Israeli soldiers have stormed, raided and burned the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, forcing all residents to evacuate and leaving dozens of medical staff, including the director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, were arrested.
The sick and injured there have no other medical facility to go to because Israel has destroyed all other hospitals in the north and they cannot leave the north.
The northern Gaza Strip has been under a “siege within a siege” imposed by Israel since October this year, leaving tens of thousands of people without food, services, adequate shelter and now hospitals.
Israel besieged Gaza in October 2023 and began a war against the captive population that resulted in deaths 45,399 people died and more than 107,000 were injured to date.
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.
Israel has everywhere Hospitals attacked and schools where people sought refuge whose homes were bombed.
Most of the internal resistance to the continuation of Israel’s war on Gaza centers on demands for the release of about 100 prisoners abducted from Israel in October 2023 as part of a Hamas-led operation.
However, many Israelis’ awareness of the extent of their country’s actions in Gaza appears to be minimal.
Analysts say this is the consequence of a soft media policy that, with some notable exceptions, appears poised to parrot the country’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his increasingly far-right government.
At war with reality
In February, reports emerged that Netanyahu was attempting to shut down public broadcaster Kan because it was resisting political pressure to change its editorial line.
Three months later, the Israeli government passed a law banning Al Jazeera not operate in its territory.
It is in November passed a bill to break off relations with the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which has proven to be a consistent critic of the Netanyahu government and its war on Gaza.
In December, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said that Israel had detained 75 reporters on its territory, the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip and attacked, threatened and censored others since the start of the war on Gaza.
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, head of campaigns for Reporters Without Borders (RSF), told Al Jazeera.
“Netanyahu’s government is deliberately working not only to present a distorted narrative about the war in Gaza, but also to tighten state control of the media… This will have devastating longer-term consequences for press freedom in Israel, but also for Israeli democracy,” said she .
Many humanitarian and human rights organizations working in Israel to defend the rights of Palestinians feel that their voices are being silenced amid increasing hostility toward their mission.
“There is no space for our work,” says Dr. Guy Shalev, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHRI), which advocates for Palestinians’ right to health care.
“There is only one platform available for PHRI and that is Haaretz… the only platform with news about Palestinians, the occupation and Gaza that is not controlled by the security apparatus,” he said.
“There are others (outside the country), but they are small, and if you want to speak to Israelis in Hebrew, they may not exist either,” he said of the information vacuum in which many operate in Israel.
represent genocide
For Shalev, it is primarily about crafting messages 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 a flight crew member had been injured and two people had been killed at the airport.
Our mission is to negotiate release @U.N staff prisoners and to assess the health and humanitarian situation in #Yemen completed today. We continue to demand the immediate release of those detained.
About two hours ago, as we were about to board our flight from Sana’a, 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 an attack during a “rebel press conference” but failed to mention that the international diplomat was almost killed.
Israel’s second most widely read newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, also announced details of the attack without mentioning condemnation, including from the UN.
If issues like the near-total lack of humanitarian aid entering Gaza are mentioned at all, “the focus will be on Hamas or armed gangs that are robbing it,” Shalev said.
This, he said, allows the development of an Israeli narrative that does not exist Famine in Gazaand that even if there were, “Hamas is responsible for the famine, not Israel.”
Isolation in an echo chamber
“The public is largely unaware of what happened in Gaza last year,” Haaretz columnist and former Israeli ambassador Alon Pinkas told Al Jazeera via WhatsApp.
“A lot of this is conscious denial. It was understandable when people were devastated and wanted revenge immediately after October 7, 2023.”
However, Pinkas continued: “It is now inexcusable. The information is there, be it (in) Haaretz, foreign media that reports extensively on it, the US government and various humanitarian organizations. People consciously choose to ignore it.”
According to Shalev, the result of the information vacuum is the increase in paranoia in a society that has been told that it finds itself under siege by the international community, its courts, institutions and human rights organizations for a war that – according to many in their opinion – will break out in the media – is “legitimate”.
Referring to the two far-right ministers who are often seen as role models for growing Israeli hardliners, Shalev continued: “It is more widespread than just (National Security Minister Itamar) Ben-Gvir or (Finance Minister Bezalel) Smotrich.”
“It’s a much broader sense of Jewish supremacy. People just take it for granted. It goes beyond the right wing, the left wing or the settlers. It’s about everyone,” he said.
The Israeli media’s portrayal of the war on Gaza is “only intended for the 30 to 50 percent of the population who need it,” Shalev continued. The others have already decided. They don’t want help getting to Gaza, they want hospitals to be attacked.
“Growing up as a Jewish Israeli, my entire schooling was about the Holocaust and how people at the time 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.”
