Does Israeli TV, media and newspapers show to the Israeli public pictures of the innocent Gaza women and children, or pictures of the hospitals with badly injured men, women and children, or pictures of the starving children? NO
Propaganda and weaponized lies can only obscure the dead bodies, the forced starvation, the mass killing of children, and the utter destruction of an entire society for so long. Over time, it becomes increasingly difficult to conceal the nexus between the actions taken by Israel after October 7, the mendacious narratives it deployed, and Netanyahu’s desperate struggle to retain political power and his personal liberty. The 1,200 Israeli and international victims of October 7, and the more than 27,000 Palestinians whose deaths were justified in their names, deserve an unvarnished rendering of the truth.
On Israeli TV News, Scenes of Palestinian Suffering Are Rare
On Israeli television screens, you are unlikely to see the suffering and deaths or even the faces of Palestinian civilians, according to media critics and others who have watched the coverage closely.
“The central media outlets actively ignore almost completely the presence of people in the Gaza Strip,” said Shuki Tausig, the editor in chief of the Seventh Eye, a reader-funded website that is Israel’s most prominent media watchdog. Tausig estimates the screen time given to Gaza residents as “almost zero.”
On a recent nightly news broadcast on Channel 12, Israel’s most popular station, the analysis seemed to bear out. Though much of the coverage focused on the war in Gaza, only a few moments were devoted to the plight of Palestinians. In one shot, a few people were seen traveling on a donkey cart. A chyron informed viewers that some 2 million Palestinians had fled their homes, but there was no elaboration.
Allyn Fisher-Ilan, a former news editor at the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz ’s English edition, said Israelis were getting a one-sided picture of Gaza through the prism of how many Hamas fighters have been killed or how many people have been told to evacuate. “There are a few details of the suffering going on, but it’s all in the context of blaming Hamas.”
Instead, the broadcasts tend to focus on the stories of Israeli troops going into combat, soldiers killed in combat, and the ordeals of families whose loved ones were taken hostage by Hamas and other groups on Oct. 7.