The number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip since October 2023 alone has exceeded 70,000. Many of the victims are children and women, and UN experts have determined that this constitutes “genocide (mass killing).” Housing has been thoroughly destroyed, food and medical supplies are not being provided, and people have been suffering from hunger and disease. Even after a “ceasefire” agreement was reached with Hamas, which effectively governs Gaza, in October 2025, Israel has continued to occupy Gaza.

In the Hamas raid that triggered the latest round of attacks on Gaza, 1,200 people were killed on the Israeli side and 250 were taken hostage. To what extent has the Israeli media reported not only on Israeli casualties but also on the devastation in Gaza?

In Israel, the law requires that articles related to national security be shown to the military censor before publication. Journalists who do not comply with censorship can be prosecuted, and media outlets can even be shut down. According to the independent Israeli news outlet +972 Magazine, in the single year of 2025 the military banned the publication of 753 articles, and ordered partial changes to 4,974 articles. This means that more than 15 articles per day were being banned or altered.

There are criticisms that by failing to report on Gaza’s humanitarian crisis, the Israeli media is effectively serving as a component in the prosecution of the war. In Israel, where conflict with Iran, Lebanon, and others is constant, this article examines how military censorship has been implemented, its history and mechanisms, and what it signifies.

Israel Defense Forces (IDF) headquarters (Photo: Ted Eytan / Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.0])

The history of censorship

The history of censorship in Israel is longer than that of the State of Israel itself.

This may sound strange. But the origins lie in regulations introduced in 1945 by Britain, which at the time administered Palestine—including the territory of present-day Israel—as a Mandate, to restrict freedom of the press. Jews persecuted by Nazi Germany migrated there, and three years later, in 1948, Jewish leaders unilaterally declared the establishment of the State of Israel. After the First Arab–Israeli War, Israel took control of most of the land, and 700,000 Palestinians became refugees. At its founding, Israel incorporated Britain’s press-control regulations into its laws, and they have been carried on to the present day.

That said, intervention by censors is supposed to be limited to cases where it is “almost certain that substantial harm to state security will result.” A 1989 High Court ruling confined banned publications to those “very likely to cause harm” to national security, and excluded from censorship matters related to the reputations of the Defense Ministry, the military, and politicians.

It is up to each media outlet to decide which articles to submit to the censor. However, the scope of “national security” is extremely broad. It includes information about undisclosed arms deals, administrative detention, intelligence activities, troop deployments, and targets of missile strikes. The censor can also intervene after publication and delete articles without prior approval. In the case of television, censor officials sometimes monitor the content of live broadcasts from inside the studio.

Even more troubling is that media outlets are forbidden from telling readers or viewers whether the censor has intervened in an article, or what was changed and how. They are not even allowed to publish a complete list of topics subject to censorship. Readers and viewers, without being told anything, are reading censored articles and watching modified programs.

Foreign journalists working inside Israel are no exception. When issuing the press cards required for reporting, the government requires them to pledge compliance with the censorship laws.

Newsroom of the newspaper Haaretz (Photo: Deror Avi / Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 4.0])

Yet in an age when the internet is widespread and information can travel around the world in an instant, how effective can censorship really be? Even if media inside Israel are banned from reporting, censorship becomes meaningless once foreign media report the story.

The Anat Kamm affair, revealed in 2010, is one such example. Anat Kamm, a female soldier who was also a journalist, leaked military secrets to a reporter at the liberal daily Haaretz after she left the army, and was arrested. The military banned domestic media from reporting on the case, but it spread inside and outside Israel via blog posts. Graffiti reading “Google Anat Kamm” appeared on the streets of Tel Aviv. Even if domestic media were gagged, people could still learn the facts by searching on Google.

Nonetheless, the stance of the Israeli government and military did not waver. In 2016, they extended censorship obligations to online media such as +972 Magazine, as well as blogs and Facebook accounts.

Sharp rise in censorship cases

Every year on World Press Freedom Day (May 3), +972 Magazine and the NGO “Movement for Freedom of Information in Israel” have requested that the military censorship authorities disclose censorship statistics. While withholding details, the military has disclosed the total numbers of interventions since 2011.

According to these figures, 2024 saw the highest number of censorship cases to date. The censor completely banned the publication of 1,635 articles and ordered partial changes to 6,265 others. That works out to interventions in an average of 21 articles per day.

In that year, Israeli media outlets submitted more than 20,000 articles to the censor, roughly double the previous year’s level. As noted at the beginning of this article, after the Hamas raid in October 2023, the Israeli military intensified its attacks on Gaza. Since then, the number of articles relating to “national security” increased, which appears to have driven the rise in censorship. This trend continued in 2025, when the number of censored articles was the second highest on record after 2024.

Israeli soldiers intimidating journalists in the West Bank, 2011 (Photo: Yossi Gurvitz / Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0])

In June 2025, when the Israeli military launched an attack on Iran, censorship tightened even further. The military notified media outlets of new censorship guidelines. According to the Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera, the following actions were newly prohibited:

(1) Filming or broadcasting missile impact sites or areas near military facilities; (2) filming impact sites using drones or wide-angle cameras; (3) specifying the exact location of damage sites near security facilities; (4) broadcasting images of Israeli missile launches or the interception of Iranian missiles. In addition, sharing videos on social media without prior review by the censor was banned on the grounds that they “could be fake news produced by the enemy.”

