Governments often take unpopular measures. To minimize the political cost of such measures policy makers may strategically time them to coincide with other newsworthy events, which distract the media and the public. We test this hypothesis using data on the recurrent Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Combining daily data on attacks on both sides of the conflict with data on the content of evening news for top U.S. TV networks, we show that Israeli attacks are more likely to be carried out when the U.S. news are expected to be dominated by important (non-Israel-related) events on the following day. In contrast, we find no evidence of strategic timing for Palestinian attacks. The timing of Israeli attacks that we document is suggestive of the intention to minimize next-day news coverage which, as confirmed by comprehensive video content analysis, is especially charged with negative emotional content. We also find that: i) strategic timing of Israeli attacks is less relevant in period of more intense fighting, when the need to quickly retaliate reduces Israel's capacity to time operations strategically; ii) strategic timing is present only for the Israeli attacks that bear risk of civilians being affected; and iii) Israeli attacks are timed to newsworthy events that are predictable.