Israeli television news presenters were openly jubilant on Oct. 17 as they reported that the army had killed Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who masterminded the attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. On Kan News, operated by Israel’s state-owned broadcaster, veteran journalist Ayala Hasson said: “We can celebrate! It’s a good thing that Sinwar was killed.” When one of the reporters mentioned that Sinwar’s brother, Mohammed, was not killed with him, Hasson responded: “That’s a pity.” Next to her in the studio sat some retired brigadier generals who had been invited to provide commentary. But instead of offering analysis of military tactics, they served up hawkish pro-government rhetoric. Amir Avivi, who founded a far-right organization called Habitchonistim (The Security-ists) after leaving the army, said that since the army had found Sinwar in Rafah, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been justified in overriding U.S. President Joe Biden’s objection to invading Gaza’s southernmost town. Israel, said Avivi, had presented the United States with a gift “on a silver platter” by killing Sinwar. Another panelist, Midan Bar, who retired from the air force and now heads the Pilots’ Union, said that the army’s success in locating and killing Sinwar further justified Israel’s refusal to normalize terror organizations by negotiating with them.
The correspondent Gili Cohen, standing in front of the National Forensic Institute in south Tel Aviv (colloquially known as Abu Kabir, the name of the Arab village that existed on that spot before the 1948 war), reported to Kan’s viewers that Sinwar’s body was in transit for DNA tests to confirm his identity; meanwhile, she interviewed some women who were distributing candies to celebrate the Hamas leader’s death. But when Cohen reported that the army had found Sinwar by chance, Hasson admonished her: “Don’t say it was by chance! It was due to the army’s hard work in Gaza.”
The tone of the commercial networks was no less populist and violent than that of the state-run broadcaster. On Channel 12, the country’s most popular network, anchor Danny Kushmaro opened with the announcement that one year after “that tragic day,” he brought “very good news” that evening. “The reviled murderer, the man who brought catastrophe upon our nation and an even worse catastrophe on his own people, returned his soul to Satan,” said Kushmaro. Yes, he continued, “Yahya Sinwar has been eliminated. Like [Ismail] Haniyeh, like [Hassan] Nasrallah, like Mohammed Deif and all the others who hate us, he ended his life covered in blood and ashes.” To illustrate the point there was a graphic of Haniyeh, Nasrallah and Deif, with a large red X over each man’s face and the caption “eliminated.” “Or, in language our enemies understand, ‘kul kalb biji youmo’” (Arabic for “every dog has his day”).
Kushmaro went on to describe the accomplishment of “our soldiers, our brothers” who found Sinwar and “shot him dead.” Kushmaro turned to Nir Dvori, Channel 12’s military correspondent, and emphasized that Sinwar had been killed “not due to intelligence work, but because of soldiers in the field.” Indeed, confirmed Dvori. The army is fighting well. The remainder of the prime-time news hour was devoted to military analysis and interviews with soldiers who had participated in the events that killed Sinwar. Perhaps one minute was devoted to short interviews with the relatives of Israelis still captive in Gaza. Please, pleaded the relatives, now that Netanyahu can claim victory with the death of Sinwar, can we please have a cease-fire that brings our loved ones home?
Since Oct. 7, 2023, Israeli television news has carefully tracked and mirrored the popular mood. During the first hours and days after the Hamas-led attack, they echoed the public in asking how the army could have failed to protect its citizens. But since recovering from its initial shock, the party line has been to report that the army is strong, is functioning well and has restored deterrence and security. For security-obsessed people, as Israelis certainly are, feeling that their army can protect them is essential.
