https://www.972mag.com/israel-investigative-journalism-drucker-dayan-hostages/.
The farce of Israel’s ‘liberal’ investigative journalism
A recent exposé on the killing of three hostages by Israeli soldiers highlights how even critical news programs form part of an architecture of public denial.
By Sebastian Ben Daniel (John Brown) May 22, 2026
Raviv Drucker presents HaMakor's investigation into the killing of three Israeli hostages by Israeli soldiers. (Screenshot)
Two weeks ago, the investigative program HaMakor on Israel’s Channel 13 aired a 60-minute report on the December 2023 killing of three Israeli hostages — Yotam Haim, Alon Shamriz, and Samer Al-Talalka — who were shot by Israeli soldiers in Shuja’iya, eastern Gaza City, after emerging from a hiding place carrying a white flag.
Even without intimate knowledge of the details, one thing should have been clear from the outset: When soldiers fire from inside buildings at three shirtless men carrying a white flag, kill two of them, then pursue the third, call him out of hiding, and shoot him dead, the issue is not merely “mistaken identity.” The issue is that Israeli soldiers routinely shoot innocent people. One would have to be extraordinarily naïve to believe that the single time this happened, the victims just happened to be Israelis.
Yet HaMakor fastidiously avoided that conclusion. It did not even entertain the question, declining to report what I and others had already noted in real time: that the battalion commander on the scene, Lt. Col. Dan Luria, had previously overseen another incident at Gaza’s Zikim beach in which Palestinians who had surrendered and posed no threat were killed, and later proudly posed beside their bodies.
Only one of the hostages’ parents — the father of Alon Shamriz — raised the connection between the two incidents on air. But the producers, defying what should be the most basic instinct of investigative journalism, did not pursue it.
Nor did HaMakor seriously grapple with the testimony of Yotam Haim’s mother, Iris, who revealed that the soldiers who killed her son had been operating under orders to shoot every male on sight, regardless of age — an obviously illegal order, and one that, based on dozens of other incidents in Gaza, was likely not exceptional. But rather than investigate whether such orders were standard practice, HaMakor again confined the allegation to Haim’s voice, and moved on.
Watching the report, I wondered: If one of Israel’s most respected investigative television programs could only tepidly confront the killing of innocent Israelis, how had it dealt with the killing of innocent Palestinians in Gaza? I began looking through the output of HaMakor and Uvda — the two dominant investigative programs on Israeli commercial television which, along with their anchors Raviv Drucker and Ilana Dayan, are widely regarded as standard-bearers of liberal Israeli journalism.
Israeli journalist Ilana Dayan at a conference of the Israeli Television News Company in the Jerusalem International Convention Center, September 3, 2018. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Over the past two and a half years, the two programs aired 45 investigations on the Israeli hostages, most of them framed around narratives of heroism; 11 episodes on the military failure of October 7; 12 on the internal management of the war in Israel; and four on the war in Lebanon and Iran. The number of investigations devoted to innocent Palestinians killed by the Israeli army was precisely zero. The omission is so complete that viewers could be forgiven for thinking the Israeli army’s only innocent victims in this war were Israelis.
Aside from the killing of the hostages in Shuja’iya, the only other time either program seriously examined the killing of an innocent civilian by Israeli forces was the shooting of Yuval Castleman at the scene of a Jerusalem terror attack — again, an Israeli victim.
The same pattern appeared in coverage of abuse in Israeli jails. More than 100 Palestinians have died in the custody of Israeli security forces since the start of the war, with Israeli human rights groups B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights–Israel documenting clear signs of abuse. Yet HaMakor chose to address detention-related maltreatment only once: in the case of Ori Elmakayes, an Israeli teenager wrongly suspected of passing information to the enemy, who was not physically harmed during a brief detention.
These are not failures of journalistic ability. Raviv Drucker and Ilana Dayan are among the best journalists in Israel. Both have survived for years in mainstream Israeli media as the society has grown more violent and ever less willing to look in the mirror. Perhaps that survival has depended precisely on the ability to sense and internalize what may be said, and what must remain unsaid.
The result is a conscious editorial choice that hovers, at times, between the grotesque and the absurd: The war may be criticized, but not from the perspective of its Palestinian victims. The failures of the army may be investigated, but primarily insofar as those failures harmed Israelis.
That is why the question is not only what this kind of anti-journalism refuses to show, but what this refusal has done to Israeli society itself. While tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, Israel’s leading investigative reporters have abandoned one of journalism’s most basic responsibilities: forcing society to confront what is being done in its name.
