Poll: 4 out of 5 Jewish Israelis are not troubled by the famine in Gaza

Another poll documenting the moral nadir of Israel has been released. This time it is the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) with a poll released Tuesday, showing that 4 out of 5 Jewish Israelis – 79% – are not troubled by the famine in Gaza. 

The precise question asked was: “To what extent are you personally troubled or not troubled by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza?”

According to the poll results, 23.4% of Jewish Israelis are “not so troubled” by Palestinian famine and suffering, and 55.6% are “not at all troubled.” 

Among Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, the results were nearly the opposite – 86% were “troubled”, with a breakdown of 34.4% “somewhat troubled” and 51.5% “very troubled.” 

This lack of concern among Jewish Israelis is not because they don’t know about the starvation conditions in Gaza, even though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed (just last week) that “There is no starvation in Gaza” and “no policy of starvation in Gaza.” Jewish Israelis do know because it has finally been discussed on their mainstream news channels within the past several weeks. While some of the journalists admit the famine with some regret, others, like those on Channel 14, directly mock starving Palestinians. In the latter example, they put up a photo of a starving child with a mother that they call “well-fed”, who “may have eaten all her child’s food.” They can’t get enough of the sadism: “this is a woman who ate a whole goat”… “who ate the child herself!” 

Israelis not only know about the starvation that Netanyahu denies, but about the intentional policy to starve Palestinians, which he also denies. They’ve known and pushed for it. Israeli Channel 13 has just reported a leak of government transcripts from March 2025, revealing that Israel’s war cabinet knowingly restricted all humanitarian aid to Gaza in hopes it would ‘break Hamas’. In addition, they show that Israel was not met with bad faith in negotiations with Hamas — yet it broke the ceasefire and escalated anyway.

We are no longer in the place where we even have to discuss whether people know, and to what degree – everybody knows, everybody who has a screen and is exposed to media knows about the Gaza famine – the intentionally engineered famine – even Israelis know. 

So the question is not the level of Israeli denial, but the level of Israeli indifference, or even sadism, to this issue. 

This cannot be misunderstood – the IDI poll measures the level of people’s support for the genocide, without using the term. It comes on the heels of another poll in June, which showed that over 75% of Israeli Jews “highly agree” with the statement that “there are no innocents in Gaza”.  

In February, 82% of Jewish Israelis supported “Trump’s plan” of ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip. 

We’re hearing it over and over again – an overwhelmingly genocidal majority among Israeli Jews. 

Yes, there are other voices in Israel. Recently, the Israeli human rights organizations B’tselem and PHRI released reports declaring Israel is practicing genocide, and the famous author David Grossman admitted the same. Yet the question is not whether the Israeli public knows that Israel is carrying out genocide in Gaza doing but does it have the internal dynamics or critical mass to change from within?

This new poll showing Jewish Israelis’ lack of concern about Palestinian famine is a rather precise measurement of this very concrete and visible matter. Most Jewish Israelis are simply unmoved by it. 

This understanding should increase the drive for external pressure. We have no time to wait for another Israel to appear from this genocidal abyss.