Israeli Media: Hunger in Gaza Has Been Ignored, But Is That Changing?

Images of Palestinian children in Gaza emaciated by hunger under the blockade imposed by Israel, and of families grieving the more than 61,000 people killed in the territory, have stirred outrage among foreign governments and much of the global public.

- Lorenzo Tondo

Images of Palestinian children in Gaza emaciated by hunger under the blockade imposed by Israel, and of families grieving the more than 61,000 people killed in the territory, have stirred outrage among foreign governments and much of the global public. Inside Israel, however, the reaction has been markedly different.

In a poll conducted in late July by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), more than three-quarters of Jewish Israelis – 79% – said they were either "not very troubled" or "not troubled at all" by reports of famine and suffering among Gaza's Palestinian population. According to Anat Saragusti, an expert on the media, the reason is simple: most people in Israel are unaware of those reports because for months they have never seen them.

"Until a couple of weeks ago, you could count only a handful of reports from Gaza not filtered by the IDF," said Saragusti, the head of freedom of the press at the Union of Journalists in Israel.

Except for a few newspapers, such as the leftwing Haaretz, she said, "all the other mainstream media completely ignored what's going on on the Palestinian side - the human casualties there, the numbers of children killed in this war. The Israeli audience simply did not see that at all." In past weeks the growing focus on the issue in the international media has led to some Israeli papers and TV channels reporting on hunger in Gaza for the first time, albeit as a debatable issue.