Ignoring history
After watching HaMakor’s report on the hostages, I could not shake the thought of what might have happened had similar incidents in Gaza received the same kind of treatment on Israeli television years earlier. Maybe the orders to kill innocents would have ceased? Maybe some soldiers would have refused to carry them out? Or maybe the hostages themselves may have avoided the soldiers, knowing they might kill them rather than save them?
Protesters hold a banner mimicking the one made by the three Israeli hostages killed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza, which read “Save Us,” at a demonstration calling for the return of the remaining hostages, outside the Kirya in Tel Aviv, December 19, 2023. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)
On Jan. 4, 2009, during the three-week conflict known in Israel as Operation Cast Lead, Israeli shelling hit the home of the Abu Hajjaj family south of Gaza City. In response to the Israeli army’s instructions, around 30 members of the family — 20 of them children — left the neighborhood waving white flags. As they crossed an open agricultural field, an Israeli tank opened fire. Majda Abu Hajjaj, 37, was killed instantly; her mother, Raya Abu Hajjaj, 64, was wounded and died shortly afterwards. The two women’s bodies remained in the field for two days until the fighting ended.
Nine days later, in the village of Khuza’a in southern Gaza, dozens of residents gathered in the courtyard of Osama Al-Najjar’s home after soldiers ordered them to leave their homes in pairs. The first two out were Rawhiyya and Yasmin Al-Najjar, waving white flags. After they had passed several houses, a soldier roughly 40 meters away opened fire. Rawhiyya was killed by a precise shot to the head. Three years later, the soldier involved received a sentence of 45 days’ confinement to base. Incidents of this kind recurred so frequently during that conflict that it is difficult not to suspect a systemic policy.
Nor was the shooting of innocent Palestinians carrying white flags unique to Operation Cast Lead. During Operation Protective Edge in 2014, soldiers entered the house of Muhammad Tawfiq Muhammad Qudayh, also in Khuza’a. Qudayh climbed out of the basement carrying a white flag alongside his two children in order to inform the soldiers that his family was sheltering below. The soldiers shot him dead on the spot. (After the residents evacuated, the village was razed — a preview of what the Israeli army would go on to do to large parts of Gaza after October 7.)
Years later, the case was quietly closed. The military police investigator assigned to it would later write a play about the cover-up, titled “Apart from that, nothing happened.”
In all of these cases, the victims were clearly identified as civilians carrying white flags and posed no threat. The soldiers who killed them were in no immediate danger — and may well have been operating under the same kind of unlawful orders later described by Iris Haim. Nor was there ever a shortage of evidence: Military police investigations, eyewitness testimonies, soldiers documenting their own crimes and posting them on social media, and, in some cases, investigators later speaking publicly about systemic concealment within the military.
Drucker, himself a former military investigator, should understand this system better than most. Yet Israel’s investigative television programs showed virtually no interest.
During the latest Gaza war, independent Israeli outlets and media organizations around the world published investigation after investigation into mass civilian killings in Gaza. The record is by now extensive: +972 Magazine and Local Call’s reporting on the Israeli army’s use of artificial intelligence in mass targeting; the New York Times’ investigation into the Oct. 31, 2023 strike on Jabalia refugee camp that killed at least 126 civilians, including 68 children, and its visual investigation into repeated Israeli strikes on so-called “safe zones” in Gaza; Forensic Architecture’s reconstruction of the killing of 6-year-old Hind Rajab and the paramedics sent to rescue her, and the investigation into the killing and burial of 15 Palestinian aid workers; Reuters’ investigation into the killing of five journalists in Nasser Hospital; the BBC investigation into children shot in the head or chest; and many more.
Israeli soldiers operating in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, July 22, 2024. (Oren Cohen/Flash90)
Together, these investigations represent only a fraction of the incidents that have killed tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians in Gaza, including some 20,000 children. Yet in Israeli mainstream media, most of this barely registered. When foreign investigations became impossible to ignore, Israeli outlets generally gave more space to the denials of military spokespeople and government press officials than to the evidence itself.
And in any case, foreign reporting was hardly necessary to establish what was happening: Israeli soldiers themselves uploaded hundreds of videos documenting war crimes, secure in the knowledge that, in Israel, such acts would be met with admiration rather than punishment.
A moral foundation for looking away
Mainstream Israeli media — not the openly propagandistic outlets like Channel 14, but the institutional press — has become one of the clearest examples in any so-called democracy of wartime information management fused with the active manufacturing of public consent. This has not merely been a matter of “ignoring” what happens in Gaza, which, though unacceptable, would at least lend ordinary Israelis plausible deniability. The coverage has in fact been relentless. But it is not coverage of reality.
