Israelis Are Starting to Talk About Famine in Gaza
Two weeks ago, Israel’s most-watched news broadcast, on the mainstream Channel 12, aired a series of startling images from Gaza. There were photographs of emaciated babies, and of children being trampled as they stood in food lines, holding out empty pots; there were pictures of mothers weeping because they had no way to feed their families. At the end of the segment, Ohad Hemo, the network’s correspondent for Palestinian affairs, concluded, “There is hunger in Gaza, and we have to say it loud and clear.” He was careful to note that his assessment was not influenced by foreign reporting: “I speak to Gazans daily. These are people who haven’t eaten in days.” He went on, “The responsibility lies not only with Hamas but also with Israel.”
In much of the world, this sentiment would seem incontrovertible, even obvious. In Israel, it represented a drastic change. Since the early days of the war, the Israeli media has maintained that there is no hunger crisis in Gaza. Partisans of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government argue that there is plenty of food there, and circulate images of markets laden with fruits and vegetables. (Never mind that the prices of goods there are the highest in the world.) The real problem, they say, is that the United Nations, which largely set up the aid-distribution network, isn’t doing enough—neither to distribute food nor to keep Hamas from stealing it before it can reach the needy. Hamas and international organizations, they say, are falsely promoting a “starvation campaign.”
In July, mainstream journalists and politicians abruptly abandoned that official narrative. On the same day as the Channel 12 report, the well-known journalist Ron Ben-Yishai ran an article headlined “There Are Hungry Children in Gaza. We Need To Admit It—And Immediately Change the Distribution of Aid.”
The same day, the military, evidently in crisis-control mode, released a video that it said had been uncovered in Gaza, of Hamas militants in an underground room, feasting lavishly on apparently looted food. This time, reporters did not take up the official line. “Even that argument is problematic,” a Channel 12 reporter ventured. “After all, Israel replaced the U.N. aid delivery precisely to prevent Hamas from looting the aid.” He was referring to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an initiative that was rolled out in May, with backing from Israel and the U.S. Though Netanyahu’s government hailed it as a “turning point in the war,” there are only four distribution centers inside Gaza and no proper tracking of aid recipients. The sites quickly grew chaotic. According to the U.N., more than eight hundred Palestinians have been fatally shot as they sought food near G.H.F. sites. (In a recent statement to The New Yorker, the G.H.F. denied that anyone was shot near its sites.)
The hunger crisis in Gaza is still far from dominating the news in Israel the way it does elsewhere. But, even for politicians and journalists who are sympathetic to Netanyahu, it has become permissible to acknowledge that it is real. Notably, this change occurred before President Donald Trump acknowledged what he called “real starvation” last week.
After the Channel 12 report, Amit Segal, the network’s chief political correspondent, who has close contacts with Netanyahu, posted on social media, “Gaza may well be approaching a real hunger crisis. Shocked to be reading this from me? I don’t blame you.” Segal included an analysis by a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem that tracked the price of goods in Gaza and compared them with similar costs in historic food shortages. During the worst famines of past years, prices rose tenfold. Now, in Gaza, they have shot up eightyfold. The researcher, Yannay Spitzer, concluded that “mass starvation seems inevitable.”
It’s not that Israelis have been unaware of international outrage over Gaza. When Italy joined other European countries to criticize the war, an Israeli news site affiliated with the religious right posted a weary acknowledgment: “The wave of condemnation of Israel continues.” There have been pockets of dissent within the country, too, with activists marching through the streets of Tel Aviv carrying bags of flour to protest hunger. The liberal newspaper Haaretz has been filled with stories about the humanitarian disaster that followed an eleven-week aid blockade by Israel earlier this year. But the overwhelming reaction among Israelis has been, effectively: “Blame Hamas, not us.” If Hamas released the Israeli hostages still in captivity and put down its weapons, the argument goes, the war would be over. More than that, such skeptics ask, what other nation on earth is expected to provide humanitarian aid to its enemy during wartime? (That Gaza is a blockaded territory whose crossings are controlled almost entirely by Israel does not much figure into the public debate.)
On the right, there has been flat-out denial. Channel 14, a Netanyahu-friendly outlet, has devoted entire segments to “debunking” footage of starving children. Last week, a pundit on the network mused about a CNN report, “The images show very thin, even emaciated children—and their parents are fat and healthy.” Among the wider public, the sentiment has been less crude, but still characterized by deflection. “Empathy Isn’t a Strategy,” a recent op-ed on the news site Ynet declared. Though it “may be a moral flaw” to starve Gazans, the article argued, it would be an “even greater moral flaw” to keep Hamas in power.
In March of last year, the I.P.C., an international panel of experts backed by the U.N., projected an “imminent famine” in northern Gaza if more aid wasn’t allowed in. The next month, after a thirty-minute phone call between then President Joe Biden and Netanyahu, Israel opened more crossings into the northern area. A worst-case scenario was averted—for a while. “That report worked,” Alex de Waal, one of the foremost experts on food security, who heads the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, told me at the time. “It got the U.S. government and the Israeli government to say, ‘We have a big reputational risk here, if nothing else.’ ” But inside Israel the panel’s warnings were rejected. Segal and others spent months tarnishing the I.P.C. for relying too heavily on data collected by U.N. agencies. They have also scornfully dismissed reporting by Haaretz. “For Haaretz, Hamas propaganda isn’t a bug but a feature,” Segal wrote just last week.
