NEW YORK - A majority of Americans disapprove of Israel’s military actions in the Gaza Strip, in a pronounced shift from November, according to a new poll released by Gallup on March 27.

In a survey conducted from March 1 to 20, 55 per cent of US 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 per cent in November, a month after the war began, to 36 per cent in March, while the proportion of Americans who said they had no opinion on the subject rose to 9 per cent from 4 per cent.

The findings are the latest evidence of growing American discontent with Israel over the course of 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 fell from 71 per cent in November 2023 to 64 per cent in March.

Independents’ approval dropped to 29 per cent from 47 per cent, and Democrats’ approval declined to just 18 per cent from 36 per cent.

An AP-NORC poll conducted in late January found that half of US 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 5 for Democrats.

Another recent survey from the Pew Research Centre – 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’ 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 analyse their views. NYTIMES