Inside Israel, it’s a very different war

livemint.com:

TEL AVIV—Every evening on TV news, Israelis get the latest on the Gaza war—cease-fire and hostage talks, Israeli military casualties, battlefield analysis and coverage of the Oct. 7 attacks by Islamist militant group Hamas that sparked the conflict. One thing that is almost always missing: the people of Gaza.

Israel is watching one war unfold in Gaza, while much of the rest of the world is seeing a different one, with footage of the destruction caused by Israeli airstrikes in the densely populated enclave and sometimes gruesome images of Palestinians killed in the fighting. That split screen helps explain the widening gulf between an Israel that feels isolated and misunderstood and outsiders who have shifted their attention from the horrors of Oct. 7 to the damage inflicted by Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas.

That gap in perspective could grow in coming weeks if Israel’s military expands its effort to destroy the remaining Hamas battalions in the crowded southern Gaza city of Rafah. On Israeli television, there is virtually no footage of dead Palestinians and only some scenes of the destruction, according to media executives, journalists, media analysts and ordinary Israelis. Many Israeli Jews, who usually consume news in Hebrew, also say they rarely come across explicit footage of Gaza on their smartphones, though they are aware there has been widespread destruction and a high death toll.

Nearly two-thirds of Israeli Jews said they had seen a few or no images of the damage, according to an April survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research center. Just over a third said they had seen a lot, either through Israeli media or social media. “You see everything about the war on Israeli television except