Opinion | The Reasons Israelis Have Closed Their Eyes to Gaza

A stream of images of starving children in the Gaza Strip have captured the world’s attention, deepening anger over Israel’s actions in the territory and furthering its isolation among nations.

But the narrative is different inside Israel. The story of hunger in Gaza has hardly registered compared with other crises and tragedies: the grinding announcements of the deaths of young Israeli soldiers; the political upheaval over the exemption of ultra-Orthodox Jews from the draft and government’s efforts to fire key democratic and professional gatekeepers; the haunting videos of emaciated young hostages, one forced to dig his own grave on camera, after nearly two years in hellish captivity.

Worse than showing indifference, many Israelis deny the clear realities: that Gaza is in chaos and teetering on the edge of widespread starvation, and that Israel has played a major role in bringing about this terrible state.

The attitude is projected from the top. “There is no starvation in Gaza,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has declared. In a news conference on Sunday he blamed Hamas and the international media for perpetuating a “global campaign of lies.” He added that “the only ones being deliberately starved” are the Israeli hostages in Gaza.

This sentiment is widely shared in Israel. A poll in late July found that almost 80 percent of Jewish Israelis believe that Israel is making an effort to avoid causing suffering to Gazans. The same percentage — though primarily on the right and center — said they are not troubled by reports of famine.

While indications are growing that the tragedy is starting to register among Israelis, the willful blindness of much of Israeli society must be discarded for Israel to begin pulling itself out of the quagmire in Gaza and repairing its own tattered image. The first step to resolving a problem is admitting there is one.

When it comes to Gaza, Israelis live in an echo chamber, relying largely on local media, which often enacts self-censorship regarding Israeli wrongdoing and Palestinian suffering in Gaza. But it is also important to understand the powerful underlying emotions that have led many Israelis to close their eyes and ears to the suffering of Gazans and accept a different version of reality.

Many feel fury at the humanitarians and international organizations that, while criticizing Israel’s every move, seemed to minimize Hamas’s horrendous crimes on Oct. 7, 2023, when about 1,200 people in Israel were murdered and some 250 taken hostage. Fifty are still captive, 20 of whom are believed to be alive. There is a profound sense of unfairness over demands that Israel allow large transfers of aid to Gaza when many returning hostages describe being starved and abused even when there seemed to be enough food for their captors.

Recent history also lingers bitterly in Israeli memory. It includes the 2005 disengagement of Israel from Gaza, followed by Hamas’s 2007 takeover, and nearly two decades of cyclical attempts to deter and contain the organization with limited military operations and economic carrots, like permits for Gazans to work in Israel. All seem to have amounted to nothing in the face of Hamas’s futile and bloody drive to destroy Israel. The barbarity displayed on Oct. 7, combined with the cheering chorus from enemies and the silence from many friends, hardened the conflict for many Israelis to the fundamental, zero-sum and inherently violent struggle for land and sovereignty that so many of the kibbutzniks murdered in their homes that day had sought to overcome with their peaceful intentions.

Videos from Gaza circulate on Israeli social media, showing markets with food on display, open restaurants, gunmen looting aid. They might be real, but they are often old or fail to present a full picture across the strip. Nonetheless, these videos help Israelis to construct an alternative narrative: There is enough food going into Gaza, but the United Nations is failing to distribute it properly; Hamas and gangs are stealing it, while Israel is doing what it can.

The warnings of famine have drawn more rational skepticism. Despite repeated alarms raised by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification — the definitive international source for declaring a famine — there is still no clear indication that their predictions have come to pass at scale, leading the Israeli public to believe that the warnings are just another part of the global anti-Israel propaganda machine.

Israelis also lay blame with the U.N., which despite objective difficulties has seemingly opted for a principled approach over pragmatism. Nearly 90 percent of U.N. food aid has been seized by armed actors or hungry crowds since May 19. Still, although the U.N. adopted Security Council Resolution 2720 in December 2023 to accelerate and monitor the delivery of aid to the people of Gaza, it was not until May that the U.N. added an online dashboard to monitor that aid. In addition, the U.N. prioritizes the privacy of its local workers in Gaza, failing in Israeli eyes to register legitimate concerns regarding terrorists penetrating aid agencies.

For Israelis, the reality is this: Israel, a flawed but real and vital country, is fighting an evil terrorist group that has the power to stop the horror at any time, but hates Israel enough to persist and does not care enough for its own people to stop.

