Every night during prime time, Israeli viewers hear about army operations in the Gaza Strip, now ravaged by the ongoing genocidal Israeli war.
Israel has four main news channels.
There is Channel 11, the main channel of the public broadcaster; Channel 12, "the most watched"; Channel 13, "the most critical" of the government; and Channel 14, "Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's propaganda tool, Israel's Fox News", summarised Oren Persico, a journalist for "The Seventh Eye", an Israeli news website focused on the media.
After analysing many hours of news, satire and talent shows, "The Seventh Eye" earlier this month delivered its verdict: "Media in Israel, from Channel 11 to 14, do not show images of human suffering in Gaza."
Television viewers see "images of rubble, of a bombarded building, but not individual stories of people concerned", the website said.
'A different angle'
The pattern is not exactly new, Jerome Bourdon, a media sociologist and professor at Tel Aviv University said, as Palestinian voices were "made invisible" even before October 7.
Israel has killed at least 41,467 Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of them women and children, according to data provided by the health ministry.
The United Nations has acknowledged the ministry's figures as reliable, but they are "not used by Israeli media", Persico said.
The exception is ultra-conservative Channel 14, which mentions "40,000 terrorists eliminated" in Chyrons and on its website.
In an interview with AFP, one of Channel 14's journalists, Hallel Bitton-Rosen, said its news coverage focuses on "support for fighting forces that protect the country and citizens".
The Israeli army says 348 soldiers have been killed during operations in Gaza since the beginning of the ground offensive on October 27.
When Israeli TV channels do dedicate segments to Palestinians, there is "a different angle compared to foreign media", Bourdon said, pointing in particular to terrorist settler attacks on Palestinian villages in the occupied West Bank, where violence has soared since October 7.
Israeli journalists tend to favour the line that "the army failed to stop the settlers" rather than "couldn't protect Palestinians", he said.
Legitimate torture?
In late July, Israeli soldiers were arrested and questioned by military police on suspicion of sexually assaulting a Palestinian detainee after a prison surveillance video was leaked to the media.
Israel's most important military backer, the United States, said at the time that "reports of sexual abuse of detainees are horrific" and called for perpetrators to be held accountable.
On Channel 12, however, debate raged over whether torturing and even sodomising "terrorists" could be considered "legitimate".
Inside Channel 12's newsroom in Tel Aviv, there was "a before and after October 7", said a popular reporter who wished to remain anonymous.
"The focus is on the horror that struck us, not on Palestinian stories," he said.
Several journalists AFP spoke to said they have not faced editorial pressure to cover the war a certain way.
Instead, they said the absence of attention allotted to Gaza's civilian inhabitants could be explained by lingering shock from October 7 and a widespread belief that Palestinian sources cannot be trusted.
They contended it was international media who covered the war unfairly, with a clear bias in favour of Palestinians.
Israel's media landscape is not monolithic, however.
The left-leaning Israeli daily Haaretz and the online news site +972 are among the few outlets producing investigations on Gaza.
They have examined, for example, the torture of civilians by Israeli soldiers and the use of artificial intelligence to identify strike targets.
Bourdon noted that these outlets' audiences are limited to a "minority" on the "intellectual left" in the country.
* This story was edited by Ahram Online.
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