Short answer: No. Amira Hass is an Israeli Jewish journalist for Haaretz who has spent nearly three decades living among Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and she is one of the most consistent Israeli critics of Israeli government policy in the occupied territories. She describes the Israeli system there as a form of "apartheid," has been sued and twice arrested by Israeli authorities over her reporting, and frames her work as opposition to occupation rather than support for the state's policies. She is not a boycott absolutist, though: in a 2018 interview she cautioned Palestinian activists against turning BDS into "a religion." As of August 2026, that record has not changed.
What Amira Hass has actually said and done
Amira Hass was born June 28, 1956 in Jerusalem to Holocaust-survivor parents, a Sephardic Jewish mother from Sarajevo who survived Bergen-Belsen and a Romanian-born Ashkenazi Jewish father, both of whom were Israeli Communist Party activists. She is Jewish and Israeli by birth, according to her biographical profile.
In 1993, after reporting from the West Bank and Gaza since 1991, she became the first Israeli journalist to live permanently in the Palestinian territories, settling in Gaza. She relocated to Ramallah in the West Bank in 1997. She still lives there and reports as the paper's Occupied Territories correspondent, per the same Wikipedia profile.
In 2001, a Jerusalem court ruled that Hass had defamed Hebron settlers in her coverage and ordered her to pay 250,000 shekels in damages, a rare formal legal finding against her reporting, documented by Reporters Without Borders and the Wikipedia court record.
By 2005, in a recorded interview, she described Israeli control of the Palestinian population as "an apartheid-like system" arising when two peoples share the same territory but one benefits at the other's expense. She has repeated and expanded that framing in Haaretz columns since, including a 2021 Haaretz piece welcoming the term's growing use.
Between 2008 and 2009, Israeli police arrested her twice for entering the Gaza Strip without the Israeli-issued permit required at the time, according to Reporters Without Borders.
In a 2018 interview, discussing the BDS boycott movement with the Israeli-Palestinian outlet +972 Magazine, Hass said not all Palestinians support BDS and cautioned activists "don't make a religion of it," a nuanced position rather than a blanket endorsement of boycotts.
Days after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, she told Democracy Now! she was "appalled by what happened on Saturday, October the 7th," while also saying "history did not begin with October 7" and criticizing the Israeli government's Gaza response as an extension of what she called an extreme, messianic, settler-right political program.
Most recently, after the October 2025 Gaza ceasefire took hold, she told Democracy Now! that fear the war could resume persisted, described conditions for released Palestinian detainees as dire, and characterized West Bank settler attacks during the olive harvest as state-backed rather than random, saying, "These are emissaries of the state."
Context: an Israeli journalist who reports from inside the occupation
Hass's career centers on documenting Israeli military and administrative practices toward Palestinians from inside Gaza and the West Bank, one of very few Israeli journalists to have lived among the population she covers rather than reporting from Israel proper. That positioning has put her at odds with the Israeli government and with mainstream pro-Israel opinion for most of her career, and it has come with real consequences: the 2001 defamation judgment tied to her Hebron settler coverage and the 2008-2009 arrests for entering Gaza without a permit. She identifies as a leftist who favors a bi-national resolution to the conflict rather than current Israeli government policy on settlements or military operations. On the boycott question specifically, she is not a simple BDS advocate, having pushed back in 2018 on treating boycott activism as dogma. There is no public record of her expressing support for Israeli government policy, participating in pro-Israel advocacy, or renouncing her critical stance. Equally, there is no record of her calling for Israel's destruction or endorsing violence against Israelis, and she personally condemned the October 7 attack while placing it in the longer historical context she believes Israeli policy created.
The bottom line
Amira Hass does not support Israeli government policy toward the Palestinians and has spent more than 30 years as one of Israeli journalism's most persistent internal critics of the occupation, using the word "apartheid" to describe it. She is Jewish and Israeli by birth and family history, the child of two Holocaust survivors, and she personally condemned the October 7, 2023 attack. But her public record is one of sustained opposition to Israeli occupation policy, not support for Israel's actions in the territories.
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Last updated August 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.