Yet what is happening in Gaza speaks for itself. People are starving, and as in any other crisis, the most vulnerable in society — the elderly, newborns, people with pre-existing conditions — are harmed first.

Even after almost two years of war, Israel lacks a coherent humanitarian strategy for Gaza, switching aid on and off based on the calculations of Mr. Netanyahu, who is trying to balance keeping the political support of his right-wing coalition partners, who want the war to continue, and international pressure to stop it.

After several hundred thousand tons of food aid entered Gaza during the second cease-fire, according to Israel — enough for several months, by World Food Program projections — Israel’s decision to cut off all aid in March pushed the strip into the dire crisis it faces today. Israel said that it hoped the blockade would disrupt Hamas’s ability to profit from the goods coming in, weaken the group’s governance and pressure it to capitulate in cease-fire negotiations.

This was not just a morally wrong choice — humanitarian aid should not be a political issue — but a strategically foolish one that misread both Hamas and the international community. A humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza was never going to force Hamas’s hand. The group needs very few resources to operate: just enough to continue to hold the hostages, carry out guerrilla attacks and continue making statements to influence public opinion.

In May Israel sought to sidestep the U.N. assistance system, which it relentlessly criticized as ineffectual and compromised by Hamas with the poorly planned and even more poorly implemented system run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. But after months of no aid, stocks in Gaza had run down and prices had soared; the foundation’s four distribution sites were almost immediately overwhelmed and exploited by profiteers, not to mention dangerous to access, with numerous casualties reported in lines for aid. The lack of aid has led to the death of more than 210 people by malnutrition since the start of the war, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health.

The Israeli-American plan to quadruple the foundation’s distribution centers will hardly address the grave situation. Even today the foundation faces logistical challenges, and the boxes they issue, both in terms of food quantity and diversity, don’t translate easily to nutritious meals.

The humanitarian disaster in Gaza is far broader than starvation. The vast majority of the population has been displaced at least once and lacks shelter. There is limited water and sanitation. Health care is devastated. Yet even though Israel now theoretically places no limits on aid to Gaza, it continues to refuse work visas to staff members of the U.N. and international aid groups. It restricts humanitarian operations to a small number of organizations that manage to successfully maneuver through an opaque registration. These conditions all seem likely to continue: Despite Mr. Netanyahu’s statement on Thursday that Israel would expand the war, beginning with the takeover of Gaza City, the Israel Defense Forces is loath to assume a civilian governance role.

Glimmers of recognition of all this suffering have emerged in recent weeks.

Despite denials of the extent of the grim reality in Gaza, Israel established fixed humanitarian corridors, conducted and facilitated airdrops and allowed in small amounts of commercial traffic and daytime pauses in operations in some areas to allow for aid delivery.

The I.D.F. chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, reportedly protested the plan to take over Gaza City mainly for Israeli security reasons, but he also mentioned the lack of plans for a proper humanitarian response for the million people who will be displaced. In addition, he cited the absence of civilian infrastructure in Gaza and called for building hospitals there.

Mainstream media, including Channels 12 and 13 and the popular newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, have begun stating the obvious: that there is hunger in Gaza, and that the current aid system is not working.

The intellectual and cultural elite has also become more vocal, with a petition signed by some 1,000 prominent Israeli artists titled “Stop the Horror in Gaza” and a demand by heads of universities to address the humanitarian situation. People at vigils in Tel Aviv hold posters showing pictures of dead children in Gaza.

Israel has played a leading role in creating this crisis, and continuing willful blindness to that fact will only worsen the damage in Gaza, radicalize Palestinians for generations to come and further isolate Israel regionally and internationally.

Israel’s legal and moral obligations do not change because of the evil of the enemy it is fighting. Israel cannot ignore, deflect or wish away the crisis in Gaza. It is now making the right strategic and moral choice to increase aid into the territory, but absent a holistic strategy, it will be too little, too late.

Israelis must look beyond their own prism of pain and trauma, ignore the double standards at play and recognize the harsh reality in Gaza and Israel’s responsibility for it. Israel needs the courage to see what it sees. Then it must act.

Shira Efron is a senior fellow and research director at Israel Policy Forum. She previously led the Israel program at the RAND Corporation and was a consultant with the United Nations in Jerusalem on Gaza access.

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