The world is horrified by the hunger in Gaza. Now, more Israelis are speaking out.

July 28, 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 the 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.


I am on a summer trip to the United States and Canada. The usual: sightseeing, eating the food we are hard pressed to find in Israel, and catching up with friends and family.

After the hugs and the shared jokes, conversations inevitably arrive at images of hungry, even starving children and adults in Gaza, some of whom have been killed trying to reach aid. The talk soon veers into  searching questions about chaos, not just on the ground, but in how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government have downplayed and outright denied reports of starvation in Gaza.

Netanyahu insisted as recently as this week that “there is no starvation in Gaza.” Yet on Sunday, after heavy international pressure, after even the slickest of professionals peddling in Israeli public diplomacy – like Israeli actor turned Hollywood producer Noa Tishby – have been at a loss for words, he directed the air force to drop food into the strip.  He also greenlighted assistance for aid convoys in driving through the largely flattened Gaza Strip through “designated humanitarian corridors,” and allowed Egyptian trucks to enter Gaza. 

“The policy that Smotrich and Netanyahu have led to is a disaster. For the residents of Gaza and for Israel,” Bar Peleg, a Haaretz journalist wrote in a tweet Sunday. “A direct line runs between their evasion of explaining the disastrous decisions they made regarding humanitarian aid and a leadership that does not take responsibility for the disaster of the October 7 attack.”

Criticism of the hunger crisis in Gaza and Israel’s role in it from a journalist from the left-wing Haaretz newspaper is not new in Israel. What is new: Yonit Levy, anchor of Israel’s Channel 12 TV, one of the most watched news broadcasts in the country, who told viewers Sunday evening: “Maybe it's time to understand that it's not hasbara failure but a moral failure and to start from there.”

She made the comment after a report on international media coverage and outrage over the suffering in Gaza, the final frame of which featured the recent cover of The Daily Express, a British tabloid, with a banner headline over the image of a suffering child in Gaza that read: “For Pity’s Sake, Stop This Now.” 

That sentiment reflects one being shared across the political spectrum abroad—most recently even from evangelical right-wing voices in America. But Gaza’s suffering has been almost entirely absent in mainstream Israeli discourse, including in the mainstream media, with rare exception. Until recent days and weeks, Israel’s mainstream media has arguably sheltered the Israeli public from in-depth coverage of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. And when it did report on it, reporters tended to stick to the script that Hamas was the sole party to blame for civilian suffering in Gaza.  

Levy’s remarks on Channel 12 were a notable departure from how she presented images of Gazans scrambling for food aid at a distribution site in early June. Levy in early June reported on the starvation to make the point that it was turning opinion away from Israel – not that it was an occasion to rethink policy. That strange framing was aimed at keeping Israel and Israelis at a remove. Her remarks last night placed Israelis in the center of the crisis. 

Tishby, one of Israel’s most prominent voices in the social-media-influencer world, told Channel 12’s podcast, “One a Day,” that “it is impossible to explain the humanitarian situation in Gaza from the Israeli side… The situation and images are so dire that people are truly at a loss. I have never received more inquiries from friends and acquaintances and people I work with, from the entertainment industry to journalists, asking me: ‘What can we say about this matter?

Her conversations reflect the ones I have been having in North America where news coverage, let alone social media feeds, are all but dominated by the plight of Gazan civilians.  

People are stunned to hear when I tell them how little is reported in the Israeli media. The focus of coverage even almost two years after the unprecedented Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023 still are very much on that day. When the public is still digesting that trauma and its aftermath, the ongoing nightmare of the hostages still in Hamas captivity ever present in the discourse, there is not much room to see – or feel anything else. Especially when it’s absent from their Israeli screens. 

In recent months I have often asked myself – and experts: “Why don’t Israelis just ‘Google’ Gaza if their own media won’t give them a more complete picture?” The experts tell me that Israelis’ denial, fed by the popular post-October 7 refrain: “Everyone in Gaza is a Hamas supporter,” is not unlike other parties in conflict zones. As  Israeli analysts I interviewed repeatedly put it: “If an individual, no matter how progressive their politics may have once been, feels the ‘other side’ is ready to kill them and their children in their beds, their capacity for empathy vanishes.”

Standing Together, the growing grassroots movement that brings Jewish and Arab citizens together to fight for equal rights and which has arguably done more than any other Israeli group to put the humanity of Gazans in front of Israeli eyes, has taken in recent days to protesting in front of Israeli television news studios. They chanted and held up posters of children killed and left malnourished in Gaza since Israel ended the cease-fire with Hamas in March, abruptly halting the hostages-for-Palestinian-prisoners exchanges and calm in Gaza that Palestinians and Israelis both welcomed as desperately needed oxygen. Their call on Israel’s media establishment: report on what is happening in Gaza. 

They are not sufficing with public protests. Their volunteer activists are also sending WhatsApp messages to journalists like this one: "The starvation in Gaza is severe and urgent. Babies and children are dying every day from hunger! Why aren't we seeing this in the media? What are you hiding? Who are you serving? Report it now before tens of thousands die. The Israeli government must allow food and medicine in now!"

Meanwhile, at the weekly mass protests in Tel Aviv and across Israel calling for the government to make a deal to bring home the hostages, some 20 of whom are presumed still alive but in grave mental and physical shape 661 days after being taken into Hamas bondage, the speeches, posters, and slogans remain almost entirely fixed on the hostages. That said, some speakers have begun referring to the hunger and devastation in Gaza. And intermixed among the signs hoisted high in the night air of the faces of those kidnapped and calls for their immediate return are some of the emaciated bodies of Gazan children as well as those Gazan children no longer alive to starve.

I’m hearing from colleagues in Gaza that some parents are reporting their children are coming to them asking to go to heaven, “because there’s food in heaven.”

As the war continues and some Gazan civilians tell their friends abroad they have not eaten for several days in a row, Israel’s strategy to increase pressure on Hamas by returning to fighting has not led to Hamas buckling in negotiations – instead they appear emboldened by the world’s outrage. The hostages remain held hostage, the Gazan people are dangerously famished, and Israel’s reputation continues to plummet in ways Israelis have yet to fathom. 

American Reform rabbis put out this statement Sunday: “No one should be unaffected by the pervasive hunger experienced by thousands of Gazans. No one should spend the bulk of their time arguing technical definitions between starvation and pervasive hunger. The situation is dire, and it is deadly.  Nor should we accept arguments that because Hamas is the primary reason many Gazans are either starving or on the verge of starving, that the Jewish State is not also culpable in this human disaster. The primary moral response must begin with anguished hearts in the face of such a large-scale human tragedy.”

And from Los Angeles there is this: a rabbi giving a sermon at Ikar, a popular synagogue. A video of his Shabbat sermon was shared on social media with these searing words: “Everyone deserves to eat – to have safe access to food. There is no justification for the use of starvation as a weapon of war. It goes against everything in our Jewish values, the sanctity of our life that makes our religion worthy of devotion. This war must end. I am begging those in power to look at themselves in the mirror, and at last, prioritize human life.”

In Israel long rows of people stood alongside Rothschild Boulevard in central Tel Aviv last week in a silent vigil, holding empty bowls aimed to get their fellow Israelis, let alone their leaders, to do just that.

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Strategic Failure in Gaza