Inside Israel, the Gaza War Looks Very Different

KFAR AZA, Israel—There is a pervasive sense in Israel that time stopped on Oct. 7, 2023. Kibbutz Kfar Aza, one of the first places Hamas attacked on that day, is now a closed military zone, frozen in time. A sukkah, or temporary hut erected for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, which took place the week leading up to Oct. 7, still stands in the yard of one house. In another, a cluster of children’s bikes lean under a tree. 

In the home of Sivan Elkabetz and Naor Hasidim, a young couple in their early 20s, there are still dishes on the drying rack by the kitchen sink. Writing on the wall by the front door, scrawled in the aftermath of the attack, reads “human remains on the sofa.” 

In the days after the attack, in which thousands of militants led and organized by Hamas streamed into Israel at daybreak on Oct. 7, raping, mutilating, and killing some 1,200 people and taking a further 253 hostage, much of the world rallied in support of Israel. Monuments from the Eiffel Tower to the Sydney Opera House were illuminated in the blue and white of the Israeli flag in solidarity with the country.

Eight months later, much of that international outpouring of sympathy has given way to condemnation as Israel has waged an unsparing war in Gaza in a quest to root Hamas out of the coastal territory. 

A little over a mile to the west of Kfar Aza lies Gaza, where Israel is now embroiled in the longest war it has fought since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Amid the burned houses of the kibbutz on a recent morning in late May, a black anvil of smoke could be seen hanging over the the Gaza Strip, accompanied by the distant thud of artillery fire.

“If you want to take a metaphor from a different conflict from around the world, Israel started the war as Ukraine, and seven months after, it’s Russia,” Shira Efron, the Israel Policy Forum’s research director, said at an FP Live event last month. 

Smoke rises in the Jibalia region of the Gaza Strip as seen from Kfar Aza on May 15, after an Israeli airstrike. Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu via Getty Images

More than 37,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health authorities, which do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Some 8,000 children have been killed, according to data shared by the United Nations—a likely undercount as an untold number remain buried under rubble. 

The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, has asked the court to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, alongside senior Hamas leaders, accusing them of having committed war crimes, including the use of starvation as a method of warfare. The United Nations has warned that a full-blown famine has taken hold in northern Gaza. 

But although Israel has grown increasingly isolated, the war is viewed in starkly different terms within the country, where many see the campaign in Gaza as one of existential necessity. 

“For us, it’s a ‘never again’ war,” said Avner Golov, the vice president of research and alliances at the Tel Aviv-based think tank MIND Israel. “My generation now faces a question that I never thought I [would] face, and this is whether a Jewish state can exist in the hostile Middle East,” he added. “We need to make sure the answer is yes.”

While global attention has turned to Gaza, Israel is still mired in the trauma of Oct. 7 and the security failures that left thousands of people defenseless in the face of Hamas’s onslaught. There’s a creeping fear that the bloodshed of the attack is being forgotten or even denied. 

“I feel like no one believes us enough,” said Yarden Gonen, whose 23-year-old sister, Romi Gonen, was taken hostage from the Nova Music Festival. In a country of just under 10 million people, almost everyone knows someone who survived, was killed, or was taken hostage. 

A person reads a book on a lawn in Tel Aviv, Israel, on May 17, near photos of people kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7.Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images

Reminders of the 120 hostages who remain in Hamas captivity—only about 80 of whom are thought to still be alive—are omnipresent throughout Israel. Passengers arriving into Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport are confronted with images of the captives on biometric passport scanners, ATMs, and a phalanx of posters that line the ramp down to passport control. The media is filled with an agonizing drip of information about their fates. 

Hamas struck as Israel was embroiled in its most profound political crisis in decades over judicial reform proposals by the Netanyahu government that critics feared would undermine the country’s vaunted independent judiciary. And though Israelis rallied together in the wake of the attack, that did not translate into greater support for Netanyahu, and frustration has only mounted over the government’s failure to secure the hostages’ freedom or present a viable path out of the war.

Shmuel Rosner, a researcher with the Jerusalem-based Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) who has been conducting weekly polls of Israeli public opinion, said there was no surge in government approval ratings in the wake of Oct. 7. 

“There was never a case in which a country was attacked by another country or by a terror organization in which the leadership of the country did not get not even one iota of bump in the polls,” he said. 

But when it comes to critiques leveled by the international community, Israelis largely stand united, said Dan Illouz, a member of the country’s parliament, the Knesset, from Netanyahu’s Likud party who sits on the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. “On almost all of the issues where the international community is trying to pressure Israel, those issues are not seen as political within Israel,” he said. “There’s tremendous consensus within Israeli society on these issues.”

