Emmanuelle Elbaz-Phelps returned home one evening this summer feeling frustrated after recording another panel news show on a prominent Israeli television station.
It had been, the Israeli journalist says, another round of discussion where the subject of Gazans’ suffering was ignored.
So the following week, when the on-air conversation turned to how the war was impacting the hostages and Israeli soldiers, she argued it was vital to also speak of its impact on Gazan civilians. This summer, a famine was declared in much of Gaza.
Why We Wrote This
Throughout the war in Gaza, Israel’s media has focused on Israelis’ hardships on and since Oct. 7. It was what people wanted. Now, some journalists are admitting that coverage of Gazans as people has been irresponsibly minimal, distorting reality.
“I want to say something we are not used to hearing in Israeli television studios: The war in Gaza is killing a large number of people in Gaza, Palestinians,” Ms. Elbaz-Phelps said.
The hosts of the show on Channel 13 tried to interrupt her.
She then countered: “These are things that are difficult to say in Israeli studios, but it’s important to say them. … It’s hard not to be shocked by the images we are seeing out of Gaza, and they are another reason the war has to end.”
Nearly two years after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and mass hostage-taking that sparked the war, the focus of Israeli media coverage remains largely fixed on the atrocities of that day and the ongoing trauma it sparked domestically.
The story of Palestinian civilian suffering in the war has mostly been left untold. Israeli TV reports, for example, are more likely to show Gaza in grainy, black-and-white air-force cockpit footage rather than with an in-color, on-the-ground view telling Gaza civilians’ human stories.
But in recent weeks and months, as the world grows more vocal in its outrage over the mass hunger and destruction, a handful of mainstream Israeli reporters, Ms. Elbaz-Phelps among them, are speaking out.
In doing so, they are making a conscious decision to break what some media critics are calling de facto self-censorship in order to help Israelis understand how the ongoing Israeli military assault in Gaza, aimed at destroying Hamas, is devastating for civilians.
Recounting the conversation she had with herself before that July on-air exchange, Ms. Elbaz-Phelps says, “I said to myself that as a journalist I cannot speak of victims of the war and not mention Palestinians. And if no one else is bringing up the Palestinian victims then I must, because these are just the facts, the reality of the war.”
Public’s view of coverage
Some media executives and journalists have argued that the public is not interested in hearing about the suffering of Gazans. They cite the unprecedented brutality of the Oct. 7 attack and the plight of hostages facing starvation and abuse in Hamas captivity.
Recent polls suggest they are right. One survey by The Institute for National Security Studies, a think tank, found that just 35.5% of Israelis are troubled by the humanitarian situation in Gaza, with 61.5% reporting they are “not at all” or only slightly concerned.
A survey in June by a center at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem found 64% of Israelis think Israeli media coverage has been balanced and do not see the necessity of reporting more closely on the situation of Gaza civilians.
Some journalists, even when they privately suggest broader coverage is needed, have limited their own coverage and commentary. Backlash from the public, and even from within their news organizations, can be fierce. Arad Nir, foreign editor of Channel 12, learned as much when he compared an Israeli government-planned “humanitarian city” for displaced Gazans to a concentration camp.
“A concentration camp is a concentration camp,” Mr. Nir said on air in July. “When people are gathered in tent camps amid ruins and are given food there, it’s a concentration camp, and we must also remember the historical connotation.”
Aside from backlash online and from government ministers, Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, issued a statement sharply rejecting the comparison, calling it a “serious and inappropriate distortion. … As is well known, the Nazis established concentration camps with the intent to exterminate the Jews, driven by a murderous ideology.”
Mr. Nir’s colleague Yonit Levi, anchor of the most-watched evening news program in the country, previously drew harsh critiques – including being called a Hamas spokesperson – for her on-air comment on a report about hunger in Gaza.
“Maybe it’s time to understand that this isn’t a PR failure,” she said. “It’s a moral failure, and we need to start from there.”
Rare features on Gazans
There are Israeli news outlets on the left, the Haaretz newspaper most prominently, that have covered the Gaza civilian story extensively, from mass hunger and displacement to the death toll that has surged to over 62,000 people. (Those numbers, attributed to the Hamas-affiliated Gaza Health Ministry, which doesn’t differentiate between combatants and civilians, are sometimes disputed in Israel.)
But up-close features on the lives of Gazans trying to survive this war, and of those who are among its casualties, are rarely seen.
Ohad Hemo, who covers Palestinian affairs for Channel 12, has begun to shine a light on some of those stories, specifically on the plight of Gaza City residents who have been told by the Israeli army to evacuate ahead of a planned military takeover. He’s also reported on the hunger crisis that was exacerbated after Israel shut down all humanitarian aid when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu scuttled a ceasefire in March.
But Mr. Hemo also is critical of the Western and Arab media’s Gaza coverage, which he says chooses to ignore those civilians who are critical of Hamas for instigating a war that has left the coastal enclave largely flattened.
“Yes, there is strong criticism of Israel, but there is also criticism of Hamas, and lately you are hearing more [allocation of] responsibility by Palestinians themselves who are saying Gaza was ruined because of the Hamas Oct. 7 attack.”
He notes that there is no truly free press in Gaza because Hamas cracks down on any hint of dissent with violence or threats of violence.
Government attacks on media
Ayala Panievsky, an Israeli research fellow at the University of London, argues that what she views as the phenomenon of media self-censorship regarding Gaza should be put in the context of a longtime assault on the media by Mr. Netanyahu.
His government has, she says, launched a systematic campaign to attack Israeli outlets and individual journalists he sees as critical of him and his policies, and has been trying to pass new regulations financially harmful to a free media.
“Israeli journalism arrived at this war undermined, exhausted, targeted, and hated by many sectors of society, and so the fear is to be seen as ‘pro-Palestinian’ or ‘lefty’ or affiliated with the liberal left,” says Dr. Panievsky, author of “The New Censorship: How the War on the Media is Taking Us Down.”
“Journalists are trying to lean to the right, not because they think it is the truth, but because they are trying to maintain public trust they saw eroding. So they have sought to signal to audiences that [the notion they are not trustworthy] is not true,” she says.
This is troubling to Ms. Elbaz-Phelps.
“Why must we as journalists show the reality of what is going on? Because this is a pillar of democracy,” she says. “When citizens have knowledge, they can make decisions about their lives and their leadership. Whether we are broadcasting it or not, it is happening on the ground. And even if we choose not to face it, not only us but our children as well will have to live with its aftermath.”
