Another War: Israel’s Fake Accounts to Support Its Narrative

“The media is the most powerful thing in the world. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”

Malcolm X

Since Israel launched its war on Gaza in response to the Hamas attack, known as Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, on October 7, another war has been waged on the internet with Israel flooding social networking sites with misleading information and fake news. These propaganda campaigns, led by fake pro-Israel accounts, challenge the Palestinian narrative and attack the Palestinian resistance. The fake campaigns have been accompanied by a fierce media war waged by Israel, using a policy of misinformation and lies to deceive global public opinion.

In more than one case, Western media organizations and presidents have repeated Israeli claims without verifying them. Israel’s claim that Hamas killed 40 Israeli children and beheaded them is perhaps the most prominent example of recent Israeli media misinformation.

Cyber army

Coinciding with the ongoing war in Gaza, dozens of fake accounts suddenly appeared online, relentlessly attacking Hamas and the Palestinian resistance. As a journalist and researcher specializing in diplomacy and digital media in times of conflict and war, I noticed the random and unusual appearance of dozens of accounts across social media platforms, most notably X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook.

Some of these accounts appeared shortly before the war, but they all have the following in common: they impersonate Arab or unknown identities, place the flags of Arab countries next to the Israeli flag, and all repeat the same story, whether as individual tweets or as comments on news and events disseminated on digital platforms. Many of these profiles also deliberately incite strife among Arab peoples by referring to the political and historical differences between them, such as the differences between Morocco and Algeria, and the political problems between Iraq and Kuwait.

I have also noticed that many of these fake accounts follow everything that is published about the war on famous Arabic digital platforms , such as the Al Jazeera website, Al Jazeera Mubasher, and TRT Arabia , in order to attack the Palestinian resistance and the people of Gaza in general. I followed some of these accounts and found that they are constantly commenting on war news with the same content, the same words, and the same narrative. Some of them even go further and leave comments that are meant to anger and provoke their followers.

Between Mossad and “Pallywood”

The cyber war is not limited to fake accounts and includes accounts claiming to be affiliated with official Israeli entities, including an account claiming to be the Israeli National Intelligence Agency (Mossad) on the X platform. The account with the blue authentication mark has more than 100,000 followers.

Shayan Sardarizadeh, a journalist who specializes on online misinformation for BBC Monitoring, was one of the first to discover that the account was not real, exposing the truth about one of the videos it had posted. The video, posted on the tenth day of the war, claimed to show Israel’s Iron Beam, a directed-energy weapon air defence system, but Sardarizadeh revealed that it was, in fact, the video game Arma 3. Since then, the administrators of the account in question have changed its name and continue to spread misinformation.

Such misinformation has been accepted by many in the world as established fact.  The ongoing war has brought back the use of the word “Pallywood,” a portmanteau of “Palestine” and “Hollywood,” used by Israel years ago to discredit Palestinian narratives and claim that Palestinians were cinematically representing their suffering. The hashtag has proliferated during the war with misleading, out-of-context images and videos accusing Palestinians of faking their deaths and injuries in Gaza.

Take, for example, the misleading information about Gaza activist Saleh al-Jaafrawi, who has played a major role in exposing and publishing dozens of clips documenting Israeli massacres during the current war. Al-Jaafari angered Israel, which launched a massive campaign against him, accusing him of lying, misleading, and acting, and dubbing him a “Hamas Pallywood actor.” The use of the term is intended to strip the Palestinians of their humanity and to distort their image worldwide.

Organized electronic campaigns 

An investigation by Innovative Contractors for Advanced Dimensions (ICAD), that specializes in open source intelligence, has revealed the truth about many digital accounts attacking the Palestinian resistance and criticizing Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. The investigation, conducted in October 2023, revealed that organized electronic committees are behind these accounts, as they repeat the exact same phrases and use the same emoticons on more than one digital platform to create an imaginary public opinion.

According to the investigation, the fake accounts have the same digital characteristics, as they impersonate a specific country, tweet in broken Arabic, and their number of followers does not exceed 50. The evidence points to accounts that work in an organized electronic fly group, the name used to refer to online bots and harassers and trolls,  and deliberate manner to achieve certain political goals.

There are specific clues to determine the authenticity of social networking accounts: if a profile is newly created and suddenly shares a large amount of content that is divisive, misleading, and sometimes contradictory, it is likely to be fake or operated by certain people or entities for political purposes. This is true of dozens of accounts I have tracked during the current Israeli war on Gaza.

The fake accounts work within organized committees or are affiliated with a certain party, which leads us to Israeli hasbara, the Hebrew word for propaganda and misinformation.

The term “hasbara” was first coined in the early 20th century by the Zionist activist Nahum Sokolow. It was later used as a synonym for public relations, but in reality, it is nothing more than an organized program to spread Israeli political propaganda around the world with major government and security support. Hasbara efforts often target Western political elites, opinion leaders, and the general public, and involve almost every Israeli government institution, including the army, the Foreign Ministry, NGOs, universities, research centers, advocacy groups, and even students.