A large crowd of protesters hold Israeli flags and signs bearing the photos of hostages taken by Hamas during a demonstration in Tel Aviv on June 8. Matan Golan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

A Pew Research Center survey conducted in March and early April found that almost 40 percent of Israelis felt that the country’s military response in Gaza had been about right, while just over a third felt that it had not gone far enough. The poll found sharp divides in the way Jewish and Arab Israelis see the war. Almost 75 percent of Arab Israelis, who make up around a fifth of the country’s population, see the war as having gone too far, compared with 4 percent of Jews.

“I just came back from Canada and the U.S., and I saw that even very intelligent people adopted this thing of [the Gaza war being] ‘Netanyahu’s war,’” said Einat Wilf, a former Knesset member who served as a foreign-policy advisor to former Israeli President Shimon Peres during his tenure as vice prime minister. “It is Netanyahu’s bungle—I think he is in large responsible for it being so badly done,” she added. “But the war? It’s the war of our people.”

Part of that disconnect between Israeli and international perceptions of the war has to do with how the war is portrayed in the media. “The media here [in Israel] doesn’t show what’s happening in Gaza the way that other media does,” said Mairav Zonszein, a senior analyst on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group. “Suffering in Gaza is just not a factor in the way this war is being narrated in Israel.”

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International media has been awash with harrowing reports from Gaza of doctors performing amputations without anesthetic, of parents writing their children’s names on their bodies for identification in the event they are killed. But although left-leaning Israeli outlets such as Haaretz and +972 have closely scrutinized the conduct of the war and the vast suffering it is causing for the millions of Palestinians living in Gaza, analysts say it has not featured prominently in the mainstream Israeli media.

“Seven months of Israel displacing, shelling, starving, killing, crushing and crowding together about 2 million people—and on the Israeli channels there’s nothing,” Israel lawyer Michael Sfard wrote in an op-ed for Haaretz last month.

Amid international outrage about the death toll in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) contends that it has gone to significant lengths to spare civilian life while fighting in exceedingly challenging urban terrain against an adversary that has deliberately entrenched itself among the civilian population. 

“Israelis by and large feel that the world puts too much emphasis on the humanitarian issue in Gaza and does not have proper consideration for the need for Israel to win the war and hence to fight in problematic urban areas,” said Rosner of JPPI. “Israelis feel that the world does not appreciate enough the huge effort that the IDF is making not to harm innocent people, not to hit civilian targets.”

By the end of March, the IDF had dropped more than 9 million leaflets and sent 17 million voice messages warning civilians to evacuate ahead of its operations in Gaza, according to IDF data. “The army, in its very protocols, does much more than what is needed according to international law,” said Illouz, who previously served as a legal advisor to the IDF. 

But longtime observers of the IDF, including some in Israel, counter that the military has, in recent years, loosened its rules of engagement, particularly in the current war. “It was very clear from the beginning that the IDF adopted new rules,” said Yagil Levy, a professor at the Open University of Israel, who said he feared that the campaign was fueled by revenge “in a most severe way” in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack.

Statements made by Israeli officials have also furthered the perception that the country’s political and military leaders don’t see as much of a distinction between Palestinian civilians and militants in Gaza as the rest of the world does.

“Though it is distinguished from the civilian population, Hamas is a Palestinian organization,” said Capt. Adam Ittah, a spokesperson for the Southern District of the IDF’s Home Front Command. “There is collective responsibility once you conduct such a massacre.”

Most controversial has been Israel’s use of hundreds of heavy ordnance in Gaza’s dense urban environments, including 2,000-pound bombs that are capable of killing and severely injuring people within a 1,000-foot radius. 

In the first two weeks of the war, around 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in Gaza were satellite-guided bombs of 1,000 to 2,000 pounds, according to a senior U.S. military official cited by the New York Times. 

A man pushes a bicycle as he walks amid rubble in the devastated area around Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital on April 3.AFP via Getty Images

“Even a 500-pound bomb is too much in a densely populated area,” said Wes Bryant, a retired U.S. Air Force master sergeant who led a U.S. strike cell against the Islamic State in Iraq. “I could tell from the start that Israel, from the government to the IDF, was waging an emotional campaign.”

In early May, the Biden administration paused a shipment of heavy ordnance, including 2,000-pound bombs, to Israel as its troops planned to enter the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where U.S. officials have urged Israel to conduct a more targeted operation than those seen in the early phases of the war. 

The civilian death toll, Israel’s throttling of humanitarian aid, and the killing of aid workers in Israeli strikes have placed enormous strain on Israel’s relationship with its closest partner, the United States, which provides the country with billions of dollars of military aid annually. 

Eleven days after the Hamas attack, Biden touched down in Israel for an extraordinary wartime visit. In an emotionally charged speech, he drew on the Hebrew Bible, his decades in office, and his own experiences with grief. “As long as the United States stands—and we will stand forever—we will not let you ever be alone,” he said.

His remarks also contained a word of caution, based on the United States’ own bitter experiences of going to war in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it,” he said. 

Biden referred back to this warning in an interview with Time magazine published last week. “They’re making that mistake,” he said.