A majority of Americans disapprove of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, in a pronounced shift from November, according to a new poll released by Gallup on Wednesday.
In a survey conducted from March 1-20, 55 percent of U.S. adults said they disapproved of Israel’s military actions — a jump of 10 percentage points from four months earlier, Gallup found.
Americans’ approval of Israel’s conduct in the war dropped by an even starker margin, from 50 percent in November, a month after the war began, to 36 percent in March, while the proportion of Americans who said they had no opinion on the subject rose slightly to 9 percent from 4 percent.
The findings are the latest evidence of growing American discontent with Israel over the course of the five months in which it has killed more than 32,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including nearly 14,000 children, according to local health officials and the United Nations. Israeli officials say roughly 1,200 people were killed in Israel during the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7.
The Gallup poll found that American approval of Israel’s military actions dropped across the political spectrum: While a majority of Republicans still said they approved, that figure dropped from 71 percent in November to 64 percent in March. Independents’ approval dropped to 29 percent from 47 percent, and Democrats’ approval dropped to just 18 percent from 36 percent.
An AP-NORC poll conducted in late January found that half of U.S. adults felt Israel’s military response in Gaza had “gone too far,” up from four in 10 in November. That poll also showed a rise in public disapproval across political parties, by some 15 percentage points for Republicans, 13 for independents and five for Democrats.
Another recent survey from the Pew Research Center — which, like Gallup and AP-NORC, is a well-regarded leader in the polling industry — found notable schisms in public opinion along generational and religious lines. Younger adults and Muslim Americans were significantly more likely than older adults and Jewish Americans to say that the way Israel was carrying out its response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack was unacceptable, according to the poll conducted from mid-to-late February.
It oversampled Muslim and Jewish Americans, weighted to reflect their respective proportion of the overall population, to more reliably and separately analyze their views.