Immediately after the directive, the powers of the police were expanded, allowing the arrest of journalists merely for filming at scenes of damage. In the port city of Haifa, a journalist who had set up cameras in preparation for a possible attack on the port was detained.

There have also been incidents in which citizens who support the Israeli government and Jewish settlers (*) act like vigilantes, monitoring and attacking journalists. In July 2026, in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, reporting crews from CNN and other outlets were assaulted by four settlers, their car was destroyed, and their reporting was obstructed.

More than 260 journalists killed

For the Israeli military, censorship is only one among several means of controlling the press.

The army in principle does not allow foreign journalists to enter Gaza. If Palestinian journalists living in Gaza can be silenced, coverage can be completely controlled, and even if inhumane operations are carried out, they will face no scrutiny. It is not hard to imagine that this is exactly how the Israeli military has thought.

Journalists killed in Gaza commemorated in Finland, 2025 (Photo: rajatonvimma / Flickr [CC BY 4.0])

According to the international NGO Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), since October 7, 2023, the Israeli military has killed more than 260 journalists, primarily in Gaza but also in neighboring countries including Lebanon, Iran, and Yemen. Of these, more than 70 were deliberately targeted and killed in retaliation for their reporting and newsgathering activities. The killing of journalists demonstrates that taking their lives is the ultimate form of press control.

Moves to shut media out of Israel have also come in rapid succession. In April 2024, the Knesset passed a law that allows the closure of foreign broadcasters deemed a threat to “national security.” The following May, Israel banned the operations of Al Jazeera, which had been critical of the country in its reporting. In September, Israel even forced the closure of Al Jazeera’s bureau in Ramallah, in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, where Israeli governmental authority is not supposed to extend.

Israeli media have not been spared either. In November 2024, the liberal daily Haaretz was sanctioned, and the government banned the placement of its advertisements in the paper. Authorities objected to statements by the Haaretz publisher criticizing the Netanyahu government for “not caring about imposing a cruel apartheid regime on Palestinians,” among other remarks.

At the same time, the response of the Israeli government and military is highly arbitrary. Even when the censor ruled that there was “actual harm” to national security, it did not punish Channel 14, a pro-government station, for broadcasting highly sensitive battle plans and military information tools.

Media increasingly self-censoring

It is not only the military and government that restrict reporting. A climate of intimidation within the media has led to a growing trend of self-censorship.

According to a report published by an Israeli think tank, in the six months following the start of the Gaza offensive in October 2023, coverage mentioning the humanitarian crisis in Gaza accounted for only 3% of all reporting on the private broadcaster Channel 12. Of 206 war-related video segments, only two showed Palestinian civilian casualties. CPJ notes that the coverage on Channel 12 and other outlets “almost entirely reflects the military’s framing and the official state narrative.”

Destroyed Gaza and displaced residents, 2025 (Photo: Jaber Jehad Badwan / Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 4.0])

Furthermore, according to +972 Magazine, in the roughly two and a half years from October 2023 to March 2026, Israel’s two leading investigative news programs—“Hamakor” (Channel 13) and “Uvda” (Channel 12)—aired a total of 45 episodes about Israeli hostages held by Hamas. Among these, there was not a single episode focusing on innocent Palestinians killed by the Israeli army. Most of the reports were about the military failures of the Israeli army that allowed the Hamas raid to occur. It is hardly surprising, they argue, that viewers might come to think that “the only innocent victims in this war are Israelis.” The analysis is that there is a “conscious editorial choice” that “the war can be criticized, but it must not be criticized from the perspective of Palestinian victims.”

How, then, are people in Israel perceiving this media coverage?

According to Haaretz, in a public opinion survey conducted in June 2025—one year and eight months after the Gaza conflict escalated—by a research institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 64% of Israelis responded that “local media reporting on Gaza is balanced and there is no need for broader coverage of the situation of civilians in Gaza.”

Even more shocking was that when asked to what extent they agreed with the statement “There are no innocent people in Gaza,” again 64% answered “strongly agree.”

Is the failure of news organizations to accurately convey the reality in Gaza influencing Israeli public opinion? Had there been no censorship or other restrictions, and had freedom of the press been guaranteed, the results might have been very different.

* Jewish settlers: Jewish Israelis who, with the support of the Israeli government, settle in occupied territory in the West Bank. According to the peace group Peace Now, there are 146 settlements in the West Bank, home to more than 500,000 settlers. Since October 7, 2023 in particular, attacks by settlers against Palestinian residents have soared and become more extreme. Underlying settler behavior is the ideology of the “Zionist movement,” based on the Bible and the idea of creating their own state in Zion (Jerusalem). However, transferring one’s own civilians into occupied territory violates the Fourth Geneva Convention, a key instrument of international law. The United Nations has repeatedly called for a halt to settlement activity.

Writer: Kuroda Osamu