The Evolution of New York Times Opinion on Gaza: From Unconditional Support to Bounded Criticism

Much has been written about the coverage of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in legacy western media, and most of it points to a clear bias towards Israel. Scholars and journalists have highlighted language bias in major US newspapers, the failure to maintain accuracy and provide context, and internal newsroom pressures at institutions like the BBC and CNN designed to curtail critical reporting on Israel. However, less attention has been dedicated to the evolution of this coverage as the war on Gaza progressed. Examining this evolution allows us to identify some of the forces that appear to shape mainstream media discourse on Palestine and Israel, and to consider whether the changes observed during the height of the war are likely to endure. To trace whether and how elite American media discourse evolved alongside the U.S. public discourse around support for Israel, I conducted a qualitative content analysis of The New York Times Opinion section across two years of intense hostilities. The core sample comprised 40 articles (dataset available here) distributed evenly across five time periods—eight articles every six months, starting October 7, 2023, and concluding October 14, 2025. I focus on opinion pieces rather than news coverage because opinion writers are less constrained by journalistic conventions of objectivity and therefore provide a clearer window into shifts in elite discourse. The analysis reveals that while sympathy for Palestinians and criticism of Israel’s conduct grew over time, opinion articles in the New York Times remained markedly late in acknowledging the scale of devastation in Gaza. Palestinian agency remained largely absent, and while discourse evolved to allow some critique of the Israeli political system and society, influential voices within the New York Times Opinion section remained faithful to an idealized vision of Israel. Moreover, the analysis considers several factors that may help explain this change — limited and slow as it was — allowing us to reflect on which aspects of the shift may prove lasting and which may be merely transitory. October 2023: Total Absence of Palestinian Context Articles published in the immediate aftermath of the 7 October attacks were dominated by shock. When an interpretation of the attack was offered, it was always first and foremost that Hamas is a terrorist organization intent on the destruction of Israel. The New York Times Editorial Board described the attack as occurring “without warning or any immediate provocation” and noted “how vulnerable Israel has always been — and continues to be, at a time of rising global antisemitism”. Conspicuously absent were discussions of Palestinian grievances that formed part of the broader context in which the attack occurred. The occupation, the blockade of Gaza, Palestinian prisoners, and settler violence were virtually absent from the sample. Most writers accepted that an Israeli military response was inevitable. Differences emerged primarily over strategy. Bret Stephens denounced calls for an immediate ceasefire, arguing that they would “shield the killers from consequences and deny their victims the right to effective self-defense”. More cautious voices, such as David Harden, warned against a ground invasion, but mainly because it would benefit Hamas and prove costly for Israel. Only Nicholas Kristof made a sustained moral argument concerning the Palestinian civilian casualties that would likely result from a large-scale Israeli assault. April 2024: Frustration with Netanyahu, but Palestinian Suffering Sidelined By April 2024 criticism of the Israeli government is beginning to emerge as a theme in NYTimes opinion articles, but in most cases this criticism is not framed in terms of what it is doing to the Palestinians. Instead, the government is criticized for failing to bring back the Israeli captives, showing poor leadership, following a futile military strategy and for its handling of relations with the US. The emergence of criticism toward Benjamin Netanyahu’s government should be understood in its political context. By April 2024, opposition to the Israeli prime minister was growing not only among segments of the Israeli public but also within the Biden administration, which was facing increasing domestic pressure. As Bret Stephens put it, “Wishing Netanyahu gone is the most mainstream position possible.” Yet most articles fail to reflect the scale of global outrage over the war. By this point, the International Court of Justice had found a plausible case of genocide, the UN was warning of imminent famine in northern Gaza, and thousands of protests had been taking place globally. Soon they were to reach a crescendo in the United States with the wave of encampments on US campuses. More than 33,000 Palestinians had already been killed and much of Gaza had been destroyed, but in most of the articles, Palestinian suffering is mentioned only in passing. Stephens lamented the displacement of Israelis in the north while omitting Palestinian casualties altogether. David French referred to Gaza’s civilian toll as “a human tragedy,” yet employed far more direct language in reference to Israeli deaths, describing “Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians.” Benny