• Middle East and North Africa

August 1, 2025, 8:58 AM View Comments ()

When Israel’s Channel 12 recently aired a segment on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the voiceover and interviewees mainly dealt with the problem of Israel’s image in the world and how it had lost control over the narrative. “You can’t explain the humanitarian situation in Gaza from the Israeli side. The situation in Gaza is so severe, the images so difficult, people don’t know what to do,” said Noa Tishby, an Israeli actress who is often defending Israel on social media.

But the images that appeared in the report spoke more loudly than any words. They showed children with empty pots competing for food at an aid station, babies with their rib cages showing through thin skin, and a mother staring blankly as she held a sickly child in her arms.

For people around the world, such images are nothing new—television reports, newspaper front pages, and social media have covered Gaza’s growing hunger crisis quite graphically. Indeed, throughout the war, they have been treated to images of death and destruction. But for Israelis, the report by Channel 12, which is the country’s most-watched news broadcast by far, offered a rare glimpse of the human suffering that has been happening in Gaza over the last 22 months of war.

“There is indeed, for the first time and after much pressure, visual evidence of the starvation in Gaza on the Israeli mainstream media,” said Ayala Panievsky, an Israeli media researcher at City St. George’s, University of London, who conducted a study of Channel 12’s coverage in the war’s first few months. “But it is mainly framed as part of Hamas’s propaganda war. The basic facts on the ground are constantly challenged, and even when the hunger in Gaza is acknowledged, it is presented as Hamas’s problem or as a sophisticated and inauthentic way to smear Israel.”

Indeed, the Channel 12 report was too graphic for some viewers. When presenter Yonit Levi concluded the segment by suggesting, “Maybe it’s time to understand that this isn’t a PR failure. It’s a moral failure, and we need to start from there,” she came under criticism.

As the war soon enters its third year, Israelis may finally be prepared for more critical coverage. In a recent poll by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), only 34.5 percent of Israeli Jews said the media was reporting to a fairly or very large extent “the true situation of the residents of the Gaza Strip.” Even respondents who identified as right wing expressed a high level of skepticism, although that may be because they regard the media as unreliable no matter what it is reporting on.

In any case, Channel 12 isn’t alone in the style and substance of this pivot in Gaza war coverage. The question is whether the change will affect public opinion—or, conversely, whether the media now recognizes that public opinion has changed and adapts accordingly. Either way, the hunger crisis in Gaza could be another Sabra and Shatila moment for Israel.

The Sabra and Shatila massacre occurred in September 1982, during Israel’s first Lebanon war. Israeli troops occupying Beirut allowed Christian militiamen to enter the two Palestinian refugee camps, where the latter slaughtered as many as 3,500 Palestinians while Israeli soldiers looked on. That atrocity—and the horrific images that emerged from the camps—spurred a massive demonstration against the war in Tel Aviv, attracting an estimated 400,000 people, which was around 10 percent of the country’s entire population at the time. The pressure at home and abroad forced the Israeli government to evacuate troops from Beirut, form a state commission of inquiry to examine Israel’s role in the killings, and formally end the offensive (although Israeli troops remained in South Lebanon for years afterward).

There are certainly parallels between then and now. In both cases, the wide public support that the wars enjoyed when they broke out dissipated as the fighting dragged on and Israeli casualties rose. In the case of the 1982 Lebanon War, it was the horror of Sabra and Shatila that finally turned the public against it. The images of the hunger crisis in Gaza could perhaps trigger a similar dynamic now, although it would entail a sea change in Israeli views: According to the same IDI poll, more than three quarters of Israeli Jews said the government should take little or no consideration of Palestinian suffering when staging military operations.

It would be facile to say that all Israelis view the war in Gaza through the same prism. There is a hard core, mainly on the right, that still revels in the violence and revenge for the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023. For the majority, the passage of time has softened the revenge factor but has done less to ease the trauma. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has done all it can to fan those fears of vulnerability.

