From the decision of the first chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) application for arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Galant, through the pro-Palestinian protests in US campuses to the voting pattern in the Eurovision finale, the Israeli public discourse loses it when confronted the sudden hate towards us across the world.

The logical explanation that the Israeli public relies upon to bridge this gap of how we perceive ourselves to the way Israel is perceived across the world, ranges between “the world forgot what happened in the 7th of October” to “we are hated because we are Jewish”. Suddenly everyone became antisemites, with no reason why.

The problem is that in order to understand reality and consolidate a founded stance of it, we need to know it, and most of the Israeli public has a black hole in their world view.

The reason is simple: it doesn’t see it in the Israeli media. It is true, there is antisemitism in the world, and yet, many across the world forgot October 7th, that is forever scorched to the Israeli soul. However, there is also a human catastrophe right here, across the border. A catastrophe that is predominantly absent from the daily coverage of the Israeli media.

Excluding Haaretz, and the independent website Local Call, the mainstream Israeli media ignores almost entirely the fates of the Gazan citizens. The lack of information on the results of the war in Gaza - the number of the dead, wounded and displaced; the percentage of women and children amongst them; the heart wrenching human stories and the acute humanitarian crisis in the strip - causes the “unexplained” gap between how the world perceives the war to the way we perceive it.

For the Israeli media consumers, the reality has stopped after Hamas’s cruel and brutal massacre and the dozens kidnapped in Gaza. However, in reality, the one the rest of the world sees, tens of thousands of Palestinian dead and wounded were added, most of them women and children.

“In most media outlets in Israel there is no trace of the basic information on the fates of the Gazan women, children and elderly dying due to the war’s consequences. So much so, that the former editor in chief and current columnist Haggai Segal can define the notion 'there is a humanitarian catastrophe and an ongoing stringent condition' as an 'antisemite poison' ”, Oren Persico wrote here in March.

If in the online and printed press we can find a few articles and reports on the civil Gazan reality, in tv news broadcasts, the main source of news for most Israelis, the condition is absolutely disgraceful. N12 news, the monopolistic news outlet most Israelis watch, avoids reporting on the condition in the Gaza Strip.

A search in the N12 website show a single digit number of articles on what is done in Gaza since the breakout of the war, and they mostly center around the Gaza’s citizens outrage over Hamas and the disaster they put upon them, with headlines such as “N12 news camera in Gaza: what do the young people of the Gaza Strip think about Hamas?”. What do the young people of the Gaza Strip think about Israel? N12 news disregards Israel’s role in the condition of the Gaza Strip and its citizens, or even just the condition itself.

In the far right channel 14’s website even now the number of terrorists killed counter is displayed. At the time of writing this article, the number is 34,971. Most, even according to IDF’s estimates, are civilians not involved in the war. Just like Hamas, channel 14 can’t distinguish between babies and fighters. N12 news’s does not relish in the lust for blood as channel 14, but they count only the number of Hamas terrorists dead. The civilians aren’t mentioned.

The government has a cynical interest to keep its citizens ignorant to the true conditions in Gaza, and many Israelis don’t want to hear about the civil suffering of the enemy, however, the Israeli media derelicts in its duty to give an accurate and comprehensive account even if it’s not comfortable for the government and is not well receipted in the public opinion.

An especially ironic testimony of the infiltration of this crooked perception of the media’s role, can be found in a public statement published by the Press Council. Instead of going against the lack of reporting in mainstream news outlets in Israel, it decided to congratulate Yonit Levi, the host of the main edition of N12 news, on winning a prize for “Objective reporting in the Middle East”.

Since October 7th, seven intense months of war have passed. A war we, here in Israel, are a part of. The conscientious choice of the Israeli media to avoid reporting on the consequences and results of our fighting, unless they can be defined as a “successful operation” or god forbid casualties of our troops, hurts us first, the Israeli public. We have a right as the public to know what is done in our behalf. It’s the Israeli media’s duty to report that.