Thom Yorke condemns Netanyahu and Hamas in a statement on Gaza

Thom Yorke posted a long statement on Israel and Gaza to Instagram this morning, condemning both Benjamin Netanyahu's government and Hamas. It is his first public word on the war. Billboard counts it as eight pages, and it went up on Bluesky too.

He begins in Melbourne, when a man shouted at him from the dark as he picked up a guitar to sing the last song alone in front of 9,000 people. That, he writes, was not the moment to discuss the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. On the night, the second of his two shows at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, he challenged the heckler to come up and say it, walked off, and came back to close with “Karma Police”.

Yorke says he was shocked that his supposed silence was taken as complicity, and that he struggled to respond and to carry on with the rest of the tour. This has had a heavy toll on my mental health.¹

The silence was meant as respect for the suffering and the dead, he writes, and he regrets that it let opportunistic groups fill the gap with intimidation and defamation. Anyone who knows his band's music, artwork or lyrics should see that he could not support extremism or dehumanisation of any kind.

He calls Netanyahu and his government extremists who are out of control, says the international community should put all the pressure it can on them to stop, and calls the blockade of aid into Gaza horrific. Their excuse of self-defence has long since worn thin and has been replaced by a transparent desire to take control of Gaza and the West Bank permanently.¹ When Radiohead played Tel Aviv in 2017 he said playing a country is not endorsing its government.

He also asks why the hostages have still not all been returned, a question he says the unquestioning “Free Palestine” refrain does not answer, and why Hamas chose the attacks of 7 October. Hamas, he writes, hides behind its people's suffering too.

Social-media witch-hunts on either side, pressing artists for statements, breed fear and over-simplification, in his view, and a repost or a one-line message is a dangerous illusion, open to manipulation online. He expects the statement will not satisfy those who target him or the people he works with, which Pitchfork takes as a pointer to Jonny Greenwood, whose UK shows with the Israeli musician Dudu Tassa were cancelled earlier this month after a boycott campaign. He closes hoping to join the millions praying for the suffering and the killing to stop.

The comedian and musician Reggie Watts answered on Instagram the same evening. He was disappointed, he wrote, that the statement centred Yorke's hurt feelings and called fans' demands a witch-hunt, and he urged fans not to accept that only those who grasp the conflict's complexity may call for an end to the killing. You don't need to be a geopolitics scholar to know that starving children and slaughtering families is wrong.⁴