As of: January 19, 2024, 5:12 p.m
From: Foreign Policy
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The reporting could contribute to a gap in perception about the war in Gaza.
Israeli television ignores the suffering in Gaza.
Dehumanization and personal opinion are mixed into public discourse.
In some cases, reporting is actively hindered;
Journalists are wrongly accused.
This article is available for the first time in German - it was first published by
Foreign Policy
magazine on January 11, 2024 .
Gaza - Palestinians digging through the rubble with their hands after an Israeli airstrike, UN officials reporting increasing hunger, bloodied children being carried through hospital corridors: these are some of the recurring images in Western media coverage of Israel Gaza offensive launched after a massive surprise attack by Hamas on Israeli border communities on October 7.
Images like this are rarely seen on Israeli television.
© IMAGO/Khaled Omar
But Israeli television screens rarely show the suffering and death or even the faces of Palestinian civilians, according to media critics and others who have closely followed the coverage.
“The central media almost completely ignores the presence of the people of Gaza,” said Shuki Tausig, editor-in-chief of Seventh Eye, a reader-funded website that is Israel’s most prominent media monitor.
Tausig estimates the screen time available to Gazans to be “almost zero.”
“Everything related to blaming Hamas” - Israeli TV ignores suffering in Gaza
In a recent news broadcast on Channel 12, Israel's most popular station, this analysis appeared to be confirmed.
Although much of the coverage focused on the war in Gaza, only a few moments were devoted to the plight of the Palestinians.
In one shot you could see a few people traveling on a donkey cart.
A chyron informed viewers that about 2 million Palestinians had fled their homes, but it did not elaborate.
Allyn Fisher-Ilan, a former news editor at the Jerusalem Post and the English edition of Haaretz, said Israelis were getting a one-sided picture of Gaza through the prism of how many Hamas fighters were killed or how many people were ordered to evacuate.
“There are some details about the suffering there, but it is all related to the accusation against Hamas.”
Instead, the programs focus on the stories of Israeli troops going into battle, soldiers killed in combat and the anguish of families whose loved ones were taken hostage by Hamas and other groups on October 7 .
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Proponents consider one-sidedness to be natural - Does “internal suffering in Israel” take precedence?
That day, Hamas militants broke through the border and killed about 1,200 people in Israel, most of them civilians.
In some communities, gunmen went door-to-door, killing entire families and committing sexual violence and other atrocities.
More than 200 people were kidnapped back to Gaza and held hostage.
In a country marked by ongoing conflict and war, this event has been described as the most traumatic in Israel's history.
Proponents of reporting point to other conflict countries where the media emphasizes the suffering on one side and say this is only natural.
“There is war in Israel, hostages are in a difficult situation in the Gaza Strip, soldiers are dying every day, and a large number of people are homeless [in Israel].
“It makes sense that during a war the news would be primarily concerned with the internal suffering in Israel,” said Meital Balmas, a professor of communications at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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Or Celkovnik, the head of Channel 13's news department, said there was no blanket decision to ignore the pain on the other side, but he added that raising morale in Israel was an important part of the work.
“In this war we are Israelis first” - dehumanization and personal opinion
“We always investigate the truth, but in this war we are Israelis first and foremost, reporting on what is happening here with the families, on the terrible murders of [June 7].
October], about the testimonies and images that continue to arrive, and about the freed hostages giving interviews.
That is what concerns us above all else,” he said.
“We hug the soldiers.
We go into the field with them.
“It is our priority to send messages of love and admiration, but also to explore the truth and criticize.”
For some observers, this privileging of Israeli stories may also imply a dehumanization of Palestinians.
Channel 13's senior Arab affairs correspondent Zvi Yehezkeli lamented last month that Israel had not killed many more than the estimated 23,000 Palestinians who have died in the offensive so far.
“In my opinion we should have killed multiples of 20,000 people.
[We] should have started with a hit of 100,000.”
Channel 13 even posted Yehezkeli's apparent call for mass killing on X, formerly known as Twitter, but then took it down.
“He was talking about terrorists and Hamas supporters,” Celkovnik said when asked by Foreign Policy.
“It was his personal opinion.
Our paper will never support the killing of innocent people.”
“Measured and precise” - But no distinction between combatants and non-combatants
The death toll, often cited by journalists, is based on figures from the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza that the majority of those killed were civilians.
Israel has been criticized around the world for not taking sufficient measures to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.
A Channel 12 segment on a recent late-night program focused on what analyst and retired Major General Israel Ziv described as the "very measured and precise" fighting style of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and showed images of troops and tanks.
