Framing Palestinians’ displacement in Gaza after October 7: A multi- layered quantitative content analysis of Swiss media

On October 13, 2023, the Israeli army ordered the mass evacuation of Palestinians living in the north of Gaza. Over the next two years, about 90% of the Strip’s population would be displaced. This transformed civilian movements in Gaza into a central object of interpretation. Whether the Gazans’ movement was described as an evacuation, displacement, forced displacement, or a measure of humanitarian protection was not merely a semantic issue. Given that the media shape understanding of current events, this analysis examines how displacement in Gaza was framed across 6 Swiss media outlets, how that framing varied between October 7, 2023, and October 10, 2025, and between French- and German-language outlets. It does so by identifying both measurable framing patterns across the Swiss corpus and more contextual uses of legal references, historical anchoring, and displacement-related labels via a multi-layered quantitative content analysis of framing displacement. The findings reveal that the Swiss media rarely framed the displacement of Palestinians in Gaza as a legally structured process of forced displacement or as part of a longer trajectory of dispossession. Instead, displacement was mainly framed as a humanitarian and coercive condition of wartime. Furthermore, while variation over time existed, they were thematic rather than legal. Moreover, differences between the Swiss French- and German-language media outlets in their framing of Palestinians’ displacement in Gaza were identified, but they were uneven, thus not amounting to a simple Röstigraben. In sum, the results suggest that the Swiss media framing of displacement in Gaza was more diagnostic than prescriptive. In other words, it was more humanitarian-driven than about treating it as a situation requiring legal and political remedies.