Morris argued that Israel must go ahead with the proposed invasion of Rafah, even as he professed concern for the civilian casualties that will result from it. However, this batch of articles does include two pieces that made forceful arguments about Israel’s moral and legal failures. Spencer Ackerman argued that “International law is unambiguously against what Israel is doing in Gaza” and highlighted the International Court of Justice’s finding that genocide allegations were plausible. David Wallace-Wells, writing about the Israeli military’s use of artificial intelligence, argued that the devastation in Gaza should not be understood as an automated process but as the product of human choices: “a man behind a curtain, fiddling the switches.” October 2024: Taking Stock on the First Anniversary Articles marking the first anniversary of October 7 included a moving personal account from Yaffa Adar, an 86-year old resident of Kibbutz Nir Oz, who was abducted by Hamas and remained in captivity for 49 days. At the same time, it included another personal account from Mohammed Aghaalkurdi, a Palestinian humanitarian worker displaced in Khan Younis. He argued that Israel’s recent consent to a polio vaccination campaign in Gaza should not be allowed to whitewash its conduct in the war. A noticeable shift had begun to emerge. After a year of continuous bombardment and mass death in Gaza, some articles paid greater attention to Palestinian suffering and offered more forceful criticism of Israel. Indeed, for the first time in the sample, criticism extended beyond the Israeli government to broader features of Israeli society. Peter Beinart described Israel’s political system as one “explicitly based on religion and ethnicity.” Mairav Zonszein lamented widespread Israeli indifference to Palestinian suffering, writing that “[t]here is almost no outrage over the indiscriminate destruction of Gaza and the killing of over 40,000 people.” These developments should not be overstated. Strongly pro-Israel perspectives remained present in the sample. Bret Stephens argued that the “world had better hope that Israel wins its wars against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and their masters in Tehran”. Thomas Friedman, while disapproving of the Israeli government’s excessive use of force, reaffirmed his commitment to Zionism, portraying Israel as a unique democratic haven. Spring 2025: Discontent with Israel Reaches Its Peak Eighteen months into the war, criticism of Israel reached its highest level in the sample, with seven of the eight articles faulting either Israel, Netanyahu, or both. By this stage, Israel had ended a six-week ceasefire, blocked aid deliveries, and overseen a death toll exceeding 50,000 Palestinians. Much of the criticism focused on the humanitarian catastrophe and the starvation of Palestinians. Sean Carroll, argued that “Israel is now openly exploiting aid as a tool of war”. The trend toward broader critiques of Israeli policy beyond the war in Gaza also continued. Nicholas Kristof highlighted the long-standing oppression of Palestinian Christians in the West Bank, while Mohsen Mahdawi described growing up under what he called “Israel’s apartheid system,” recounting the deaths of family members and friends at the hands of Israeli forces. Yet even amid stronger criticism, some writers continued to distinguish between opposition to Netanyahu and opposition to Israel itself. Thomas Friedman sharply criticized the prime minister while continuing to assert his own belief in Israel’s “core identity — that of a proudly proclaimed rule-of-law democracy in a region of strongmen”. Another important factor shaping discourse was Donald Trump’s return to power. Six of the eight articles connected criticism of Israel to concerns about Trump. Mahdawi, who was detained by ICE during his U.S. citizenship process drew parallels between his suppression in Trump’s America and his family’s suppression in Israel. Friedman argued that Trump and Netanyahu shared a similar political trajectory: “Each is a wannabe autocrat.” He also criticized both governments’ “weaponization of antisemitism as a way to silence or delegitimize critics”. This theme appears for the first time in the sample as the Trump administration intensified its attacks on universities in the name of combating antisemitism. Peter Beinart railed against the suppression of pro-Palestinian Jewish voices on campus, and Michelle Goldberg denounced “the way Israel’s defenders conflate all but the mildest criticism of Israel with antisemitism”. October 2025: Who Won? What Next? The final sample, published after the ceasefire agreement, was dominated by cautious celebration. Writers generally welcomed the end of hostilities while warning that major obstacles remained, including Hamas’s future, Israeli withdrawal, and governance arrangements for Gaza. Some proposed solutions continued to deny full Palestinian agency. Friedman, for example, envisioned a new mandate over Palestine “that combines Palestinian, Arab and international stewardship over Gaza’s future. If it works, the arrangement might one day be extended to the West Bank.” There was no consensus regarding who had “won”. Bret Stephens argued that “Israelis rallied and won,” praising Israel’s refusal to “buckle to unceasing international pressure”. Other writers