The conflict between Israel and Hamas is quickly becoming a world war online.
Iran, Russia and, to a lesser extent, China have used state media and the world’s major social media platforms to support Hamas and undermine Israel, while denigrating Israel’s main ally, the United States.
Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq have also joined the fight online, along with extremist groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State that have previously been at odds with Hamas.
According to government officials and independent researchers, the flood of online propaganda and disinformation is greater than anything before – a reflection of the world’s geopolitical divisions.
“It is seen by millions, hundreds of millions of people around the world,” said Rafi Mendelsohn, vice president of Cyabra, a social media intelligence company in Tel Aviv, “and it influences the war in a way that is probably the same “effective as any other tactic on the ground.” Cyabra has documented at least 40,000 bots or fake accounts online since Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza on October 7.
The content – deep, emotionally charged, politically biased and often false – has stoked anger and even violence far beyond Gaza, raising fears that it could spark a wider conflict. Although Iran has denied any involvement in the Hamas attack, it has threatened to do so, with its Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian warning of retaliation on “multiple fronts” if Israeli forces remain in Gaza.
“It’s like everyone is involved,” said Moustafa Ayad, managing director for Africa, the Middle East and Asia at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The institute, a nonprofit research organization in London, last week released detailed influence campaigns by Iran, Russia and China.
The campaigns do not appear to be coordinated, American and other government officials and experts said, but did not rule out collaboration.
While Iran, Russia and China each have different motivations for supporting Hamas over Israel, they have championed the same themes since the start of the war. In addition to providing moral support, the officials and experts said, they are also conducting overt and covert information campaigns to reinforce each other and expand the global reach of their views on multiple platforms in multiple languages.
For example, the Spanish arm of RT, the global Russian television network, recently republished a statement by the Iranian president in which he called the explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza on October 17 an Israeli war crime, despite Western intelligence agencies and independent intelligence agencies Analysts have since said that a rocket fired from Gaza was the more likely cause of the explosion.
Another Russian news agency abroad, Sputnik India, quoted a “military expert” saying without evidence that the United States supplied the bomb that destroyed the hospital. Posts like this have received tens of thousands of views.
“We are in an undeclared information war with authoritarian countries,” James P. Rubin, the head of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, said in a recent interview.
From the first hours of its attack, Hamas has pursued a comprehensive, sophisticated media strategy inspired by groups such as the Islamic State. According to Cyabra’s researchers, its employees spread graphic images through bot accounts originating in countries such as Pakistan, circumventing Hamas’ bans on Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter.
A profile on one post featured a cartoon claiming that double standards portrayed Palestinian resistance to Israel as terrorism, while Ukraine’s fight against Russia was self-defense.
Officials and experts who track disinformation and extremism have been impressed by how quickly and widely Hamas’s message has spread online. This achievement was almost certainly fueled by the emotional intensity of the Israeli-Palestinian issue and by the graphic images of violence captured virtually in real time by cameras carried by Hamas gunmen. It was also boosted by extensive networks of bots and soon after by official government and state media accounts in Iran, Russia and China – amplified by social media platforms.