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HomeRead, Watch, ListenIsrael
Israel Iran WarAnalysisIsrael

Israeli media dodges hard questions about the war against Iran

As Iranian missile strikes raise the possibility of a war of attrition, commentators are making tactical criticisms but not asking whether the government was justified in going to war.
Ben Lynfield
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Israel Faces Further Missile And Drone Attacks After Weeks Of War With Iran

Prime Minister Netanyahu speaks to media while visiting the area destroyed by an Iranian ballistic missile in Dimona on March 22. (Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty)

Published: 26 March 2026

Last updated: 26 March 2026

On Saturday evening, while watching television reports about two devastating missile strikes, it became difficult for Israelis to dismiss the thought that their country may not be “winning the war” against Iran.

In subsequent days, a wave of further missile strikes saw more than half the entire population ordered into shelters, raising the prospect in people’s minds that Iran may remain an ongoing threat in a protracted war of attrition, even after the war “ends”.

Faced with this distress, the Israeli media has been transmitting conflicting messages: on the one hand thoroughly covering the missile strikes and their impact, while on the other promoting patriotic endurance and statements of army spokesmen and commentators that Israel has the upper hand.

“The stations still see their role as holding up morale but it’s getting harder and harder with these pictures that they have to show to some extent,” Allyn Fisher-Ilan, former news editor at The Jerusalem Post and Haaretz English told The Jewish Independent.

The stations still see their role as holding up morale but it’s getting harder and harder with these pictures.

Channel Twelve, the most popular television station, showed shocking footage of a large building from the southern city of Arad whose façade had been blown off, exposing decimated apartments. “Complete devastation. Complete destruction. Why wasn’t the missile shot down?” a journalist asked.

Viewers were told that wounded were still being evacuated, including by helicopter, and rescuers were searching the rubble for survivors. Soon reporting shifted to the deputy director of Soroka Hospital who gave the tally of the wounded who had arrived there and their conditions. “A lot of injuries from fragments, all over the body,” he said.

The devastation followed only hours after a mass casualty missile attack on another southern city, Dimona. Together, the Arad and Dimona strikes and other recent barrages amount to a setback in the war. In Dimona too, the missile interception had failed. Meanwhile, in northern Israel, residents who only recently returned from evacuation from previous fighting, were facing relentless barrages of Hezbollah missiles.

Channel Twelve’s host, Yair Sherki, speaking as the pictures came out of Arad, permitted himself to put his finger on their impact: “Many people at home are frightened by this,” he said. It was a clear admission of vulnerability and unease.

Another Channel 12 commentator, former military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin, later tried to reassure viewers by conveying that Israel is bombing the daylights out of Iran.

“The pace of their firing is the same as it was or declining, 10-20 missiles a day. Most are intercepted but nothing can be hermetic. If the public behaves properly, it minimises it,” Yadlin said. “We’ve received a very severe blow. Yes, sometimes Israel gets hit. But it’s a ratio of 100 [Israeli bombs] to one [Iranian missile].”

In subsequent days, there were more missile strikes and more reasons to be distraught. Haaretz’s website publishes a daily tally along with pictures including the aftermath of strikes. On Tuesday, it tallied 39 alerts, with 6.2 million people—more than half the country’s population—ordered into shelters. It also noted that Iran had fired a cluster munition whose warhead divides into deadly projectiles spread over a wide radius.

Threat of protracted war of attrition

All of this is scary enough. But it is perhaps even more disquieting to think of the larger picture: that the threat Iran poses may remain intact after the war ends and that the future may be a protracted war of attrition where running to shelters becomes an ongoing routine.

The mainstream media generally is not discussing this, nor is it tackling the painful question: was the government justified in going to war?

“There is tactical criticism but not strategic criticism,” says Oren Persico, senior staffer at Israel’s leading media watchdog, The Seventh Eye. He explained that the television stations, with the exception of the stridently pro-Netanyahu Channel Fourteen, will criticise the government for not providing adequate protection from missile attacks and report on the difficulties of working and studying in wartime “But the decision to attack Iran is not an issue,” he says.

One topic not covered at all by the networks is the toll on Lebanese civilians of Israel’s burgeoning invasion of Lebanon. Defence Minister Israel Katz said this week that Israeli troops will control “a large swathe of southern Lebanon,” with the stated aim of crippling Hezbollah and reducing its ability to fire missiles across the border.

Over a thousand Lebanese have been killed and more than a million displaced, with Gaza-like rows of tents housing the evacuees shown on foreign networks.  Still, two Channel 13 journalists, Raviv Drucker and Alon Ben-David, are calling for a diplomatic solution instead of broadening the incursion in Lebanon, where the country’s president and prime minister oppose Hezbollah.

Ratings drive patriotic content

Ratings are playing an important role in the news coverage, Persico says. “They prefer not to anger the viewers and not to broadcast anti-patriotic content because in war time the public is more patriotic than some of the journalists.”

Still, Haaretz’s Uri Misgav penned an article that was an exception to this tendency, arguing that there should be a state commission of inquiry about the war, including the decision-making preceding it. Questions that need to be answered, he wrote, include: “Were decision-makers presented with an alternative concept according to which it is possible to face the present Iranian threat through other means?”

Other criticism concerns how the war is being prosecuted. Michael Milshtein, who heads the Palestinian studies forum at the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, wrote on the Ynet website: “There is weakness in understanding the enemy.

“Too many resources are placed in efforts to eliminate and collapse the regime instead of focusing on deepening the blow to nuclear installations, missiles and security installations,” he wrote.

Many more people are getting worried about whether they can go on living a normal life. The media thinks it would create panic to discuss that fear.

But in much of the media, the time-honoured approach of unquestioningly backing the army still resonates despite the disaster of October 7, as if to combat the growing sense that Iran is proving more capable than expected.

In what seemed to be an effort to boost morale, veteran military analyst Ron Ben-Ishai argued, in Yedioth Ahronoth the day before the Arad and Dimona calamities, that everything is going well and that what is needed is more time and patience. “The air force doesn’t miss any opportunity to strike targets whose destruction shapes consciousness and indicates the regime is not able to function. Sources in Israel say there are already results: chaos and confusion in the political leadership and also desertions among the Basij [internal security] forces.” Ben-Ishai wrote.

Still, in most broadcast media, even if it is not stated explicitly, a dispiriting subtext has developed from the intensive coverage of missile strikes, which in the case of Arad, included having the anchors broadcast from the scene the next day.

“The subtext was ‘this is getting too serious folks’, even though the journalists feel constrained about saying that flatly,” Allyn Fisher-Ilan said.

“Many more people are getting worried: ‘are we going to be able to go on living a normal life here’,” she adds. “The media thinks it would create more panic to discuss that fear.”

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About the author

Ben Lynfield

Ben Lynfield

Ben Lynfield covered Israeli and Palestinian politics for The Independent and served as Middle Eastern affairs correspondent at The Jerusalem Post. He writes for publications in the region and has contributed to the Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy and the New Statesman.

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Comments1

  • Avatar of Mark Ian

    Mark Ian27 March at 07:05 am

    Iran found paths to accelerate its ballistic missile arsenal with pay loads of 750kg to 1500 kg of destruction into the thousands and buried deep in missile cities. Plans to recover enriched uranium buried in the Natanz and Fordow nuclear plants and elsewhere were being prepared for recovery . The targeting of IRGC leaders and Ali Khamenei was in reaction to the cruel murders of thousands many estimate tens of thousands protestors . Israel was compelled to attack and the casualties during the remaining ballistic barrage while tragic would be catastrophic if thousands of ballistic missiles would be launched from Iran .