Global outrage has grown after two years of bombardment in Gaza. In Israel, it is a different story

Jerusalem
 — 

On a hot Friday morning in September, dozens of Israelis turned up at Gaza’s border fence – not as soldiers, but as dissenters. Their demand: an end to the siege they say is being carried out in their name.

The activists, mostly Jewish Israelis, marched toward the fence, calling on the international community to sanction and isolate their country, to “stop the genocide and end the decades-long Zionist apartheid regime.”

“We are fully aware that the government is not going to stop, so we are here to call on the world to boycott us, as ridiculous as it sounds,” Sapir Sluzker Amran, one of the participants, told CNN.

Almost two years into the war in Gaza, Sluzker Amran represents a minority in Israel, and she is aware of it.

“It’s a shame that we don’t have more people with us today, but I think we need to keep challenging our own society. … They’re in denial, and I think the best way to get out of this denial is to keep shocking them until everyone faces the horrible truth that we are committing genocide.”

In September, an independent UN inquiry concluded for the first time that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, a finding which the Israeli government has rejected.

Only a short drive away, the extreme distance between the protesters’ view and that of most Israelis is made clear.

In the southern border city of Sderot, which was attacked on October 7, and is frequently the target of rocket fire, a group of Israelis gathered at an observation deck overlooking Gaza to revel in its ruin.

Dubbed the “Sderot cinema” by Israelis online, watching Israel’s bombardment has become a popular pastime; people take turns looking through tower viewers. Some bring popcorn and snacks, and some snap selfies as the thud of airstrikes echo in the distance.

“When I look at Gaza from here and see buildings still standing, it makes me upset. … I want Israel to continue until it’s all flattened,” Rafael Hemo, an onlooker told CNN.

Hemo said he doesn’t want any Arabs living next to Israel any longer, and laments the world’s sympathy for Gaza after what happened on October 7.

“After what we’ve gone through, they need to be gone. No more Gaza.”

Hamas-led militants killed 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, and took more than 250 people hostage. There are 48 remaining in Gaza, 20 of whom are believed to be alive.

Many Israelis have struggled or refused to move past this one moment in time, viewing it as Israel’s 9/11. And until there is a sense of closure – the return of the hostages and answers to how it happened – they see little reason to contemplate what’s happening on the other side.

Nowhere is that clearer than at demonstrations.

Saturdays in Israel have turned into a weekly ritual. Thousands converge every week on the streets of Tel Aviv to express their anger at the government and call for an end to the war.

But while polls show a majority of Israelis consistently back a ceasefire, at the Saturday protests, the main aim is the return of the remaining hostages. The killing of more than 66,000 Palestinians by Israel are rarely, if ever, mentioned by the protesters or displayed on banners.

A poll conducted in August by the aChord Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem indicates that a majority of the Israeli public (62%) agrees with the claim that “there are no innocent bystanders in Gaza.”

Israelis who do not share that view blame the country’s media for fueling that rhetoric.

Dr. Ayala Panievsky, an Israeli author and researcher at City St. George’s, University of London, told CNN that since the October 7 attacks, mainstream media participated in a campaign of “dehumanization” of Palestinians; outright promoting the notion that there is no innocent life in Gaza.

Focusing on Israel’s most influential and popular channel, Channel 12, Panievsky said Palestinian voices were “erased”. When the channel aired footage from Gaza, it would mostly show Israeli soldiers in combat, and rarely the human suffering of Palestinians, she said.

“Everything that haunted the imagination and nightmares of audiences worldwide was really censored out, just cut out of the Israeli mainstream media. … It created a huge gap between what Israelis know about this war and what everyone else does,” she said.

Co-author of a soon-to-be-published report by the Molad think tank titled “Eyes Wide Shut: When the War on the Media Met the War in Gaza,” Panievsky found through sampling and forensic analysis that only 3% of Channel 12’s reports on the war during its first six months showed human suffering in Gaza.

