Comment on this storyComment
A WhatsApp voice note purportedly spreading insider information reverberated in hundreds of group chats in Israel early Monday. The Israeli army was planning another “battle like we have never seen before,” the anonymous woman said in Hebrew, warning that people should prepare to lose access to food, water and internet for a week.
Across the country, Israelis ran to banks and grocery stores in anticipation of another attack. But the message, the army clarified on X hours later, turned out to be a fake.
A week into the war between Israel and Gaza, social media is spreading a fog of war that surpasses previous clashes in the region – and is shaping the way panicked citizens and the world view the conflict.
Social media has long played a crucial role in the fighting in the region. During the 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in 2021, massacres in Gaza mobilized the public to the Palestinian cause. Researchers say increased internet access and the proliferation of smartphones enabled a turning point, revealing how technology platforms could show the horror and human toll of such events.
But now a heated, months-long battle over Israel’s democratic future has led to conspiracies and false information spreading within its borders. Tech platforms, weakened by waves of layoffs, have pulled back from policing falsehoods, disinformation and hate speech online. According to human rights organizations, power outages and strikes on telecommunications infrastructure in Gaza are endangering Palestinians’ connectivity.
Elon Musk’s X is facing an EU investigation over its handling of the Israel-Gaza war
While social media has been an important tool for disseminating war information in recent days, a deluge of images, memes and testimonials makes it difficult to judge what is real. Activists in the region warn that viral horror stories that turn out to be untrue could make people more distrustful of authority figures – and spark hatred, violence and retaliation against innocent people.
“I’m terrified,” said Marwa Fatafta, a policy analyst at Al Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank, and regional policy manager at the nonprofit digital human rights group Access Now. “There is a lot of information being shared that is not verified and there is a lot of incitement to violence and dehumanization. And all of this is fueling the fire for further massacres [of Palestinians].”
Foreign disinformation – a key element of Russia’s global strategy has been a key feature of the protracted war in Ukraine.
But in the current Middle East war, researchers have so far found only minimal evidence of disinformation from abroad, said John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google-owned cybersecurity company Mandiant.
Instead, much misinformation about the war is directed inward.
Posts, videos and memes falsely claim that the attack was the result of collusion between Hamas and Israel. In the 24 hours after the Hamas attack, the hashtag “TraitorsFromWithin” became the top trend on X, formerly Twitter, in Hebrew. Some threads claimed that Palestinian citizen workers of Israel were stationed at the border fence, while others claimed the attack was staged to enforce a peace deal with Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Months of protests over the country’s future, deep polarization at home and widespread distrust of authorities have led to the spread of these theories, said Achiya Schatz, director of FakeReporter, an Israeli watchdog organization dedicated to combating disinformation and hate speech online dedicated.
Live updates on the Israel-Gaza war
A viral TikTok video featured a woman who identified herself as a former soldier in the Gaza Strip. She claimed that the border was so tightly controlled that even “a cockroach” was detected in advance – a description that many commentators interpreted to mean that Israel should have helped Hamas penetrate the border.
Supporters of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have called critics of his right-wing extremist government traitors in recent months, Schatz said. Now the narrative is entering the current conflict.
“People don’t want to believe that their leader has abandoned them,” he said. “So it must have been an inside job.”
Hamas and its supporters have taken advantage of Israel’s disunity: On Monday, a pro-Hamas account called Gaza Now shared an image suggesting that former left-wing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak is fleeing the country. The picture was undated and showed him in baggage claim at an airport. The Gaza Now account had picked it up from a Jewish-Israeli influencer who supports Netanyahu’s far-right government and shared the content to criticize Israel’s left. The influencer finally gave one Excuse me on X
When war broke out between Israel and Hamas two years ago, locals used their cell phones to broadcast clips of the demonstrations and subsequent bombing to the world.
But much more is at stake in today’s conflict, Fatafta said. While the 2021 conflict claimed 250 lives in Gaza and 13 in Israel, the current war has killed at least 1,300 people in Israel and more than 1,799 people in Gaza.
