How worried are Israelis about what their government is doing in their name? | Israel-Palestine Conflicts News

The Israeli army stormed, raided and burned the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza, forcing everyone inside to evacuate and arresting dozens of health workers, including the director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safia.

Sick and wounded people have no other medical center to go to, because Israel has destroyed all the other hospitals in the north, and they cannot leave the north.

Northern Gaza is under a “siege within a siege” imposed by Israel since October this year, trapping tens of thousands of people where they have no food, services, or adequate shelter and, now, no hospitals.

Israel laid siege to Gaza in October 2023 and launched a war against its trapped population, killing 45,399 people and injuring more than 107,000 so far.

Most of these people are civilians. Tens of thousands of children have lost at least one limb in Israeli bombings and tens of thousands are orphans.

Throughout the years, Israel has attacked hospitals and schools where people whose homes were bombed took shelter.

Most of the internal opposition to the continuation of Israel’s war in Gaza demands the release of about 100 hostages taken from Israel in the operation led by Hamas in October 2023.

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

The result, analysts say, of a conservative media that – with a few notable exceptions – seems ready to manipulate the country’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his increasingly right-wing government.

In the fight against the truth

In February, reports emerged that Netanyahu was trying to shut down public broadcaster Kan because he was resisting political pressure to change the agenda.

Three months later, the Israeli government passed a bill banning Al Jazeera from operating within its territory.

In November, it passed a bill severing ties with the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which has proven an outspoken critic of the Netanyahu government and its war on Gaza.

In December, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said that 75 journalists have been arrested by Israel in its territory, the West Bank and occupied Gaza since the start of its war with Gaza, and some have been beaten, threatened and searched.

Israel also killed around 200 journalists and media workers.

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

“Netanyahu’s government is deliberately working not only to present a distorted story of the war in Gaza, but to strengthen the state’s control of the media … This will have long-term and painful consequences for media freedom in Israel, but also for Israeli democracy,” he said. .

Many humanitarian and rights organizations working in Israel to protect Palestinian rights feel that their voices are being silenced amid increasing hostility to their work.

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

“There is only one platform available to PHRI and that is Haaretz … the only platform with issues of the Palestinian people, settlements and Gaza that is not led by the security services,” 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 be there,” he said of the many information gaps in Israel.

Hedging the genocide

For Shalev, the issue is primarily one of framing, with stories reinforcing the government’s war intentions, rather than presenting the facts.

On Thursday, Israel detonated a bomb in Yemen, hitting the international airport in Sanaa where the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was about to board a departing flight.

International media reported the accident to Ghebreyesus, who wrote on social media that one of the flight crew was injured and two died at the airport.

Our mission is to negotiate the release of @UN detained workers and to assess the health and humanitarian situation #Yemen it ends today. We continue to appeal for the immediate release of those arrested.

As we were about to board our flight from Sana’a, 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, bragged about the strike during a “rebel news conference”, making no mention of the imminent assassination of international diplomats.

Likewise, Israel’s second most widely read newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, blew the whistle on the details of the strike, without saying anything about its condemnation, including the UN.

When issues like the lack of aid coming into Gaza are mentioned at all, “the emphasis will be on Hamas, or armed gangs, taking over,” Shalev said.

This, he said, allows the growth of Israel’s narrative that there is no famine in Gaza, and that even if there was, “Hamas is to blame for the famine, not Israel”.

Isolation in an echo chamber

“Most people DO NOT know what happened in Gaza last year,” Haaretz columnist and former Israeli Ambassador Alon Pinkas told Al Jazeera via WhatsApp.

“A lot of it is deliberate denial. It was understood shortly after the day of October 7, 2023, when people were frustrated and wanted to take revenge.”

However, Pinkas continued: “There is no excuse now. The information is there, whether it’s (in) Haaretz, the foreign media that broadcast it widely, the US administration and various humanitarian organizations. People choose not to care.”

According to Shalev, the result of the vacuum of information is the increase of paranoia in a society that has been told to see itself besieged by the international community, its courts, institutions and human rights organizations by war – according to many of them. media – “official”.

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

“It is a very broad concept of Jewish superiority. People just take that for granted. It goes beyond right wing, left wing or immigrants. It’s everyone,” he said.

Israel’s media presentation on the war in Gaza, Shalev continued, “according to 30 to 50 percent of the people who need it. Some have already made a decision. They don’t want to see aid coming into Gaza, they want to see hospitals attacked.

“Growing up as an Israeli Jew, every school I attended was about the Holocaust and how people at the time said they didn’t know about it,” he continued, “I didn’t understand that.

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