Military correspondents recite the army spokesperson’s briefings almost verbatim: Civilian deaths are “Hamas lies”; if civilians are killed, they were being used as human shields by Hamas terrorists; “every house has a gun in it”; every destroyed neighborhood was a military necessity. The army announces how many “terrorists” it “eliminated” on a given day, almost never how many civilians were killed beside them. At most, there is an expression of regret, usually when the dead happen to hold foreign passports.
Arab correspondents virtually disappeared from Israeli television screens during the first year of the war, because their very presence in the studio disrupted the dehumanization on which the coverage depended. The exception was “proud Arab-Israeli” influencer Yoseph Haddad, whose full-throated support for the war allowed the networks to preserve the appearance of diversity while purging nearly every other Palestinian voice. Meanwhile, commentators such as Almog Boker on Channel 12 and Moria Asraf on Channel 13 became central precisely because of their obsessive repetition of the consensus that there are “no innocents in Gaza.”
Inside the studios there are endless arguments about how to wage the war, but almost none about whether the war itself — with its unprecedented destruction of civilian life — is morally acceptable. Journalists debate shortages of Israeli-made bombs; heaven forbid they ask whether the problem is not insufficient production, but an excessive desire to drop bombs on a civilian population.
At times, the logic sustaining this system surfaces openly. In January 2024, Channel 13 investigations editor Roi Yanovsky — while simultaneously serving as a reserve soldier, a fact that would have undoubtedly made him a “legitimate target” had he been Palestinian — wrote that “Hamas’ ideology is in almost every house” in the Strip. “Hamas in Gaza is like Messi in Argentina,” he declared, before asking rhetorically why Gazan parents would send their children to kindergartens that “serve as terror infrastructure.”
Palestinians walk among the ruins of their homes in the Shuja’iya neighborhood of eastern Gaza, October 16, 2025. (Khalil Kahlout/Flash90)
In advancing the familiar argument that the population itself is complicit, Yanovsky provided the moral foundation that allows Israelis to look away from the crimes being perpetrated in their name in Gaza.
A year later, after activists from the Standing Together movement organized a protest outside Channel 12’s studios in central Israel against the media’s indifference to suffering in Gaza, a leaked Channel 12 WhatsApp chat exposed the same logic even more frankly. “With all due respect for our journalistic duty,” wrote chief editor Ron Yaron, “when you hear the story of the [Israeli] women who survived captivity, it is somewhat hard to connect with the message of this protest.”
The exchange shows that what appears on Israeli television is not a result of accidental omission, but of a conscious editorial ideology. Dictatorships impose silence through terror and censorship; Israel accomplishes much of it through social consensus, reproduced by managers, editors, CEOs, and senior commentators.
None of this began on October 7. For decades, Israeli media has laundered the killing of Palestinians as tragic “accidents,” while sustaining the mythology of “the most moral army in the world.” In earlier wars, there was still an effort to preserve the facade: For years, Channel 12 aired a clip of an Israeli Air Force pilot aborting an airstrike after “spotting a child,” reinforcing the message that the Israeli army does not kill children intentionally.
That was always a complete lie. But at least then, many still felt a need to whitewash it. That is no longer the case.
Making mass killing palatable
But there is an even more important role played by shows like HaMakor and Uvda among Israel’s liberal public. Openly genocidal slogans like “there are no innocents in Gaza” are too vulgar for an educated, liberal audience; they may even elicit disgust. Nor is this audience likely to turn to social media, which it regards as unsourced and unreliable. The liberal public requires a more sophisticated mechanism of denial, one with pretensions to critical inquiry while carefully avoiding the conclusions such inquiry demands.
This is the role Drucker and Dayan came to occupy. Drucker continues to produce sharp investigations into the corruption of well-hated figures like Transportation Minister Miri Regev. Last week, he effectively crucified those who peddled disinformation — among them Knesset member Tsega Melaku — about the May 2023 hit-and-run that ended in the tragic death of 4-year-old Rafael Adana and sparked mass protests over the justice system’s handling of the case (something he would never do, for example, to army officers who spread lies about beheaded babies during the October 7 attack, claims later parrotted by President Biden).
Dayan, too, has delivered sincere liberal monologues warning of the judicial overhaul’s threat to Israeli democracy. Both have shown a great deal of courage against the government, and far greater cowardice toward the Israeli army and their own audience.
Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker arrives for a court hearing at the District Court in Jerusalem, for a petition filed by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir asking the court to bar the TV show HaMakor from publishing videos, texts, and recordings from a leaked WhatsApp group chat, November 10, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
Crucially, their “leftist” dissent is always presented as “an opinion,” never as the product of investigative reporting on Gaza. The reason is clear: The opinion of one man or woman, however prominent, does not force the public into moral self-examination. Viewers can simply hold the opposite opinion, which is treated as equally legitimate. In fact, such surface-level disagreement helps sustain the illusion that Israel is a normal, dynamic democracy — even as its army was killing tens of thousands of children.
An investigation by Israel’s most respected journalists establishing that the army had systematically killed civilians, or at least operated under permissive rules of engagement toward them, would rupture one of the most basic “common sense” assumptions of Israeli society: that its military is the most moral in the world. But that is precisely where the line of legitimacy was drawn, with the pen of self-censorship. This work was left to foreign reporters, allowing the Israeli government and its media proxies to dismiss the findings as anti-Israel (or antisemitic) propaganda.
I do not claim that Drucker or Dayan consciously seek these outcomes, nor do I dismiss the pressures they face in a society that treats mild criticism as betrayal and demands that those who voice it pay a steep personal price. But intentions are secondary to the consequences here.
This architecture of denial, which allows the liberal public to know and not know simultaneously, is one I know well from my time living in and researching Argentina under the right-wing civilian-military junta (to which Israel provided substantial military and diplomatic support). There, journalists feared the generals and the green Ford Falcons, and society continued to function “normally” even as 30,000 people were “disappeared.”
In Israel in 2026, journalists fear ratings collapse, online mobs, and being branded “traitors” or “terror supporters” on right-wing channels — or, worse, by their own audience. Liberal media has effectively become a willing hostage to the darkest impulses of its viewers. Instead of forcing them to look reality in the eye, it feeds them precisely what they are prepared to consume: another story of heroism, another technical failure of the army, another tragedy — provided that the victims are themselves Israeli. And all while carefully avoiding explaining the reason for the tragedy, and feeding the myth that such tragedies are done “by mistake.”
This is not censorship in the classical sense. It is something less straightforward, and in some ways more effective: a shared system of boundaries that determines in advance what can be known. Israelis may see the images of dying children in Gaza on CNN or social media, just as Argentines once saw the mothers of the disappeared gathering in Plaza De Mayo. But the local media shields viewers from the implications of what they are seeing, preventing those images from becoming a moral indictment of the society that produced them.
In this context, it is worth recalling an article written during the junta years by Ilana Dayan’s father, Mordechai Dayan (see page 188 here). In “No one is persecuted because of their Jewishness,” he argued that Jews, despite being heavily overrepresented among Argentina’s disappeared, had not been targeted simply because of their Jewish identity — implying, in effect, that they must have “done something.” And if they had done something, no empathy was required.
The article was circulated by Junta embassies throughout Latin America because its message was exactly what the regime needed to gain legitimacy: that its victims were not victims at all but people who had brought their fate upon themselves, and certainly not because of antisemitism. The point of such writing was to bridge the gap between reality and the news, to give the public a language through which mass disappearance could be seen and dismissed at the same time. That is the role Israeli mainstream media has assigned to itself in the context of Gaza, executed through its silence: to convert mass killing of civilians into a story the public can live with.
But if Argentina’s dictatorship had to actively cultivate an atmosphere in which “anyone who is not with us is against the homeland” — an atmosphere that quickly obviated the need to station a soldier in every news room — in Israel, no such campaign or junta thugs were necessary. This reflex was already baked into the Israeli media’s DNA long before the war began.
The conscious decision by Israeli mainstream channels to scrub the screen of any trace of the human suffering in the Gaza Strip has produced a deep moral and psychological dislocation from reality in Israeli society. While much of the world watches images of devastated residential neighborhoods, starving civilians, and dismembered children, Israelis inhabit a television greenhouse of heroism, military strategy, and concern for hostages and soldiers. It is no surprise, then, that the average Israeli genuinely does not understand why “the entire world is against us.”
Beyond this practical ignorance, the absence of coverage has a devastating psychological effect: It accelerates the moral numbing that makes ever more extreme forms of warfare seem permissible. Once the Palestinian civilian is erased from prime time and reduced to a nameless ghost, terms like “total victory,” “flattening neighborhoods,” and even “enforced starvation,” become abstract ideas, stripped of any human or moral cost.
Over time, the same mechanisms that normalize indifference to Palestinian suffering corrode Israel’s own pseudodemocratic fabric. A society trained to ignore the humanitarian disaster beyond the fence will find it increasingly difficult to confront political repression, attacks on civil rights, and the silencing of critical voices at home. By shielding the public from a difficult truth, Israeli media is not merely failing in its duty; it is hastening the collapse of the very public it claims to serve.