And unlike 2021, Palestinians in Gaza are already losing access to the internet, affecting their ability to tell their story to the world.
“People don’t have enough power to charge their devices,” she said. “There are people who cannot send SMS messages, some telecommunications infrastructure has been damaged… There is an information blackout.”
Hamas’s rapid and violent attack is more difficult to analyze than events in 2021. “Nobody knows what really happened at the border,” Schatz said. “It was too big, too fast and too brutal.”
Facebook’s AI treats Palestinians like black Americans. It blocks them.
This gap is being filled by misinformation to stoke people’s anger – which researchers say could lead to more anti-Semitic attacks or violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel – and to justify more brutal retaliation in Gaza.
In another WhatsApp voice note, the voice of a man could be heard claiming to be a soldier and to have information that the country’s Arab citizens – about 20 percent of Israel’s population – were planning a coordinated attack. The audio message played for the Washington Post said that Palestinian citizens would show up Vehicles with Israeli license plates and “start shooting people.”
WhatsApp, a Meta messaging platform, is the default communication across the region and allows people to forward audio messages to many groups, each of which can contain more than a thousand members. But the source of such messages and the extent of their dissemination are almost impossible to trace.
A Palestinian digital rights organization called 7amleh says it has discovered more than 19,000 cases of hate speech and violent incitement against Palestinians in Hebrew since October 7, the first day of the escalations. The organization’s executive director, Nadim Nashif, said he could not report the content to
One such story is the claim that Hamas beheaded babies in Kfar Aza, a kibbutz near Israel’s southern border with Gaza. The unconfirmed story appears to come from a single Israeli news report on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, the Israeli prime minister’s office appeared to confirm the report, with a spokesman saying the babies were found with “decapitated heads.” The claim went viral and spread across newspapers, social media platforms, etc CNN broadcast.
President Biden appeared to push the story in a meeting with Jewish community leaders. “I’ve been doing this for a long time, I never thought I would see … confirmed images of terrorists beheading children,” he said.
An administration official later clarified Biden’s remarks, saying that Biden was referring to public statements from officials and media reports and had not actually seen the photos.
Graphic war videos are testing the rules of social media companies
Less than a day later, the Israeli government backed down. “There have been cases where Hamas militants have carried out beheadings and other ISIS-style atrocities,” it said in a statement to CNN on Thursday. “However, we cannot confirm whether the victims were men or women, soldiers or civilians, adults or children.”
To combat disinformation, FakeReporter operates a war room across Israel with 2,500 volunteers. The volunteers flag and report suspicious, malicious and graphic content on the platforms themselves, and FakeReporter also debunks misleading narratives on social media.
But over the last year, tech companies’ ability to handle these complaints has been hurt by waves of layoffs in units responsible for monitoring problematic content. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has laid off many members of a global operations team that oversees the platform, including Arabic speakers, according to a person familiar with the layoffs who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe them. Under Musk’s leadership, X laid off the teams that served as on-site contacts for advocates in the region. On Wednesday, the European Union announced an investigation into X over failures to moderate potentially illegal content and disinformation on its service.
Schatz said there was little communication on WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, because the messaging platform is considered a private, encrypted service. And at He said the company made contact for the first time this week.
Mandiant’s Hultquist said foreign disinformation has so far played a minor role compared to the cacophony at the local level. He said his team discovered fake accounts linked to Iran – whose leader has repeatedly called for Israel’s destruction – in which they posed as Egyptians across social media platforms to celebrate Israel’s “humiliation.” .
But Eric Feinberg, vice president of content moderation at the Coalition for a Safer Web, noted that Hamas and its supporters were able to use X to spread anti-Semitic propaganda relatively unhindered throughout the Arab world. He provided screenshots of pro-Hamas accounts using WhatsApp and X in English to rally support for the organization’s attacks on Israel in Pakistan.
“Right now,” Hultquist said, “it’s very difficult for a layperson to get to the bottom of the truth.”
Joe Menn contributed reporting