So, what changed? Why are more Israelis now willing to acknowledge that people in Gaza are starving? In part, the situation has become so dire that it can no longer be ignored. As concerns about hunger were breaking through to the public, Haaretz reported that forty-three Palestinians had starved to death in just four days. “You build a dam around your consciousness, but holes and cracks start to appear, and the water eventually seeps through,” Oren Persico, a journalist for the Seventh Eye, a media-watchdog publication, told me.
Many Israeli reporters have been reluctant to be seen as criticizing their country at a time of war. In a column that circulated widely last year, the journalist Akiva Novick reminded his peers that Israeli soldiers serving in Gaza “listen to the radio and television stations,” and said that “highlighting stories of military and civilian heroism . . . is the order of the day.” But growing public disillusionment about the war’s stated goals of defeating Hamas and releasing the hostages has made it possible to speak out. Polls show that roughly seventy per cent of the Israeli public supports a deal that would end the war and release the remaining hostages. “If people still believed in the talk of ‘total victory,’ we wouldn’t be seeing this criticism,” Persico said.
Two other events appear to have expedited the change. The first was that the Daily Express, a U.K. tabloid, published a cover photo of an emaciated-looking baby, alongside the headline “FOR PITY’S SAKE STOP THIS NOW.” For Israelis, particularly those on the right, it was startling—not because the image was upsetting but because the Daily Express more or less always sides with Israel. Channel 13, another mainstream network, showed the cover (with the infant blurred) and noted, “Many outlets, including pro-Israel ones, are echoing the images of hunger in Gaza and calling to stop the war.” Other media reported an uptick in coverage of the Gaza crisis on Fox News—“the Israel-friendly outlet,” as one outlet called it. A sense grew that the country was beginning to lose even its staunchest supporters.
The other decisive event was more prosaic: activists from a joint Jewish-Palestinian initiative called Standing Together staged a protest outside the studios of Channels 12 and 13. Holding signs that said, “What Is the Media Hiding?,” the demonstrators condemned the networks’ “continued ignoring of the horrors of the war.” These kinds of protests happen every week in Tel Aviv. In this case, though, an argument broke out about it in a private WhatsApp group used by the network’s employees, and the exchange was leaked to Ynet.
The leaked texts show that, as the argument began, Ron Yaron, a news editor at Channel 12, was griping about the protest. “With all respect to our journalistic duty, when you hear the stories of the survivors of captivity, it’s a little hard to connect with the message of the demonstration,” he wrote.
Others took issue. “Our journalistic duty is to report on everything that is important and worthy, whether the released hostages connect with it or not,” one reporter wrote. Another agreed: “I receive a lot of criticism that there is no reporting on this issue here, and in my opinion the criticism is justified.” A member of the news desk added, “We have to report only on what we connect to? Isn’t that the definition of biased journalism?”
Several employees sympathetic to the government took Yaron’s side. “If this is the definition of biased journalism, I live with it in peace,” another editorial member wrote. Segal, the political correspondent, wrote, “Bingo.”
Finally, a commentator named Mohammad Magadli, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, joined in. “I would be happy to arrange for you a conversation with my cousin Zainab from Gaza,” he wrote. “Perhaps you will connect a bit more with the suffering of people who have never identified with or supported Hamas and have woken up every morning for a year and a half to a race for a sack of flour.”
The exchange was picked up by many Israeli outlets; it was the first indication that the war was causing internal conflict at a major media organization. A veteran news editor described the leak to me as a pivotal moment. “It loosened things up,” he said. Suddenly, journalists “felt like they could dial up their criticism a notch.”
So far, the change in public discourse appears limited mostly to media circles. Forty-seven per cent of Israelis say that there is no hunger in Gaza and that “It’s just Hamas lies,” according to a new poll by the mainstream newspaper Maariv. They claim that images of starving children are staged by Hamas, or manipulated by A.I., or taken out of context. Activists have worked steadily to discredit stories about famine. One tracked down the medical records of the infant who appeared on the cover of the Daily Express, and found that he had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, which the Times and other major news organizations initially did not mention. Politicians and several pro-Israel outlets called the omission a “blood libel.”
The Israeli military unit known as COGAT, which leads civilian policy in Gaza, has been publicizing images of Palestinian children with health disorders as proof that there is no widespread hunger. It recently called out an Italian newspaper for publishing a photo of a malnourished child without mentioning that the child suffered from an underlying health condition and had been evacuated by Israel for medical treatment. Persico criticized this tactic as a “campaign for the margins”—an attempt to use a few problematic cases to dismiss a much larger phenomenon. Nevertheless, COGAT’s messaging has been widely amplified by leading Israeli outlets. “One baby with pre-existing conditions makes more headlines than twenty thousand dead children,” Persico said.
Even with its newer, tougher tone, Channel 12 tends to distinguish between hunger and starvation. And much of its recent reporting on Gaza framed the issue as a “media tsunami”—implying that the problem was not Israel’s conduct but its reputation abroad. Yonit Levi, the network’s lead anchor, seemed dissatisfied with this analysis. “Maybe it’s time to understand that this is not a public relations failure but a moral failure, and start from there,” she noted. The blowback was swift. On Channel 14, the Netanyahu-friendly outlet, a panel of talking heads lambasted Levi for almost ten minutes. “Maybe we have to take these people to a studio, like in ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ force their eyes open, and screen non-stop footage from October 7th,” one panelist mused. Another said, “Even if it’s true that there is hunger in Gaza—and it’s not true—I’m not interested.”