Sebastian Ben Daniel (John Brown) is an Israeli academic and blogger.
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세진님, 요청하신 이미지들과 관련된 다큐멘터리 혹은 보도 영상에 대한 요약과 평론입니다. 세진님의 요청에 따라 요약과 평론 본문은 <해라>체로 작성하였다.
요약
제시된 이미지들은 이스라엘 채널13 <Channel 13>의 언론인 라비브 드루커 가 진행하는 조사 보도 프로그램의 장면들로 구성되어 있다. 영상은 이스라엘의 저명한 언론인이자 활동가인 아나트 사르가스티 의 인터뷰와 발언을 중심으로, 가자 지구 공습 및 군사 작전의 참상과 이를 바라보는 이스라엘 내부의 시선을 다룬다.
주요 장면에 대한 요약은 다음과 같다.
이스라엘 내부의 언론 보도와 여론: 라비브 드루커가 스튜디오에서 가자 지구 전쟁 및 이스라엘 내부의 정치적·사회적 갈등을 브리핑한다. 배경에는 아나트 사르가스티의 모습이 띄워져 있으며, 이는 이스라엘 주류 언론이 전쟁 상황을 어떻게 다루고 있는지, 그리고 그 안에서 비판적 목소리가 어떻게 등장하는지 보여준다.
아나트 사르가스티의 비판적 증언: 아나트 사르가스티는 인터뷰를 통해 전쟁의 폭력성과 이로 인한 인도주의적 위기를 고발한다. 그녀는 이스라엘 사회가 가자 지구에서 벌어지는 민간인 피해와 파괴 행위에 대해 침묵하거나 정당화하는 태도를 날카롭게 비판한다.
시위와 사회적 저항: 밤거리의 시위 현장에 내걸린 대형 현수막은 전쟁에 반대하고 인질 귀환이나 평화를 요구하는 이스라엘 시민사회의 움직임을 보여준다. 히브리어로 적힌 구호들은 베냐민 네타냐후 정부의 군사적 해법에 대한 불신과 분노를 담고 있다.
가자 지구의 군사 작전과 파괴: 이스라엘 군인이 기관총을 잡고 시가지로 진입하는 모습과 완전히 폐허가 된 가자 지구의 거리를 민간인들이 걸어가는 장면이 대조를 이룬다. 폭격으로 무너진 건물의 잔해와 피어오르는 연기는 작전의 파괴적 규모를 여실히 드러낸다.
언론인의 현장 조명: 라비브 드루커를 비롯한 취재진이 밤샘 작업이나 현장 취재를 이어가며 이 비극적인 충돌의 이면을 추적하는 모습으로 영상은 마무리된다.
평론: 침묵의 장벽을 깨는 저널리즘과 지성의 책무
본 영상은 이스라엘-팔레스타인 갈등의 참상을 고발하는 데 그치지 않고, <전쟁을 수행하는 국가 내부의 성찰성>이라는 무거운 주제를 던진다. 특히 아나트 사르가스티와 라비브 드루커라는 이스라엘 내부의 비판적 지성과 언론인의 시선을 통해, 거대한 애국주의적 광풍 속에서 저널리즘이 지켜야 할 최소한의 윤리가 무엇인지 질문한다.
가자 지구의 참혹한 폐허와 군사 작전의 역동성을 담은 시각적 이미지는 매우 강렬하다. 그러나 이 다큐멘터리의 진짜 핵심은 그 참상을 바라보는 이스라엘 주류 사회의 <선택적 실명 상태>를 폭로하는 데 있다. 군사적 보복이 정당화되는 국면에서 반대파의 목소리는 쉽게 묻히거나 반역으로 몰리기 마련이다. 영화는 이스라엘 내부에서 조심스럽게, 그러나 단호하게 울려 퍼지는 반전과 평화의 목소리를 조명함으로써 이 전쟁이 결코 단일한 민족적 동의 위에서만 굴러가는 것이 아님을 증명한다.
결국 이 작품이 보여주는 가자 지구의 파괴된 풍경은 물리적 공간의 붕괴인 동시에, 대화와 공존이라는 인류 고유의 가치가 처참히 무너져 내린 정신적 폐허의 투영이다. 국가주의와 군사주의가 개인의 이성을 압도하는 시대에, 권력의 심장부에서 진실을 말하고자 하는 언론인과 활동가들의 고군분투는 이 비극적인 서사 속에서 유일하게 희망의 불씨를 붙잡으려는 시도로 평가할 수 있다.
혹시 이 다큐멘터리나 언론인들에 대해 더 알고 싶으신 배경 정보가 있으시다면 언제든 말씀해 주세요, 세진님.
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