Why are Israelis ‘not at all troubled’ by starvation in Gaza?

Tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Tel Aviv on Saturday to demand that their government reach a deal to release two Israeli captives held in Gaza who have been shown as starving in Hamas footage.

The video showed that captives have been as badly affected by the blockade Israel imposed on Gaza in March as the rest of the population trapped there.

So far, at least 197 people have starved to death in Gaza, 96 of them children and global outrage about the famine Israel is imposing on Gaza has mounted.

However, a poll from the Israel Democracy Institute (PDF) found more than half of Jewish Israeli respondents were “not at all troubled” by the reports of Palestinians starving and suffering in Gaza.

Front pages of international newspapers previously accused of backing Israel’s war on Gaza have carried images showing the massive human cost of Israel’s actions.

Yet, in the past 24 hours, gangs of far-right Israeli agitators have blocked aid trucks from reaching a starving Gaza, in apparent defiance of global anger.

Formerly stalwart allies, such as Canada, France and the United Kingdom, have condemned Israel and its actions in Gaza, committing to recognising Palestinian statehood if some kind of resolution is not reached.

I guess Israeli settlers are stopping and destroying aid meant for starving Palestinians, so that Israel-first politicians in the West can accuse Hamas of stealing the aid… pic.twitter.com/6ECMP23g8r

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) August 6, 2025

Domestically, two of Israel’s leading NGOs – B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, Israel – have labelled Israel’s war on Gaza a genocide, and protests against the war have grown.

A week earlier, hundreds of demonstrators led by wounded soldiers and the families of some of the captives marched on the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem, demanding that the war on Gaza be continued.

Widespread awareness of the extent of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and their government’s role in inflicting it, has yet to dawn upon the bulk of Israeli society, Orly Noy, journalist and editor of the Israeli Hebrew-language magazine Local Call, told Al Jazeera.

This is particularly the case because Gaza’s suffering has not been featured in mainstream media.

“I avoid Israeli TV,” Noy told Al Jazeera. “However, I was round at my mother’s yesterday, and they were covering the story of the video of the two captives.

“So, for once, starvation and famine in Gaza was finally on Israeli news,” she said, adding that, instead of denying that starvation existed in Gaza, the wider Israeli public was being told that the only two people starving there were the captives in the Hamas film.

For months now, the mainstream media narrative in Israel has been that the widespread hunger documented by numerous aid agencies is “a Hamas-orchestrated starvation campaign”.

This perception runs deeper than the framing by Israel’s nationalistic television channels, political analyst and former government adviser Daniel Levy told Al Jazeera.

“It comes from decades of self-justification and dehumanisation,” Levy said.

“Most Israelis would be uncomfortable setting out some kind of moral critique of the country, but still have the feeling that something has gone very seriously wrong. There’s a kind of cognitive dissonance at play that helps them make sense of it.”

Then there is the language used by politicians, the media and, ultimately, the public to discuss the war, Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani said.

“They’ve corrupted language. Instead of ‘concentration camps‘, they say ‘humanitarian city’. Instead of talking about ‘killing’, they say ‘elimination’. Every military operation has a biblical name, which we now use to measure time.

“We don’t say ‘such and such a thing’ happened in June. We say, ‘during Operation Whatever’. It helps people make sense of everything. The jargon’s become a new type of speech. It’s become Orwell’s 1984,” he said, referring to the dystopian novel in which language is dictated by the state.

Changing tides

However, while most Israelis have continued to see Gaza’s starvation through the lens of its media and politicians, there are signs that, at its fringes, the mood is beginning to shift, observers say.

“This isn’t going to hold up,” Aida Touma-Suleiman, a member of the Israeli parliament representing the left-wing Hadash-Ta’al party, said.

“More and more, people are beginning to understand that there is real hunger in Gaza, and if Israel is making such a big deal of sending food now, then how can it not have been responsible for the hunger before?”

Meanwhile, activists such as Alon-Lee Green of the Israeli-Palestinian group Standing Together say resistance to the war is growing across all parts of Israeli society – albeit for often widely differing reasons.

“We don’t care why people are protesting the war. We don’t care if it’s because you don’t want to do another tour with the army, or you don’t want your children to go to Gaza and kill people. If you’re against the war, you’re welcome,” he said.

However, despite the killing of more than 61,000 Palestinians since October 2023 – and thousands more lost under the rubble and presumed dead – much of Israeli society has yet to accept that the suffering Israel is inflicting on Gaza is real. 

“From my perspective, we’ve reached the point where the Israeli state and society has lost whatever moral claims they had as a result of the Holocaust,” Shenhav-Shahrabani said.

“They’ve spent whatever symbolic capital that was associated with it.”