New poll reveals dramatic shift in Americans’ Israel-Gaza views
By Associated Press, February 27, 2026American sympathies in the Middle East have shifted dramatically toward the Palestinians, according to new Gallup polling, after decades of overwhelming support for the Israelis.
That shift accelerated during the war in Gaza. Three years ago, 54 per cent of Americans sympathised more with the Israelis, compared to 31 per cent for the Palestinians.
Now, their support is about evenly balanced, with 41 per cent saying their sympathies lie more with the Palestinians, and only 36 per cent saying the same about the Israelis.
The numbers reflect how support for Israel has become deeply contentious in the U.S., with profound implications for American politics and foreign policy.
The changing sentiment has been largely driven by Democrats, who are now much more likely to sympathise with Palestinians. U.S. assistance to Israel has been a major dividing line in the party’s primaries this year.
Gallup’s data indicates that the shift was already happening before Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, and then increased during Israel’s subsequent military operations in Gaza. The polling has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, meaning sentiment toward Israelis and Palestinians is roughly even.
“It’s the first time they have reached parity, which is really quite striking,” said Benedict Vigers, a senior global news writer at Gallup.
“In not many years, that very significant gap in public opinion has now completely closed.”
Democrats and independents
About two-thirds of Democrats now say their concerns lie more with the Palestinians, while only about 2 in 10 sympathise more with the Israelis. As recently as 2016, the picture looked very different: About half of Democrats sympathised more with the Israelis and only about one-quarter sympathised with the Palestinians.
The shift began even before the Israel-Hamas war turned the issue into a flash point within the Democratic Party. Palestinian militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the initial attack and took another 251 hostage, but the Israeli response has been widely seen as disproportionate, with Gaza health officials reporting more than 72,000 Palestinians killed, nearly half of them women and children, and wide swaths of the territory reduced to rubble. Many progressive politicians and activists now describe Israel’s actions in the war as genocide, a charge Israel vehemently denies.
Democrats have expressed greater sympathy for the Palestinians than the Israelis since 2023, in a Gallup poll that was conducted before the Oct. 7 attacks, but Gallup’s surveys show their support in the conflict has been tilting toward the Palestinians and away from the Israelis since around 2017.