Channel 13, another nominally centrist-liberal commercial station, described Sinwar as a “murderous psychopath,” while various analysts claimed that with the Hamas leader’s death the war in Gaza would enter a new phase, making a hostage deal possible. Only Raviv Drucker, one of the country’s most famous investigative journalists, departed from the received wisdom. Assassinating Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, had not brought Israel’s war in southern Lebanon to an end, he pointed out. Nor had various assassinations of prominent Hamas leaders in previous years weakened the movement significantly. Shaking his head slowly, Drucker said that he very much doubted there was any possibility of a cease-fire or a hostage deal any time soon. The killing of Sinwar had made Netanyahu stronger. The prime minister didn’t want to end the war and now, with the public feeling triumphant, he was in a good position to claim that “total victory” was not only attainable, but imminent.
For a read of reactions among Palestinians in the West Bank, I called two Palestinian colleagues in Ramallah. Both described the mood on the street as somber and ambivalent. On the one hand, Hamas was deeply unpopular; on the other, Sinwar had succeeded in making Israelis feel vulnerable for the first time in 50 years, which gave people a feeling of satisfaction. We exchanged a few more observations and insights, from Arabic and Hebrew media. There was a warmth of friendship and a trust in one another’s professionalism that was built on relationships formed nearly two decades earlier, under the auspices of a U.N.-sponsored four-day workshop for Israeli and Palestinian journalists in Amman. There was something symbolic, I felt, in the steadiness of those friendships in the context of the shift to the radical right we were seeing in formerly centrist Israeli media outlets.
In his televised address following the army’s official announcement that the DNA test confirmed the dead man at the forensic institute in Tel Aviv was indeed Sinwar, Netanyahu spoke of a new phase in the war but said nothing about a cease-fire or a hostage deal. Instead, he offered amnesty to any Hamas fighter in Gaza who turned over the hostages — something he certainly knew was about as likely as a July snowstorm in the Negev. More ominously, he spoke about next turning Israel’s military attention to Iran. The message, from Netanyahu and from the television news broadcasts, was that Israel was eliminating all its enemies and reasserting its regional dominance.
Since Netanyahu was elected in 2009, he has steadily co-opted and browbeaten the media through a variety of means, so that the independent commercial networks have simply chosen to become platforms that amplify the messaging of the government and the military establishment. The people don’t want to hear about the tens of thousands of dead and wounded in Gaza, which means the advertisers don’t want to hear about the subject, so the Israeli media doesn’t report on them. The people want to hear that their army is heroic and powerful, so this is what the media reports.
But the war in Gaza has taken propaganda and populism to a new level, as demonstrated by the bloodthirsty, racist language used by veteran news presenters on prime-time, mainstream commercial news broadcasts. By comparison, I remember watching the main evening news broadcast after a suicide bombing in 2001, at the height of the Second Intifada, when a reporter at the scene of the explosion, which killed several people, told a group of young men who were chanting “death to Arabs” during his live standup to be quiet, while apologizing to the viewers for their behavior, which he described as marginal and inappropriate. Today, chants of “death to Arabs” are heard regularly and pass without comment. A decade ago, distributing sweets to celebrate the death of a Hamas leader would have been considered an unusual and disgusting practice. Now it is reported approvingly.
The families of the hostages are clearly worried by the violent triumphalism coming from mainstream media outlets. Not so long ago, those television stations reflected the worldview of the liberal opposition — the people who demonstrated in their tens of thousands for months on end in 2023 against the Netanyahu government’s plan to end the judiciary’s independence. Today, only a small percentage of the liberal opposition is still demonstrating for a hostage deal. In other words, the release of the hostages has become politicized; the state, the establishment and Netanyahu’s supporters have decided, without saying so explicitly, that the hostages might have to be sacrificed for the elusive goal of wiping out Hamas, or of total victory. The families of the hostages are, for the most part, from the liberal opposition. One would have to look at the most leftist — and also least read — Israeli media outlets, like Haaretz and Local Call, to see that those people who want a cease-fire were not passing out candy or celebrating Sinwar’s death. Instead, they were out on the streets once again to demand that Netanyahu implement a cease-fire and bring their loved ones home. “The picture of victory is of the last captive — not Sinwar in a coffin,” read the sign held aloft by one of those demonstrators.
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