The war occupies all Israeli television screens, and news and program presenters hang yellow ribbons on their clothes to symbolize solidarity with the prisoners held in Gaza, but there is no talk of the fate of the Palestinians in the devastated Strip.
Every evening, Israelis can follow on television the events of the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip since October 7, 2023.
There are four general content TV stations in Israel: Channel 11, the public channel; Channel 12, the “most watched”; Channel 13, the “most critical”; and Channel 14, which is “a propaganda tool for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” according to journalist Oren Peresko, who works for the Seventh Eye investigative website specializing in media.
After analyzing hours of news broadcasts and satirical or talk shows, the site’s journalists concluded that all stations in Israel from Channel 11 to 14 do not show images of human suffering in Gaza.
These stations may show images of rubble, or a bombed building, but they do not show the stories of the affected individuals.
war effort
Even before October 7, the Palestinian voice was silenced in the Israeli media, and today it remains silenced in support of what the website describes as the “war effort.”
With American support, Israel has been waging a devastating war on Gaza since October 7, leaving more than 137,000 Palestinian martyrs and wounded, most of them children and women, and more than 10,000 missing, amid massive destruction and deadly famine.
But “the Israeli media does not support this” tally, Persico says.
On the news ticker at the bottom of the screen of the ultra-conservative Channel 14, and on its website, you can read the following phrase: “40,000 terrorists eliminated.”
The channel’s journalist, Halil Bitton Rosen, explained to Agence France-Presse that the coverage of the war is based on “supporting the fighting forces that protect the country and its citizens from the malicious terrorists who committed the terrible massacre, and from all those who support them.”
The Israeli army says about 350 soldiers have been killed since the ground operation in the Gaza Strip began on October 27.
Bourdon says that when Israeli stations devote topics to the Palestinians, there is a “difference in the angle of treatment compared to foreign media.”
He points, for example, to coverage of attacks by Jewish settlers on villages in the occupied West Bank, where violence has escalated since October 7.
Israeli journalists approach the issue from the perspective that “the army failed to dissuade the settlers” from carrying out these attacks, rather than saying that it “failed to protect the Palestinians.”
“legitimate torture”
In late July, Israeli soldiers were arrested as part of an investigation into the mistreatment of a Palestinian detainee, after a video clip was leaked and widely circulated in local media.
But Channel 12, the most watched channel with about 20% of Israel’s viewership, raised a debate about “whether torturing and sexually assaulting terrorists is legitimate or not.”
One of the channel’s star journalists, who preferred to remain anonymous, revealed that there was a shift within its editorial board between “before October 7 and after it.”
“There is a focus on the horror we lived through, not on the stories of the Palestinians,” he added, expressing his regret.
Israeli journalists confirmed that the absence of topics dealing with the conditions of the people of Gaza is not due to them being “under pressure,” but rather because they are “still in shock” since October 7, or because they “no longer trust the Palestinians.”
The Palestinian resistance launched the Al-Aqsa Flood attack in response to Israeli attacks in Jerusalem and the West Bank. The attack resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people on the Israeli side, according to a count by Agence France-Presse. This number includes prisoners who died while being held in the Gaza Strip.
During the attack, 251 people were captured, 97 of whom are still being held, including 33 who the army says were killed.
A number of Israeli journalists believe that the international media is “biased” in its coverage of the war towards the Palestinian side.
In contrast, the left-leaning daily Haaretz and the news website +972 Magazine are among the few outlets in the Israeli media landscape that conduct investigations into the Gaza Strip, some of which have condemned the Israeli military for torturing civilians or using artificial intelligence to identify and hit targets.
But its audience remains limited to a minority of “left-wing intellectuals,” according to Bourdon.