The channel broadcast the IDF spokesman's late-night statement, which also included news that three people missing since October 7 were now confirmed as hostages in the hands of Hamas.
The station reported on former US Vice President Mike Pence's solidarity visit to a devastated Israeli community on the Gaza border and the formation of the first support group of grandparents mourning their grandchildren killed on October 7 or in the fighting in the Gaza Strip.
A commercial aired for an upcoming interview with a released hostage - a nurse who cared for others while in Hamas captivity.
The broadcaster reported that hospitals in Israel were overcrowded due to a combination of seasonal illnesses and wounded soldiers.
Towards the end, the moderator lamented the deaths of 14 dogs from the IDF dog unit.
Israeli broadcasters as cheerleaders for the war - “a kind of propaganda tactic”
The same day was a particularly bloody day for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
More than 100 people were killed in Israeli strikes, according to international media reports citing the Hamas-run Health Ministry.
An Israeli airstrike hit the al-Mawasi zone in the southern Gaza Strip, which the IDF had designated as an area where Palestinians could flee and seek protection.
Twelve people were killed in this attack, including 10 children.
The Guardian website featured a photo showing grieving women in al-Mawasi and the victims' bodies in a hospital.
The IDF spokesman's office told Foreign Policy that it was not aware of the attack.
Fisher-Ilan, who has also worked as a correspondent for Reuters and the Associated Press, said Israeli broadcasters often act as cheerleaders for the war with this kind of biased reporting.
"There's a kind of propaganda tactic: 'They did this to us.'
I'm not sure it's a good idea not to see what's happening on the other side at all."
Avi Weiss, Channel 12's news director, declined to be interviewed for this article.
Gap between perceptions of the war - journalists are not allowed to enter the Gaza Strip
The disparity in reporting highlights the gap between Israel's perception of the war - as a just and existential conflict - and the view of much of the international community that the high civilian death toll and humanitarian crisis have become intolerable.
Israel says it is trying not to harm civilians, but Hamas fighters hid in civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals.
Israel has banned journalists from entering the Gaza Strip unless they are accompanied by the army.
Experts interviewed by Israeli news channels are often retired military officers or security officials, Tausig said.
“In the pictures, Israelis may see destroyed buildings, but they don't see people.
The humanitarian crisis as a “black hole” - False claims made to reporters
The humanitarian crisis is mentioned by the broadcasters, but not comprehensively or critically.
“It’s kind of a black hole.”
Over the weekend, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during a trip to the region that he would call on Israel to do more to prevent civilian deaths.
“Far too many Palestinians, innocent Palestinians, have already been killed,” he said, adding that too many journalists had also been killed in Gaza.
His comments were not broadcast on Channel 13's evening news.
The statement followed the deaths of Al Jazeera journalist Hamza al-Dahdouh and freelancer Mustafa Thuraya in an Israeli drone strike in the southern Gaza Strip.
This brings the number of Palestinian journalists killed by Israel in the Gaza Strip during Israel's war to 72, according to Haaretz. In an editorial this week, the newspaper lamented Israeli journalists' indifference to the plight of reporters in Gaza.
Israel denies it is targeting journalists.
The IDF spokesman's office later said it had evidence that Dahdouh and Thuraya were terrorists and released a purportedly captured document listing Dahdouh as a member of Islamic Jihad's armed wing.
This claim could not be verified.
Some news platforms report suffering - has Israel gone too far?
Some Israeli news channels have reported extensively on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the rising civilian death toll.
These include the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz and the English-language magazine +972, which also has a Hebrew edition.
However, the reach of these papers is relatively small compared to the news broadcasts of the broadcasters.
Haaretz said in 2021 that its websites had a combined 100,000 digital subscribers, including the Hebrew and English editions, as well as the financial daily TheMarker.
Channel 12's evening newscast, on the other hand, can reach many times that number.
To be sure, Arab coverage of the October 7 atrocities committed by Hamas in Gaza and across the region was often muted.
Opinion polls show Palestinian support for Hamas has increased sharply since the group's attack.
However, Tausig believes that Israeli journalists have gone too far in terms of mobilization and that editors are failing in their duty to inform the public about all aspects of the war.
He argues that editors fear that viewers will change channels if they see reports about Palestinian suffering.
Fisher-Ilan says the one-sided reporting harms Palestinians and Israelis alike.
“When you start censoring human suffering, you also censor what happens to your own people,” she said.
To the author
Ben Lynfield
is a former Arab affairs correspondent for The Jerusalem Post.
He has written for The National, The Independent and the Christian Science Monitor.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English in the magazine “ForeignPolicy.com” on January 11, 2024 - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.