How concerned are Israelis by what their government is doing in their name? | Israel-Palestine conflict News

Israeli soldiers stormed, stormed and burned Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, forcing everyone inside to evacuate and detaining dozens of medical staff, including the director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safia.

The sick and injured people there have no other medical facility to go to, because Israel destroyed all the 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 there without food, services or proper shelter, and now without hospitals.

Israel surrounded Gaza in October 2023 and launched a war against its captive population, killing 45,399 people and more than 107,000 injured until today.

Most of these people are civilians. Tens of thousands of children have lost at least one limb in Israeli bombing, and tens of thousands have been orphaned.

It is in all of Israel attacked hospitals and schools where people whose homes were bombed took shelter.

Much of the domestic opposition to Israel’s continued war on Gaza centers on the demand for the release of approximately 100 prisoners taken from Israel in a Hamas-led operation in October 2023.

However, awareness among many Israelis of the extent of their country’s operations in Gaza appears to be minimal.

It is the result, analysts say, of a complacent media that – with a few notable exceptions – is ready to parrot the country’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his increasingly far-right government.

At war with reality

In February, reports surfaced that Netanyahu was trying to shut down public broadcaster Khan because it resisted political pressure to change its editorial line.

Three months later, the Israeli government adopted a law to ban Al Jazeera from operating within its territory.

It’s in November passed a proposal for a law on breaking ties with the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which has proven to be a consistent critic of the Netanyahu government and its war on Gaza.

In December, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said Israel had arrested 75 journalists in its territory, the occupied West Bank and Gaza since the start of the war against Gaza, while others had been attacked, threatened and censored.

Israel has also killed nearly 200 journalists and media workers.

“The Israelis have a right to know what is being done in their name, not just in the war in Gaza,” Rebecca Vincent, director of campaigns for Reporters Without Borders (RSF), told Al Jazeera.

“Netanyahu’s government is deliberately working not only to present a distorted story about the war in Gaza, but also to tighten state control 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 human rights organizations working in Israel to defend Palestinian rights feel their voices are being silenced amid increased hostility to their mission.

“There is no place for our work,” says dr. Guy Shalev, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHRI), which advocates for the Palestinian right to health care.

“There is only one platform available to PHRI, which is Haaretz… the only platform that contains news about the Palestinians, the occupation and Gaza that is not run by the security apparatus,” he said.

“There are others (outside the country), but they are small and, if you want to talk to Israelis in Hebrew, they may not exist,” he said of the information vacuum in which many in Israel operate.

Setting up genocide

For Shalev, the problem is primarily one of manipulation, with news stories that reinforce the government’s war aims rather than presenting facts.

Israel bombed Yemen on Thursday, hitting Sana’a International Airport where the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was due to board an outbound flight.

International media reported the danger to Ghebreysus, who announced on social media that one flight crew member was injured and two people at the airport were killed.

Our mission is to negotiate a release @UN detainee staff and assess the health and humanitarian situation in #Yemen concluded today. We continue to call for the immediate release of the 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 the strike during a “rebel press conference,” making no mention of the near assassination of an international diplomat.

Likewise, Israel’s second most widely read newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, published details of the attack, without mentioning condemnation, including by the UN.

When things like the near total lack of humanitarian aid entering Gaza are even mentioned, “the focus will be on Hamas or the armed gangs that are looting it,” Shalev said.

This, he said, enables the growth of the Israeli narrative, which does not exist famine in Gazaand that even if there is, “Hamas is to blame for the famine, not Israel”.

Isolation in an echo chamber

“The public is largely UNAware of what has happened in Gaza in the last year plus,” Haaretz columnist and former Israeli ambassador Alon Pinkas told Al Jazeera via WhatsApp.

“A lot of it is willful denial. It was understandable immediately after October 7, 2023, when people were devastated and wanted revenge.”

However, Pinkas continued: “It is now unforgivable. The information is there, either (in) Haaretz, foreign media that write about it intensively, the American administration and various humanitarian agencies. People consciously choose to ignore it.”

According to Shalev, the result of the information vacuum is an increase in paranoia in a society that is told to see itself under siege by the international community, its courts, institutions and human rights organizations because of a war that – according to much of its media – is “legitimate”.

Citing two far-right ministers who are often seen as examples of Israel’s growing hardliners, Shalev continued: “It’s more widespread than just [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir or [Finance Minister Bezalel] Watcher.

“It’s a far broader sense of Jewish supremacy. People just take it for granted. It goes beyond right wing, left wing or settlers. That’s everyone,” he said.

The presentation of the war in Gaza in the Israeli media, Shalev continued, is “only for the 30 to 50 percent of the population who need it. The others have already made up their minds. They don’t want to see aid reach Gaza, they want to see attacks on hospitals.

“Growing up as a Jewish Israeli, my whole schooling was about the Holocaust and how people at the time all said they didn’t know,” he continued, “I could never understand it.

“Now we’re seeing it happen again in a horrible way and we’re all watching.”