For Israelis, Glimmers of Gaza’s Misery Begin to Penetrate a Wall of Silence (Dina Kraft - May 27, 2025)

Dina Kraft is a journalist, podcaster and the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, My Friend Anne Frank, together with Hannah Pick-Goslar. She lives in Tel Aviv where she's the Israel Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor and a creator of the podcast Groundwork, about activists working in Israel and Palestine. She was formerly opinion editor of Haaretz English. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.

In the almost 600 days since the October 7 attack, Zeev Engelmayer has posted on social media a color-drenched daily cartoon “postcard” of war-related pain and trauma.

Until recently, most of the creations, painted in acrylics or drawn with felt-tip pens and signed “Shoshke,” Engelmayer’s pen name, depicted Israeli agony: The hostages and their families, and occasionally the bereaved and the displaced. 

But in recent weeks he has turned his brush and pen to the escalating Israeli attacks on Gaza dubbed “Gideon’s Chariots” that have left hundreds of Palestinians killed, among them women and children. He has depicted the effects of widespread hunger in Gaza in the wake of an Israeli blockade on food aid, now only partially lifted. 

On Sunday his subject was the nine children of Doctors Alaa and Hamadi al-Najjar who were killed in an Israeli airstrike over the weekend at their home in the Gazan city of Khan Yunis. 

He painted their nine small bodies wrapped in white shrouds, faces still visible. Next to each of them was a single small white flower. He wrote out their individual names and ages, from Yahaya Al Najar, 12, to Sidar Hamdi Al Najar, seven months old. He notes only one sibling, an 11-year-old, survived, severely injured. 

“Nine innocent little children were killed,” he wrote in his caption. “Why doesn’t our media tell us their names? I found them easily in the foreign media, for example on CNN and in The Associated Press. Are their names more relevant to Americans and Europeans than Israelis? Why is it that every Israeli who was injured has a name and the Palestinian children who were killed do not?”

He chastised the Israeli media, its post-October 7 trauma and jingoism, its war coverage with a tight focus on Israeli suffering. He asked whether the absence of such images, of reporting of the details of the victims, makes it “easier” to accept the sweep of so much death.

The media’s filtered coverage, he charged, “deprives us of the ability to understand the dimensions of the tragedy… How can we talk about a shared future when we are unable to name nine innocent children who lost their lives?”

Englemayer’s recent turn signals a still small but noticeable crack in the overall silence in the Israeli discourse on Gaza. 

Other indicators include the scathing criticism of Israel’s conduct by Yair Golan, a political party leader and retired general; growing numbers of anti-war protesters holding pictures of children killed in Gaza since the most recent ceasefire ended; and reservists who are refusing -- either tacitly or explicitly -- to continue serving in a war that has no clear end in sight. 

“I am definitely seeing a change in mood around the Israeli attack in Gaza, specifically around the Zionist left/ center circles,” said Dana Mills, an Israeli activist and the resource development manager for +972 and Local Call, Israeli left-wing news organizations. 

“Discussion of starvation and killing of citizens, which was once limited to the radical left, is slowly entering more mainstream (though still left-leaning) discourse,” she said. “I think this is very much in line with the fact that discussions of refusal [to serve in the reserves] have also entered mainstream discourse.” 

She cited as factors spurring the change the growing international outcry against the broadening operation in Gaza, including threats of sanctions by Britain and the European Union; the reported disapproval from the Trump administration of Israeli actions; and a rising chorus of criticism from former Israeli politicians. 

Among these are former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former Defense Minister Bogie Yaalon who warned that Israeli soldiers are at risk of carrying out war crimes in Gaza. 

Golan, the retired general who heads the Democrats party, said Israel was in danger of becoming a pariah nation. 

Mills noted that these figures, deeply embedded in Israel’s establishment, are now “being quoted as ‘radicals’ in the mainstream media.” 

Golan, under fire from across the political spectrum, backtracked Sunday from his comments last week in which he appeared to accuse Israel of killing babies in Gaza “as a hobby.”

He said that did not believe that was what was currently happening but that he feared it was something Israel’s extremist cabinet members hoped would happen. 

In an interview with Channel 12, he quoted government ministers and politicians on the far right who had called in the past for Gaza to be destroyed. 

“I said something simple: that it’s unacceptable that we’re resuming fighting in Gaza, and that the political goals set for the IDF, which unfortunately are not goals connected to Israel’s national security at all… are shaped by people with such a worldview,” he said. 

Also Sunday, Ron Feiner, a major who like so many other reservists has done multiple rounds of service -- in his case 270 days to date -- refused to enlist in the ongoing operation which Netanyahu has said would only end with “total victory”. 

For Netanyahu that means not only the release of the hostages and Hamas’ total defeat, but the mass removal of Gaza’s population, according to what the prime minister has called “Trump’s plan” – an act that critics warn could be defined as a war crime and an idea the White House appears to have backed away from. 

“I’m shocked by the never-ending war in Gaza, by the abandonment of the hostages (by the government), and by the ongoing deaths of innocent people,” Feiner reportedly said. “I am morally unable to continue to serve as long as there is no change.” 

Anti-war protesters surrounded Feiner as he arrived to serve his prison sentence for refusing service, chanting “You are not alone. We are with you.” 

The chant carried a poignant echo: The protesters had co-opted a phrase commonplace at events supporting hostage families.

On Saturday night, Israelis lined two city blocks on both sides of Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv. They stood in silence holding the photos of children from Gaza, all of them killed in the days and weeks since the Israeli government ended the ceasefire in March.

The number of protesters had doubled since the previous week.