An Exhausted Israeli Public Turns Against War in Gaza

Hindustan Times

22-05-2025

TEL AVIV—In the days following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack, Israelis were unified in the belief that the country had to fight back. More than 19 months later, many are saying it is time to stop.
Support for the war was widespread in the days after the attack, but Israelis quickly split over which of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's war aims should be given priority: freeing the 251 hostages taken that day or defeating Hamas. In January 2024, the Israeli public was nearly equally divided on the question, polls conducted by the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute found.
Not so today. Polls now show that around 70% of Israelis support an end to the war in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages. For months after the attack, weekly protests in Tel Aviv and around the country demanded Netanyahu bring them home, but most protesters hardly ever carried signs calling for an end to the fighting. Today, posters all over Tel Aviv explicitly call for an end to the war.
Repeated tours of duty for Israeli reservists have exhausted troops and their families, and commanders say it is getting harder to recruit forces for new rounds of fighting. Thousands of reservists and retired veterans have signed public letters in recent months calling for the war to stop in exchange for the hostages.
The shift is coming as Israel is under increasing pressure from allies, including the U.S., to end the fighting. This week, the U.K., France and Canada threatened consequences if Netanyahu pursued a new ground offensive in Gaza. A White House spokeswoman said President Trump wants the fighting to stop.
One sign that Israelis are increasingly uncomfortable with the war effort is a surge in support for Yair Golan, the leader of what remains of the once-powerful Israeli left. His Democrats party would be the third or fourth largest in Israel if elections were held today, some recent polls have shown.
'A sane country doesn't wage war against civilians, doesn't kill babies as a pastime, and doesn't engage in mass population displacement,' Golan said on Israeli radio on Tuesday. Such sentiments would have been unthinkable for a Jewish Israeli politician to utter at the start of the war.
The change in public opinion comes amid growing distrust of Netanyahu's management of the war. There are still hostages in Gaza, Hamas hasn't been defeated and there is no plan for what comes next. Polls consistently show that Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition would lose power if elections were held today. Many of his critics allege that he is prolonging the war to appease his far-right partners on which his coalition relies. He denies the allegations.
On Wednesday, Netanyahu said at a news conference that the war in Gaza has taken so long because of battlefield conditions. 'No other army in the world has met an urban environment like this with tens of thousands of terrorists above ground, 50 meters below ground, with a population that supports them,' he said.
Hen Mazzig, a popular pro-Israeli online advocate with over 700,000 followers across platforms who has defended the country's military campaign, called for an end to the war on the social-media platform X this week, saying Trump is right to pressure Israel to stop the fighting in exchange for the release of hostages.
'I think in the first few months we understood the need for this war or the justification,' said Mazzig, who lives in Tel Aviv. But in the past year, he said, it has 'just been very challenging to defend Israel and to defend the actions of the government.'
Rotem Sivan-Hoffmann, a radiologist and mother of three, founded a movement called 'Ima Era,' consisting of mothers of combat soldiers calling on the government to manage the war responsibly. Her eldest son is stationed at the border with Gaza and waiting for orders to enter the enclave.
'They are sending my son to die for Netanyahu's political survival and taking over Gaza,' she said. More people are joining the movement's WhatsApp groups and events, she noted.
One of the key drivers of war-weariness is the burden on reservists. Israel relies on a small pool of reservists for its fighting and they are exhausted after serving for hundreds of days in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and the occupied West Bank.
Dalit Kislev Spektor, another member of the Ima Era group, is intimately familiar with the toll on reservists. Since the start of the war, her husband and two sons have all been serving in the military. Both of her sons are currently in Gaza.
'Throughout the war, the feeling that we lost our way got stronger and stronger,' she said. 'At a certain point the feeling was that the war was becoming a political war with unclear goals and this feeling reached its peak in the recent period,' she said. She added that she isn't opposed to going back to fighting Hamas once the hostages are free.
While international opposition to the war in Gaza appears driven by the high Palestinian death toll—more than 53,000 have been killed, according to Palestinian health authorities, though their figures don't say how many are combatants—this hasn't been the major driving force in Israel. For a long time, the country was consumed by its own trauma from the Oct. 7 attack and television channels didn't air gruesome images of Palestinians killed in the fighting.
Still, humanitarian-based opposition to the war is growing among the center-left in Israel, even though it isn't mainstream, said Tamar Hermann, a pollster and senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute.
'There is an awakening. I wouldn't say large but it can be felt—for the war to stop for humanitarian reasons,' Hermann said.
On Sunday, hundreds of people turned up for a protest at the Gaza border calling to end the war, said Alon-Lee Green, founder of Standing Together, a left-wing Israeli-Arab coexistence group that has long called to end the war. While he acknowledges that he is still the minority, he sees a shift in the way Israelis are viewing the war conduct in Gaza.
Previously, when he and other activists held photos of Palestinian children killed by Israel at demonstrations, people would try to take them down or even attack them.
'Now whenever we do that, people are looking at their eyes,' he said. 'They are looking at their faces. Sometimes they give us a thumbs-up, and say, 'Well done, you're right.' '
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