“The people they trusted their entire lives to tell them what’s happening are telling them, without words, that there is nothing you should be worried about there,” she added.

Haaretz, Israel’s longest running newspaper, is one of the few news websites that has covered Palestinian suffering in Gaza extensively since the beginning of the war.

It carries a social cost for its journalists.

Nir Hasson, the paper’s Jerusalem correspondent, says he receives death threats and hate mail whenever he reports stories from Gaza. The anger directed at him is greatest, however, when he publishes testimonies from Israeli soldiers admitting to atrocities in Gaza, because it’s something people “can’t ignore”.

He called it a “total failure” on society for not seeing other people as human beings.

“The trauma of October 7 is only half of the answer,” Hasson adds. “I think the other half is the dehumanization of the Palestinians in the Israeli discourse for many years. Decades of occupation and apartheid, and that’s what you get in the end,” he added.

Panievsky has a similar view. Since before October 7, she said the Israeli government had been applying political pressure on the media, compelling journalists to omit certain words from their broadcasts, such as “occupation” and replacing them with government talking points.

As a result, media coverage of the occupied West Bank and Gaza was greatly reduced before the war.

The idea of an Israeli press facing unprecedented pressure found support in Reporters Without Borders 2025 World Press Freedom Index. “Press freedom, media plurality and editorial independence have been increasingly restricted in Israel since the start of the war in Gaza,” it said.

While footage and photographs of starving Palestinians in Gaza have horrified audiences abroad, inside Israel they have been dismissed by many as manipulated or untrue.

One popular term used by Israelis to deny images of suffering emerging from Gaza is “Pallywood,” a portmanteau combining Palestinian and Hollywood, the home of acting. Online, Israelis often insist the images are staged; if not, they argue Hamas is to blame.

More than 400 Palestinians have died of malnutrition since the war began, and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a UN-backed panel of experts, declared famine in the territory’s Gaza governorate in August.

A poll conducted by Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) in July, before the IPC’s famine declaration but when aid agencies had already been warning for weeks about starvation in Gaza, asked Israelis: “To what extent are you personally troubled or not troubled by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza?”

Of the Jewish respondents, 79% reported that they were not so troubled or not at all troubled. The majority of Arab respondents – 86% – said that they were very troubled or somewhat troubled.

For Avraham Burg, an author and former speaker of Israel’s parliament who has become a prominent critic, what lies behind this state of denial in many Jewish Israelis goes far beyond media influence.

After the inception of the state of Israel, its leaders “never recognized the very existence of the Palestinian people” and acted in ways to make their citizens think the same, he said.

“Think of the partition wall; I do not see you, so you do not exist. In the eyes of many Israelis, the very existence of Palestinians is either not daily felt or is a fiction, so denial becomes very easy,” he told CNN, referring to the separation barrier built by Israel within the occupied West Bank.

Burg says he was always a “peacenik” even during his center-left political years. Although there was discrimination towards Palestinians in the Knesset halls he served in, he said the situation was more balanced back then.

“Today, the equilibrium does not exist anymore … since the situation is so extreme nowadays, people like me have to take extreme positions in order to balance it.”

In many ways, extremity has become the measure of Israeli society nearly two years after October 7. In the days following, Netanyahu promised Israelis “we are going to change the Middle East.”

Since then, he has pursued drawn-out military offensives even beyond Gaza’s borders, often against the advice of his own military.

The Middle East has, indeed changed, but not entirely in ways Netanyahu had intended. Once nearing normalization with Saudi Arabia and potentially other Gulf nations, Israel is now more isolated than it has been in years – and not just in the region. For Netanyahu, it is a price he has chosen to pay, and has taken Israel’s citizenry with him, whether they approve of his choices or not.

To the activists at Gaza’s border fence, the call to make their country an international pariah may be extreme, but it is essential in the face of what they see happening.

“I stand here as an Israeli unwilling to remain silent in the face of the war crimes and genocide in Gaza,” said M., one of the participants. “These crimes are being committed in our name, and it is our duty to resist them.”