– Yahav Zohar – September 15th, 2025 – 
A tour group visits the Gaza border area with Yahav.

– Last Thursday, out by the fence of the Gaza Strip, we stood to the side of road 232 and watched plumes of smoke go up between the towerblocks of Gaza city, 3 or 4 miles away.  Dull thuds in the distance, columns of dust rising from the parched, ruined land. Afterwards we stopped at Re’im campground, site of the  Nova festival massacre. People come to pay their respects. Photos and stories of all those killed and kidnapped, young people who  had great lives to look forward to. Now there are new and bigger signs, banner size, with a code to scan to take you to a website with more texts and images.

Overwhelming. Imagine this, a posterboard with name and story standing in a field, one for every person killed in this war. How many fields like this will we fill after we finish clearing the rubble on the other side of the fence? We had a lunch in a little sandwich place in Sderot, where new apartment blocks seem to be constantly going up. 

Not bombs tearing up families in tent camps, not man made famine and men killed lining up for food, still, there it was, the place that must not be named. 

Friday night around 4 am we were woken up by sirens warning of a Houthi missile shot in the general direction of Tel Aviv. Afterward, sleepless, I scrolled through  Ynet, the big Israeli news site. The first bulletins were about the missile being fired, alarms sounding and then the missile shot down. The fourth was news from the US: a list the University of California gave the US government, 160 students and faculty who have possible ties to antisemitic activities. 

(Salah Hussein Al-Houdalieh)

Israel was being attacked by Yemeni extremists and American antisemites. Was there anything in this vast website about the ongoing destruction of Gaza and its people?

Scrolling down, past America’s Smarter, Deadlier Bomb of the Future: Approved by UN With Huge Majority; The Irreversible Track to a Palestinian state. The report mentioned that Israel’s ambassador to the UN said that the vote favoured Hamas terrorists. But here too, no mention of Israeli attacks, no bombing, no starvation, no mention of Gaza at all. 

Further down an interview with  an Israeli reality TV star turned movie star  who says he’s a messiah, that the Third Temple would soon be built in Jerusalem, and all the world would come to Israel and make it the world capital, that the Jewish people had been chosen by God. it was a long piece but as far as I got, nothing about Gaza.

Further down, a few screenfuls of headlines later I came across the first direct mention of Gaza: What We Don’t Understand About the Power of Hamas in Gaza, a piece by a military analyst remarking on  how  surprisingly strong, adept, and resilient Hamas still is, controlling fragmented territory suppressing Palestinian challengers and launching successful attacks on the Israeli army. This was clearly Gaza, but still no Israeli attacks. Keep scrolling.

Another way down, many headlines with not a mention of Gaza so we settle for Palestine.  One Week After Attack on the Elbit Building in Germany, Palestine Action Suspects Arrested. 5 suspects in their 20s from Ireland, the UK, Spain and Germany, were arrested in connection to the action where paint was thrown, graffiti painted, windows broken and damage done in the Israeli arms producer’s plant in Ulm, Southern Germany. Investigation by the German center for security and counter terrorism suggest those arrested were members of a radical crime-terror group with branches throughout Europe, including ‘Palestine Action’, outlawed in the UK  following its members entering an airforce base and damaging fighter jets in protest, they say, of UK assistance to Israel in the Gaza war.

Not bombs tearing up families in tent camps, not man made famine and men killed lining up for food, still, there it was, the place that must not be named.  

The last word in the report is  given to the Israeli ambassador to Germany, who called those arrested ‘Hamas supporters’: ‘This is an act of terror. They must be identified and severely punished, antisemitism and terror should have no place in Germany.’

With the sun nearly up, I gave up the search and abandoned Ynet. What had  started out of the dark blue black with a Yemeni missile attack, led at first light to antisemitism and terror in Germany.

Gaza, if it exists at all,  is only a place where our hostages are cruelly held while our heroes fight Hamas warriors jumping out of tunnels in an endless wack-a-mole. In your media perhaps  there are war crimes, massacres, sometimes even genocide, here  we are hearing about the terror/ crime of graffiti in an arms factory.

I’d taken screenshots of this scrolling search but otherwise, had little recollection of all this the next morning. Why was I reminded on Saturday, at a family celebration on the bustling  Tel Aviv beach? It helped that you  texted from the UK to ask: How is anyone is Israel not a conscientious objector yet? It’s monday and I haven’t answered. I love you and I have no words. 

I guess I thought part of the answer might be that Israeli news shows so little of what is happening in Gaza, and so much broadcasts that Israel is under attack, whether by Yemen, US liberals, the UN, Hamas, or even European crime-terror groups. 

It’s far from the whole answer which I do not have. people are on Instagram, they’re live broadcasting out of Gaza. You can see bombing, you can see starvation, you can see people shrieking, holding the charred remains of their children. But why would we chose to see that?

Yahav Zohar is a Senior Partner and tour guide with the Green Olive Collective.