The result is that a majority of Israeli Jews favor ending the war, but not by a large margin—just 53 percent, according to a June poll from the Institute for National Security Studies (among Israeli Arabs, the rate is 89 percent). Palestinian suffering isn’t behind the desire to end the war as much as it is the fact that, since the fighting started up again in March, the war is widely seen as pointless. Hamas is all but defeated, the Israeli army has failed to rescue a single hostage in that time, and the number of soldiers killed in action has been on the rise recently. The burden on reservists has become intolerable, but the same poll nevertheless found that the percentage of respondents who said they would encourage a family member—called up for yet another stint of reserve combat duty—to report has actually risen in recent months.

Netanyahu continues to insist that there is no hunger crisis in Gaza. But on July 27, he enacted measures to ease deliveries of humanitarian aid, saying the army would pause for 10 hours a day in areas where ground troops are not currently operating and secure passage for trucks, while also allowing supplies to be air-dropped into Gaza. Netanyahu made that decision due to growing international pressure—particularly from U.S. President Donald Trump, who acknowledged that the hunger crisis in Gaza is real and pledged to do something about it. It is unlikely that the Israeli leader acted due to a perceived change in public opinion.

Since Trump returned to power, Netanyahu has been caught between the conflicting demands of two forces he cannot easily defy. On one side is a president who forced him last into a cease-fire last January and has been calling for an end to the war; on the other is his far-right coalition partners, who are threatening to quit the government if the war ends. That dynamic was in play again this week as Netanyahu ordered humanitarian measures to assuage Trump and the international community, even as he threatened to gradually lop off sections of Gaza and annex them if Hamas doesn’t agree to a cease-fire and hostage deal.

Of those two forces, the far right has proven to be the more steadfast so far. It sees the conquest and resettlement of Gaza as a key part of its messianic ideology and doesn’t appear to be bothered by the bloody war’s human cost and diplomatic fallout. Amid the hunger crisis, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said this week that Gaza is “an inseparable part of the land of Israel” and that establishing settlements there is now a “realistic” option. Allowing more aid to reach Palestinians in Gaza was a small tactical retreat on the way to victory, he explained.

The far right’s grip on Netanyahu is arguably stronger than ever. With polls running against him, the prime minister is obsessed with clinging to power and delaying elections as long as possible, but his majority has been slashed to just 61 seats in the 120-member Knesset after two ultra-Orthodox parties quit the government earlier this month. He cannot afford to let his far-right partners bolt, too.

Trump has been labeled as the TACO president, the one who always chickens out—at least when it comes to making good on tariff threats. In his approach to Israel, the better acronym might be TIED—Trump is easily distracted. He has careened between statements calling for an end to the war, start-and-stop cease-fire negotiations, expressions of humanitarian concern, and plans to turn Gaza into a Mediterranean resort, all while failing to exert any real pressure on Israel to act. Trump’s remarks on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza may easily follow the same pattern of momentary attention with no follow-up.

If so, the only thing that will fundamentally change the dynamic in Gaza is the Israeli public. It is still hard to imagine hundreds of thousands of people showing up in Tel Aviv for a demonstration focused on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The public is exhausted by the war and the months of protests against the judicial overhaul that preceded Oct. 7. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister, has deployed the police to deter anti-government protests. But such things are hard to predict, and there may be more anger and frustration than the polls have shown.

Perhaps the international fallout from the humanitarian crisis will bring a fundamental shift in public opinion. Most Israelis have become inured to the threats and condemnation coming from Western governments, which recently have included vows by France and the United Kingdom to recognize a Palestinian state and impose economic sanctions. But what may give the average Israeli pause is what is happening on the ground in Europe: Israelis traveling around the continent this summer have been met with angry protests against the war and even personal assaults.

They may choose to ignore all this and deem it as further manifestations of antisemitism and kneejerk hostility to Israel. But the increasing outbursts against Israelis and sanctions by traditional friends in Europe, combined with the images of Gazan suffering, may just move the needle in favor of ending the war.