Israeli soldiers stormed, attacked and burned Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, forcing everyone inside to evacuate and arresting dozens of medical staff, including the director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safia.
The sick and injured have no other medical facility to go to because Israel has destroyed all other hospitals in the north and they cannot leave the north.
Northern Gaza has been under a “siege within a siege” imposed by Israel since October this year, trapping tens of thousands of people without food, services, adequate shelter and, now, hospitals.
Israel besieged Gaza in October 2023 and launched a war against its trapped population, killing 45,399 people and injuring more than 107,000 to date.
Most of these people are civilians. Tens of thousands of children have lost at least one limb during Israeli bombings and tens of thousands are orphans.
Throughout, Israel attacked hospitals and schools where people whose homes had been bombed were sheltering.
Much of the internal opposition to the continuation of Israel’s war on Gaza focuses on the demand for the release of around 100 captives taken from Israel in a Hamas-led operation in October 2023.
However, many Israelis appear little aware of the scale of their country’s actions in Gaza.
The consequence, analysts say, of a compliant media that – with a few notable exceptions – appears ready to parrot the rhetoric of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his increasingly far-right government.
At war with reality
In February, reports surfaced that Netanyahu was attempting to shut down the public broadcaster Kan because it was resisting political pressure to change its editorial line.
Three months later, the Israeli government passed a bill banning Tel Aviv Tribune from operating on its territory.
In November, it passed a bill severing ties with the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which has been a consistent critic of the Netanyahu government and its war on Gaza.
In December, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said 75 journalists had been arrested by Israel on its territory, in the occupied West Bank and Gaza since the start of its war on Gaza, while others had been assaulted , threatened and censored.
Israel has also killed nearly 200 journalists and media workers.
“Israelis have the right to know what is being done in their name, particularly in the war in Gaza,” Rebecca Vincent, campaigns director for Reporters Without Borders (RSF), told Tel Aviv Tribune.
“Netanyahu’s government is deliberately working not only to present a distorted narrative of the war in Gaza, but also to strengthen state controls over the media… This will have devastating long-term consequences for press freedom in Israel, but also for Israeli democracy,” she said. .
Many humanitarian and rights organizations operating in Israel to defend Palestinian rights feel their voices are being silenced amid growing hostility toward their mission.
“There is no place for our work,” says Dr. Guy Shalev, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights in Israel (PHRI), which advocates for Palestinians’ right to health care.
“There is only one platform available for PHRI and that is Haaretz… the only platform presenting information about the Palestinians, the occupation and Gaza that is not guided by the security apparatus,” a- he declared.
“There are others (outside the country), but they are small and, if you want to talk to Israelis in Hebrew, they might as well not exist,” he said of the void informational environment in which many Israelis operate.
Framing the genocide
For Shalev, the issue is primarily one of framing, with reporting that reinforces the government’s war aims, rather than presenting facts.
Israel bombed Yemen on Thursday, hitting Sanaa International Airport where World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was preparing to board a departing flight.
International media reported the danger for Ghebreyesus, who posted on social media that a member of the plane’s crew was injured and two people at the airport were killed.
Our mission to negotiate the release of @UN detained and assess the health and humanitarian situation in #Yemen concluded today. We continue to demand the immediate release of detainees.
As we were about to board our flight from Sanaa about two hours ago, the airport… pic.twitter.com/riZayWHkvf
– Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) December 26, 2024
In contrast, Israel’s most widely read newspaper, the free Israel Hayom, boasted of a strike at a “rebel press conference,” without mentioning the near-assassination of the international diplomat.
Similarly, Israel’s second most widely read newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, trumpeted the details of the strike, without any mention of condemnation, including from the UN.
When issues such as the near-total absence of humanitarian aid entering Gaza are mentioned, “the focus will be on Hamas, or armed gangs, who are pillaging the Gaza Strip,” Shalev said.
This, he said, allows the development of an Israeli discourse according to which there is no famine in Gaza, and that even if there were, “it is Hamas which is responsible for the famine and not Israel.”
Isolation in an echo chamber
“The public is mostly unaware of what happened in Gaza over the last year,” Haaretz columnist and former Israeli ambassador Alon Pinkas told Tel Aviv Tribune via WhatsApp.
“A lot of this is deliberate denial. This was understandable in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, when people were devastated and wanted revenge.
However, Pinkas continued: “It’s inexcusable now. The information is there, whether in Haaretz, in the foreign media which widely cover it, in the American administration and in various humanitarian agencies. People consciously choose to ignore.
According to Shalev, the result of the information vacuum is a rise in paranoia in a society that has been told to consider itself under siege by the international community, its courts, its institutions and its rights organizations, in a war that, according to Shalev, a large part of its leaders, media – is “legitimate”.
Referring to the two far-right ministers often seen as examples of Israel’s growing hard line, Shalev continued: “It’s more widespread than just (National Security Minister Itamar) Ben-Gvir or (Minister of Finance Bezalel) Smotrich.
“It’s about a much broader sense of Jewish supremacy. People take this as a matter of course. This goes beyond the right, the left or the settlers. That’s everyone,” he said.
The Israeli media’s presentation of the war on Gaza, Shalev continues, “is aimed only at the 30 to 50 percent of the population who need it.” The others have already made their decision. They don’t want aid to come to Gaza, they want to see hospitals attacked.
“Growing up as an Israeli Jew, my whole schooling was focused on the Holocaust and how people at the time said they didn’t know,” he continued, “I didn’t never could understand this.
“Now we’re seeing this happen again in a horrible way and we’re all paying attention.”