THREE years ago, Israel had most of the world’s sympathy. On Oct 7, 2023, Hamas-led fighters killed around 1,200 people in Israel and took more than 250 hostages. Israel experienced a kind of grief that Palestinians live with every day. But grief is not a blank cheque. Three years on, the story Israel told the world about itself that day no longer commands automatic authority. Oct 7 happened. But the world has spent three years watching what came after. Gaza’s health ministry now counts at least 74,000 Palestinians killed. More than 1,100 have died since a ceasefire took effect last October. Israeli forces still control over half the territory.
In 2024, I wrote here about the Western media’s role in protecting Israel’s narrative — the different standards applied to Israeli and Palestinian victims, the lavish attention paid to Israeli suffering, the reduction of Palestinian deaths to statistics. Much of that criticism was dismissed as partisan. But what happens when audiences stop waiting for the media to tell them what they are seeing?
Palestinians in Gaza have spent three years documenting their own destruction on their phones. Palestinian journalists have kept reporting through the same bombardment, hunger and displacement they cover. They have paid for it with their lives. The Committee to Protect Journalists says Israeli forces have killed 191 Palestinian journalists and media workers in Gaza. Foreign reporters, meanwhile, have been kept out. The result is an inversion of the old media hierarchy.
For decades, Palestinians were spoken about rather than listened to. Their suffering was filtered through Israeli statements, Western correspondents and government briefings. Today, despite censorship and an enormous imbalance of power, they speak directly to the world. And the world is listening.
What is Israel afraid the world will see?
This matters because Israel’s most powerful argument after Oct 7 was not simply that it had been attacked. It was that everything it did next had to be viewed through the lens of victimhood. Hamas was condemned for murdering civilians and taking hostages. ‘Do you condemn Hamas?’ became the entry ticket to any Western conversation about Palestinian suffering. Condemnation was the toll everyone had to pay before they were allowed to mention Gaza. How often were Israeli officials asked to condemn anything before they spoke?
Three years on, that formula has collapsed. You can condemn the killing of Israeli civilians and ask why Palestinian children have been killed in such numbers. You can oppose Hamas and oppose the occupation. These positions were never contradictory. Israel needed them to seem so. Its reputation is no longer being challenged only by activists, Arabs or Muslims. A 2026 Pew Research Centre survey across 36 countries found a median 67 per cent of respondents viewed Israel unfavourably, against 25pc who viewed it favourably. In the US, Israel’s most important ally, 60pc now hold an unfavourable view, up from 53pc a year ago. This is not the work of a marginal activist class.
In 2024, I also wrote that younger audiences were abandoning legacy media for social media, podcasts and YouTube because they no longer trusted it to tell the story of Gaza honestly. That alternative ecosystem has only grown. The irony is that Israel’s attempts to control the story have destroyed its credibility. When foreign journalists cannot enter Gaza, when the journalists already there keep dying, and when Palestinians become the only witnesses to their own destruction, the absence of independent access becomes the story. What is Israel afraid the world will see? Israel can insist the world is being fed misinformation. It can call its critics antisemitic. It can say Hamas is responsible for civilian deaths because it hides among civilians. But repetition is not proof.
That is the difference between Oct 7, 2023, and Oct 7, 2026. Three years ago, Israel’s trauma was the story. Today, the question is what Israel did with the world’s sympathy. The answer is being judged not by Israeli officials or their allies, but by audiences who have watched Gaza destroyed in real time. Israel still has enormous military power, diplomatic protection and powerful friends. But it has lost something no press conference or invocation of Oct 7 can restore: the assumption that its version of events will be believed.
For Palestinians, this is not victory. Their homes are not rebuilt because opinion has shifted. Their dead do not return because the media is finally paying attention. Recognition does not end an occupation. Families still shelter in tents among the ruins. Israeli strikes continue, ceasefire or not. Sympathy has never stopped a bomb. But the story is no longer Israel’s alone to tell. Three years after Oct 7, that is the real story.
The writer is a journalist and conducts writing workshops in Karachi.
X: @LedeingLady
Published in Dawn, October 4th, 2026
