Social media is witnessing global campaigns to support Palestine and expose war crimes committed by the occupation in Gaza, which Israel seeks to confront with a wave of fake news and electronic brigades in order to mislead international public opinion about the war.
The Israeli aggression against Gaza has reached its sixtieth day, and with it the violent raids and fire belts carried out by the occupation in several places in the Gaza Strip continue. Today, Tuesday, the bombing focused on the city of Khan Yunis, while the occupation army called on the city’s residents to flee en masse towards Rafah or the coastal area in the south.
In conjunction with these developments on the ground, other battles are taking place in the virtual world, as the pace of international solidarity with Palestine and campaigns to expose the crimes of the occupation and discredit its narrative are increasing. This is what Israel is facing with a wave of misinformation spread by electronic committees affiliated with it, and managed by intelligence officers and officials in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Increasing Israeli disinformation
Since the outbreak of the Israeli aggression on Gaza, social media has witnessed extensive Israeli disinformation campaigns. According to the American website Politico, since the “Al-Aqsa Flood” attack, Israel has published dozens of advertisements on the Internet, including graphic videos, targeting millions of people to rally support for its war.
The website added that the Israeli government has launched a large-scale campaign on social media, and that part of its strategy is to "pay for dozens of ads containing brutal and emotional images of armed violence in Israel across platforms such as X and YouTube."
According to data obtained by Politico, during the first week of the war, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs displayed about 30 ads on the “X” platform, which achieved more than 4 million views. These ads target the accounts of residents of European countries, such as France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
On YouTube, according to the same source, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs published more than 75 paid ads, including ads that “demonized and dehumanized the Palestinians.”
In its campaign, Israel relied on a number of false and misleading information. In an investigation conducted by the Anti-Disinformation Office, affiliated with the Turkish Presidency’s Communications Department, a video clip widely circulated on social media, claiming that one of Al-Qassam’s members called for the rape of one of the detained women, was proven to be false.
The office said that the hadith attributed to the Hamas fighter in the video was added in Hebrew and English translation to the hadith, while the original Arabic text was as follows: “Leave her alone, she is a woman.”
In a previous interview with TRT Arabi, Sanad Agency’s news verification specialist, Mouloud Sayyad, said: “The ongoing war in the occupied territories has witnessed one of the most violent disinformation attacks targeting the resistance and the Palestinian people, which translates into many false news circulating in the media and communication.” The most prominent of which is the claim that there were infants who were beheaded.
Soldiers behind the keyboard
To spread this misleading campaign, Israel relies on electronic committees and pages belonging to its intelligence agencies and its Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In an interview on the Jerusalem Post website, the head of the digital department at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, David Saranga, admitted that their daily work aims to “reshape the international narrative” about the war, because “the battle today is not only on the ground in Gaza.”
The department headed by Saranga works to target social media users with misleading propaganda to mobilize support for the occupation, during which “more than 10,000 posts and tweets have been published since the beginning of the war,” in six basic languages: English, Arabic, Persian, Russian, Spanish, and Hebrew, in order to focus On regions where there is great solidarity with the Palestinian cause, such as the Arab world, Latin America, Iran, and Russia.
The Israeli official explained his country's propaganda strategy, saying: “I do not try to convince people who are against Israel, because I will not succeed. Therefore, we focus our efforts first on the people who are in the middle, who have no idea what is happening, in order to convey the Israeli narrative.” “We reach out to people who support Israel because we want to give them that message of Israel, and we want them to spread our message as well.”
In the same interview , Sapir Levy, the social media official in Arabic at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, revealed that entire committees work under her control to create content that reinforces the Israeli narrative and circulate it on a large scale.
Levy said: “Since the beginning of the war, we have been working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with dozens of posts and tweets, Our largest platform, and our largest account, is on Facebook, and it is called (Israel Speaks Arabic),We have an army of volunteers that prepares content.” "To share about what happened in Israel, we also have artists preparing cartoons."
In addition, investigations conducted by the “ICAD” platform revealed close links between electronic committees impersonating Arab identities to propaganda for Israel and officers in the Israeli intelligence services. The platform found a post dating back to 2016 announcing an Israeli academy that specializes in teaching the Arabic language and qualifying young men for intelligence work, and Sapir Levy was one of those responsible for training there.
Recent years have witnessed a significant rise in Israeli electronic committees. Last February, investigations by the British newspaper “The Guardian” and a number of international press organizations, including “Forbidden Stories,” revealed an Israeli agency run by a person nicknamed “Jorge” that interferes in elections around the world. .
However, Israel's efforts to shape the global narrative about its crimes and mislead international public opinion date back years before this date. During its aggression against the Gaza Strip in 2012, the Hebrew state allocated about $50 million to “support” bloggers and activists in the United States in order to support and strengthen its narrative.
In 2008, the New Media Unit was established , which was tasked with creating content supporting Israel and distributing it to media platforms and journalists around the world. In 2011, a budget estimated at $1.6 million was allocated to this unit, which was later increased to $91 million.
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