Media coverage of the Gaza war
[9][10][11] The Intercept reported that: "At the center of Israel’s information warfare campaign is a tactical mission to dehumanize Palestinians and to flood the public discourse with a stream of false, unsubstantiated, and unverifiable allegations.
At the peak of the campaign it used hundreds of fake accounts posing as Americans on X, Facebook and Instagram to post pro-Israel comments, focusing on U.S. lawmakers, particularly those who are Black and from the Democratic Party, including Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader from New York, and Raphael Warnock, Senator from Georgia.
"[12] Emerson Brooking, a fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told The Intercept: "They’re not trying to ensure an open, secure, accessible online space for all, free from disinformation.
In Gaza, young content creators, such as Hind Khoudary, Plestia Alaqad, Motaz Azaiza, and Bisan Owda, documented their lives through the war, gaining significant followings on social media.
[16][17][18] In Yemen, teenage influencer Rashid, nicknamed "Timhouthi Chalamet",[19] went viral on TikTok and X after posting a video of himself touring the captured ship Galaxy Leader and was later interviewed by streamer Hasan Piker.
[43] Widely-circulated video and images at around 7 December 2023, showed dozens of Palestinian men in Northern Gaza blindfolded, stripped partially naked, and kneeling on the ground, guarded by Israeli soldiers.
Other videos in the review include hundreds of detainees, with most stripped to their underwear, blindfolded and kneeling in front of the Israeli flag, while watched by IDF members, and interspersed with soldiers posing with guns.
[50] In October 2024, an investigation into the social media posts of soldiers in Israel's 749 Combat Engineering Battalion found that their mission was "nothing less than a systematic, concerted, and deliberate effort" to erase the future of Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, according to independent outlet Drop Site News.
[53] In May 2024, BBC News reported on a small review of about 45 photos and videos posted by IDF troops from military actions into the occupied West Bank, which showed multiple instances of soldier misconduct.
Actions documented and posted included entering homes at night and detaining Palestinians by blindfolding, binding them, at times removing women's headscarves or forcing them to say "Am Yisrael Chai" (The people of Israel live).
[54] In an October 2024 documentary, Al Jazeera published footage from IDF troops accounts of their actions in Gaza, with Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa being quoted as saying "We live in an era of technology, and this has been described as the first live-streamed genocide in history."
Some of the war crime claims raised in the documentary with the corresponding footage from social media accounts are that the IDF systematically target civilians, journalists, and others, ransacking homes, gleefully celebrating explosions, and going through women's underwear drawers.
[67] Anonymous Sudan, a hacker group, launched a DDoS attack on ChatGPT[68][69] after Tal Broda – a member of OpenAI's leadership – made social media posts which expressed support for Israel and called for more intense bombing in Gaza.
[82] Analyst John Hultquist of Google's Mandiant Intelligence noted the creativity of Iran-based influence networks, referring to accounts on X pretending to be left-leaning Americans supporting the Palestinian cause which were found in 2022.
[85] The Arabic Wikipedia has expressed solidarity with Palestinians, and briefly shut down in December 2023 for a day "in support of the residents of the Gaza Strip and in protest of the continuing attacks, while calling for an end to the war and the spread of peace.
He gave several examples of "flimsy reporting" from CNN, BBC and Sky News, of which he believes result from ingrained belief that Israel is the "villain" of the story, which allows any claim made against it—even ones that are proven false—to pass.
[119] At the start of Ramadan, the French newspaper Libération ran a cartoon mocking the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, showing a woman scolding a man chasing after rats and cockroaches because it was not yet time to break fast.
[123][124][125] Mohammadreza Bagheri, a presenter at channel 3 of Iran Broadcasting, said that the viewers should not worry about the dead or wounded Israelis, no matter if they are soldiers or civilians, because they are all occupiers who live in the lands and homes of Palestinians.
[134] On 19 October, The Guardian announced the dismissal of editorial cartoonist Steve Bell, who had been contributing to the newspaper since 1983, after he made a caricature of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holding a scalpel and preparing to make a Gaza Strip-shaped incision in his abdomen.
While Bell said it was inspired by a similar caricature of US President Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War, he said he was accused of antisemitism for allegedly evoking the "pound of flesh" demanded by the Jewish character Shylock in William Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice.
[141] During a public discussion titled "The Challenges and Dilemmas of Covering the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict," Janine Zacharia, a former Middle East correspondent and Stanford lecturer, provided valuable insights into how major news organizations approach reporting on the Israel-Hamas war.
[181] In an open letter to Australian media outlets, journalists criticized a double standard in trust given to the IDF, stating, "The Israeli government is also an actor in this conflict, with mounting evidence it is committing war crimes and a documented history of sharing misinformation.
[183] Documents released from ABC News in March 2024 showed staff concerns about persistent pro-Israel bias, including "accepting 'Israeli facts and figures with no ifs or buts' while questioning Palestinian viewpoints and avoiding the word 'Palestine' itself.
Israel has also propose emergency regulations to halt media broadcasts that harm "national morale", and threatened to close Al-Jazeera's local offices and block the outlet from freely reporting.
[249] On claims linking Palestinian militants to sexual assaults on Oct 7, The Times has remarked that investigations have been hampered by "false and misleading information" spread by "senior [Israeli] political figures and government-linked civil activists".
"[251] In The Intercept, investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill wrote, "At the center of Israel's information warfare campaign is a tactical mission to dehumanize Palestinians and to flood the public discourse with a stream of false, unsubstantiated, and unverifiable allegations.
[256] Journalist Janine Zacharia stated in relation to the war that online social media encourage the spread of "hot takes" and make the rapid dissemination of false information easy.
[257] In February 2024, Anat Schwartz, one of the authors of a New York Times article about alleged sexual violence on 7 October, was found to have liked incendiary posts on social media calling to turn Gaza into a "slaughterhouse".
[262][263][264] The union alleged that the investigators have been especially interested in employees of Middle Eastern or North African ethnic origin—and that they have been poring over the membership and communications of an affinity group of these employees—characterizing this as "racially motivated" activity; NYT denied this.
[273] Survivors and victim relatives of the Nova festival massacre filed a lawsuit in Florida against Associated Press, alleging four freelance photojournalists were embedded with militants who overran southern communities on October 7.
