Israeli soldiers have stormed, raided and burned down Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, forcing everyone inside to evacuate and detaining dozens of the 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 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 there with no food, services, or adequate shelter and, now, no hospitals.
Israel besieged Gaza in October 2023 and launched a war on its trapped population, killing 45,399 people and injuring more than 107,000 to date.
Most of these people are civilians. Tens of thousands of children have lost at least one limb in Israeli bombing and tens of thousands are orphaned.
Throughout, Israel has attacked hospitals and schools where people whose homes were bombed were sheltering.
Most of the internal opposition to the continuation of Israel’s war on Gaza centres around demanding the release of approximately 100 captives taken from Israel in a Hamas-led operation in October 2023.
However, awareness among many Israelis of the extent of their country’s actions in Gaza appears minimal.
The consequence, analysts say, of a pliant media that – with a few notable exceptions – appears 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 attempting to shut down public broadcaster Kan because it was resisting political pressure to alter its editorial line.
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 liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which has proven a consistent critic of the Netanyahu government and its war on Gaza.
In December, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said 75 reporters have been arrested by Israel in its territory, the occupied West Bank and Gaza since its war on Gaza began, with others assaulted, threatened and censored.
Israel has also killed nearly 200 journalists and media workers.
“Israelis have the 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 portray a distorted narrative of the war in Gaza, but to tighten state controls on media … This will have devastating longer-term consequences for press freedom in Israel, but also for Israeli democracy,” she said.
Many humanitarian and rights organisations operating in Israel to defend Palestinian rights feel their voices are being silenced amid increased hostility to their mission.
“There is zero room for our work,” says Dr Guy Shalev, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHRI) which campaigns for Palestinians’ right to healthcare.
“There’s only one platform available to PHRI and that’s Haaretz … the only platform featuring news on Palestinians, the occupation and Gaza that isn’t guided by the security apparatus,” he said.
“There are others (outside the country), but they’re small and, if you want to speak to Israelis in Hebrew, they may as well not exist,” he said of the information vacuum many in Israel operate within.
Framing genocide
For Shalev, the issue is primarily one of framing, with news stories that reinforce the government’s war aims, rather than presenting facts.
On Thursday, Israel bombed Yemen, hitting the international airport in Sanaa where World Health Organization chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was about to board a departing flight.
International media reported the danger to Ghebreyesus, who posted on social media that one of the flight’s crew had been injured and two people at the airport killed.
Our mission to negotiate the release of @UN staff detainees and to assess the health and humanitarian situation in #Yemen concluded today. We continue to call for the detainees’ immediate release.
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, boasted of a strike during a “rebel news conference”, making no mention of the international diplomat’s near-killing.
Likewise, Israel’s second-most widely read newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, trumpeted details of the strike, with no mention of the condemnation, including by the UN.
When matters such as the near-total lack of humanitarian aid entering Gaza are mentioned at all, “the emphasis will be on Hamas, or armed gangs, robbing it,” Shalev said.
This, he said, allows the growth of an Israeli narrative that there is no famine in Gaza, and that even if there was one, “it’s Hamas who is to blame for the famine and not Israel”.
Isolation in an echo chamber
“The public is mostly UNAWARE of what happened in Gaza in the last year plus,” Haaretz columnist and former Israeli Ambassador Alon Pinkas told Al Jazeera by WhatsApp.
“Much of it is deliberate denial. It was understandable in the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023, when people were devastated and wanted revenge.”
However, Pinkas continued: “It is inexcusable now. The information is there, whether (in) Haaretz, foreign media covering it extensively, the US administration and various humanitarian agencies. People consciously choose to ignore.”
According to Shalev, the outcome of the information vacuum is the increase of paranoia in a society that has been told to see itself as under siege by the international community, its courts, institutions and rights organisations for a war that – according to much of its media – is “legitimate”.
Referencing the two far-right ministers often credited as exemplars of growing Israeli hardliners, Shalev continued: “It’s more widespread than just [National Security Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir or [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich.
“It’s a far wider sense of Jewish supremacy. People just take that as a given. It goes beyond right wing, left wing or settlers. It’s everyone,” he said.
The Israeli media’s presentation of the war on Gaza, Shalev continued, is “just for the 30 to 50 percent of the population who need it. The others have already made their mind up. They don’t want to see any aid getting into Gaza, they want to see hospitals attacked.
“Growing up as a Jewish Israeli, all my schooling was about the Holocaust and how people at the time all said they didn’t know,” he continued, “I could never understand that.
“Now we’re seeing it happen again in a horrific way and we’re all watching.”