contended that Netanyahu had squandered military gains by repeatedly rejecting political solutions. Israeli author Shira Efron argued that the ceasefire represented the collapse of the government’s central promise. “This ‘victory’ is actually a defeat — a necessary and blessed defeat,” she wrote, because the agreement ultimately contradicted the goal of “total victory” that the prime minister had promised for two years. The Authors: Who sets the tone? In addition to the qualitative analysis of the core sample, a quantitative review was conducted of the authors of 816 articles published over the full two years in the Opinion Section of the New York Times (dataset available here). . The most prolific contributors to these articles are NYTimes columnists Thomas Friedman (75 articles), followed by Nicholas Kristof (66 articles) and Bret Stephens (64 articles). While Friedman is a critic of Netanyahu’s far-right government and its conduct of the war, he is a strong supporter of liberal Zionism. Kristof is critical of both Hamas and Likud and is seen as being sympathetic to Palestinian grievances while still committed to Israel’s legitimacy. Stephens, a former editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post and defender of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, describes himself as “a stalwart defender” of Israel. By virtue of the volume of their contributions alone, these writers played a significant role in shaping discourse in the New York Times opinion section. Despite their differences, it is a discourse that allows for criticism of Netanyahu’s policies but is generally committed to Israel. The corpus also includes 339 contributions from guest authors, of which 45 are contributions from writers who are explicitly identified as Israelis or Israel-based (excluding one author who is identified as a Palestinian citizen of Israel), and 19 contributions from writers who are identified as Palestinians or based in Gaza or the West Bank or East Jerusalem. While nationality is not a reliable indicator of political position, the disparity suggests that Israeli perspectives were afforded substantially greater visibility than Palestinian ones. Conclusion: What Drives the Change in Discourse? While the analysis shows that the tone of New York Times Opinion articles shifted over time to become, within limits, more sympathetic to Palestinians and more critical of Israel, an important question remains: what drove this change, and should we expect it to last? One possible factor is the degree of domestic support enjoyed by the Israeli leadership. The growing criticism of Netanyahu and his government in the spring of 2024 articles coincided with a decline in his popularity inside Israel, suggesting that the domestic legitimacy of an Israeli government may influence how readily American opinion writers criticize it. Relations between the Israeli and American governments also appear to affect the tone of coverage. Tensions between Netanyahu and the Biden administration coincided with stronger criticism of the Israeli government in the same period. This is perhaps unsurprising given the New York Times’ broadly liberal political orientation and its generally more sympathetic stance toward the Biden administration. Conversely, its critical stance toward Donald Trump appears to have carried over into its coverage of Netanyahu in the spring of 2025, as the two leaders grew increasingly politically aligned. Furthermore, the tactics used by Israel may have also contributed to the shift in discourse. The harshest criticism of Israel was around its deliberate use of starvation as a weapon, particularly visible after March 2025 when it fully blocked all humanitarian aid deliveries to Gaza. While Israel-sympathetic writers could attempt to explain away the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians in military strikes as unfortunate but necessary collateral damage, the starving of Gaza’s population may have been too cruel to stomach. Underlying all these factors, however, was the sheer scale of destruction of Palestinian life and property. It is difficult to imagine that the discourse of unconditional support for Israel that prevailed in the immediate aftermath of October 7 could have remained unchanged as the subsequent genocide unfolded. While the previous factors are connected to specific developments over the course of the two years of war, one further factor that may prove more enduring is the sharp decline in support for Israel among the American public. The above analysis does not examine the correlation between New York Times discourse and opinion polls, however, one can make the general observation that, although the Times’ discourse lagged behind and remained far more restrained than many voices critical of Israel in the United States, its general trajectory evolved in the same direction: toward rising sympathy for Palestinians and declining sympathy for Israel. Opinion polls indicate that this shift in public sentiment has persisted, and in some cases accelerated, beyond the period under study (2023–2025). This suggests that at least some of the changes in elite media discourse documented here may prove more lasting than transitory. Additional contribution to research by Kawthar Ali, Marta M. Asencio, Hugo Bajas, Benjamin Fultz, Omnya Khalil and Alia Sabry