Tens of thousands of demonstrators went down to Tel Aviv’s streets on Saturday to demand that their government concludes an agreement to release two Israeli captives held in Gaza which were shown as hungry in images of Hamas.
The video has shown that the captives were as seriously affected by the blockade that Israel imposed on Gaza in March as the rest of the population is trapped there.
Until now, at least 197 people are hungry to death in Gaza, including 96 children and the world’s indignation for Israel are imposed on Gaza.
However, a survey by the Israel Democracy Institute (PDF) found that more than half of the Jewish Israeli respondents were “not all troubled” by the reports of Palestinians who die of hunger and suffering in Gaza.
The first pages of the international newspapers accused previously of having supported the War of Israel against Gaza carried images showing the massive human cost of the actions of Israel.
However, in the past 24 hours, gangs of far -right Israeli agitators have prevented trucks from reaching a hungry Gaza, with an apparent contempt for world anger.
Previously, faithful allies, such as Canada, France and the United Kingdom, condemned Israel and its actions to Gaza, committing to recognize the Palestinian state if a kind of resolution is not reached.
I guess the Israeli colonists stop and destroy help intended for hungry Palestinians, so that politicians in Israel in the West can accuse Hamas to steal aid … pic.twitter.com/6ecmp23g8r
– Tricita Parsi (@tparsi) August 6, 2025
At the national level, two of the main NGOs of Israel – B’tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, Israel – qualified the War of Israel against Gaza a genocide, and protests against war have increased.
But a week ago, hundreds of demonstrators led by injured soldiers and families of certain captives worked on the Knesset, the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem, demanding that the war against Gaza continues.
The generalized awareness of the extent of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and the role of their government in the inflict, has not yet faced most of the Israeli company, Orly Noy, journalist and editor of the Israeli accommodation magazine, told Tel Aviv Tribune.
This is particularly the case because the suffering of Gaza was not presented in the consumer media.
“I avoid Israeli television,” said Noy in Tel Aviv Tribune. “However, I went to my mother yesterday, and they covered the story of the video of the two captives.
“So, for once, famine and famine in Gaza were finally on Israeli news,” she said, adding that, instead of denying that famine existed in Gaza, the wider Israeli public was informed that the only two people who die in the captives in the film Hamas.
For months, the account of the consumer media in Israel has been that the generalized hunger documented by numerous aid agencies is “a famine campaign orchestrated in Hamas”.
This perception is deeper than the framing of the nationalist television channels of Israel, the political analyst and former government councilor Daniel Levy told Tel Aviv Tribune.
“This comes from decades of self-justification and dehumanization,” said Levy.
“Most Israelis would be uncomfortable to put in place a kind of moral criticism of the country, but always have the feeling that something has been wrong. There is a kind of cognitive dissonance at stake that helps them understand this. ”
Then there is the language used by politicians, the media and, finally, the public to discuss the war, said Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani.
“They corrupted a language. Instead of “concentration camps”, they say “humanitarian city”. Instead of talking about “killing”, they say “elimination”. Each military operation has a biblical name, which we now use to measure time.
“We do not say that” such a thing or such a thing “happened in June. We say:” During the functioning “. This helps people give meaning to everything. Jargons become a new type of speech. It has become Orwell 1984,” he said, referring to the dystopian novel in which the language is dictated by the state.
Modification of tides
However, while most Israelis have continued to see Gaza’s famine through the objective of its media and politicians, there are signs which, on the fringes, the atmosphere begins to change, say the observers.
“This will not resist,” said a member of the Israeli Parliament, Aida Touma-Suleiman representing the Hadash-Ta’al party.
“Increasingly, people are starting to understand that there is real hunger in Gaza, and if Israel is so big wings of food now, then how can it not be responsible for hunger before?”
Meanwhile, militants such as Alon-Lee Green of the Israeli-Palestinian standing group say that resistance to war is developing in all parts of Israeli society-although for often very different reasons.
“We do not care why people protest against war. We do not care if it is because you do not want to do another tour with the army, or that you do not want your children to go to Gaza and kill people. If you are against war, you are welcome,” he said.
However, despite the murder of more than 61,000 Palestinians since October 2023 – and thousands of others lost under the rubble and alleged dead – a large part of Israeli society has not yet accepted that Israel suffering in Gaza is real.
“From my point of view, we have reached the point where the Israeli state and the company have lost the moral affirmations they had as a result of the Holocaust,” said Shenhav-Shahrabani.
“They spent the symbolic capital associated with it.”
