According to a new poll, conducted between 27 and 31 July by the Israel Democracy Institute, 79 percent of Jewish respondents said they were “not so troubled” or “not troubled at all” by the famine and starvation in Gaza.
The findings come as famine conditions spread across the Strip under a five-month-old Israeli blockade that has barred the entry of food, fuel, medicine, and water, pushing 2.3 million Palestinians into starvation.
At least 193 Palestinians — including 96 children — have died of starvation since the start of Israel's genocidal war on Gaza on 7 October 2023, according to local health authorities, with 160 of those deaths occurring since 2 March.
The entire population is now facing food insecurity, according to the United Nations (UN). The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) has warned of a “worst-case scenario of famine.”
In stark contrast to Jewish respondents, 86 percent of Palestinian citizens of Israel — descendants of those not expelled by Zionists in the 1948 Nakba and now numbering around 2.06 million, or 21.1 percent of Israel’s 9.9 million population — said they were either “very troubled” or “somewhat troubled” by the situation in Gaza.
A large number of Arab Palestinians inside Israel mobilized - for the first time since the onset of the war in October 2023 - against the Israeli genocide and starvation of Gaza's native population.
In Sakhnin, in the Galilee in northern Israel, thousands of Arabs protested against the war of starvation against Gaza on 25 July.
In Jaffa, Palestinian members of the Knesset and the High Follow-Up Committee launched a three-day hunger strike on 27 July in solidarity with Gaza, with committee chairman Mohammad Barakeh and Arab-Israeli lawmakers calling for an immediate ceasefire, withdrawal of the Israeli army, and unrestricted humanitarian access.
Arab Palestinians also organized protests in other Arab-majority towns inside Israel, from the Galilee and Triangle to the Negev and coastal areas.
In the poll, the divide among Jewish Israelis also fell along political lines. Just 15 percent of Jewish respondents agreed that Israel could significantly reduce Palestinian suffering, but chooses not to. Among left-wing Jews, that figure rose to 56 percent. Among Arab respondents, it reached 66.5 percent.
When asked whether Israel is making substantial efforts to avoid civilian harm, 78 percent of Jewish respondents said yes, compared to just 22.5 percent of Arab respondents.
Trust in official military reporting on civilian casualties also diverged sharply: 70 percent of Jewish respondents expressed confidence in the military’s claims, versus only 29.5 percent of Arabs.
Still, a separate Channel 12 poll released on 11 July found that 74 percent of Israelis — including a majority of Netanyahu’s own voters — support a war-ending deal to secure the release of all hostages, underscoring growing public willingness to end the war despite government resistance.
Last week, separately, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad released footage of two Israeli captives, Evaytar David and Rom Braslavsky, appearing severely malnourished.
That footage, along with images of emaciated Palestinian children, has made the famine increasingly difficult to ignore for some liberal Israelis who have long distanced themselves from the consequences of the war.
Writing in New Lines Magazine, Israeli scholar Ori Goldberg argued that images of hunger — unlike battlefield deaths — provoke a deeper, more destabilizing response because they tap into the most traumatic layer of Israeli Jewish memory: the Holocaust.
“These images occupy the most primordial layer of collective Israeli memory regarding the Holocaust,” Goldberg wrote.
Referring to the Muselmänner — the skeletal prisoners of Nazi camps — he said: “We were the ones destined to end up as emaciated corpses. We spent all our effort and resources on avoiding that fate. It is impossible to accept that we have come full circle and are now the perpetrators, not the victims.”
While many Israelis still view the war as necessary, Goldberg contends that hunger breaks the emotional logic that has long enabled military violence. “Death is a consequence of war,” he added.
“But hunger is different. Nothing about the creation of hunger is legitimate or natural … It draws a simple and straight line between those who are hungry and those who are not,” he expressed.
That clarity, he suggested, is precisely what makes the images so dangerous. It shakes the foundational belief that Jews cannot be the architects of such suffering — that “we cannot be the system.”
Some dissent is also growing beyond academia.
On Sunday, nearly 1,000 Israeli artists and cultural figures signed a petition titled "Stop the Horror in Gaza," denouncing Israel’s “policies of starvation,” “mass displacement,” and “war crimes.” “Do not issue illegal orders and do not obey them,” the statement urged. “Stop the war.”
On Monday, 600 former Israeli security officials called on US President Donald Trump to "steer" Israel toward ending the war.
Writing in the NYT, Professor Omer Bartov, one of the world’s most prominent Holocaust historians and a leading expert on genocide, has accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, marking a rare and unprecedented condemnation from within Israel’s own academic establishment.
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