[4][5][6] 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.
[9] A rumour circulated on social media that one of these officers was Major General Nimrod Aloni, the commander of the Israeli Depth Corps, based on a photograph of a man who resembled him being detained by unidentified armed men.
[14][15][16] The community volunteer paramedic and rescue group ZAKA began collecting bodies immediately after the Hamas attacks, while the IDF avoided assigning soldiers from Home Front Command who have been trained to carefully retrieve and document human remains in post-terrorism situations.
[27] Regarding claims that linked 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".
[28] In June 2024, The Times reported that Elkayam-Levy spread a "debunked story" about a "pregnant woman and her slaughtered foetus", while also circulating "photographs of murdered female soldiers that turned out to be images of Kurdish fighters in Syria.
"[28] The Times added: "Elkayam-Levy has nonetheless remained the most prominent public voice on the sexual violence of October 7, winning the country’s highest civilian honour, the Israel Prize, in April.
"[28] In a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition on 28 October, Eli Beer, founder of Israeli volunteer-based emergency medical services group United Hatzalah, claimed that Hamas had burned a baby alive in an oven.
[36] Social media accounts based in India have spread pro-Israeli disinformation, with influencers misrepresenting videos purported to show school girls taken as sex slaves, or Hamas kidnapping a Jewish baby.
[51] Saleh Aljafarawi, a Palestinian blogger and singer who lives in Gaza, was falsely accused by several pro-Israeli figures, including the country's official Twitter account, of being a "crisis actor".
[68] In October 2024 the research group Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) published a report based on the GHM's latest data concluding that at least 74% of the at the time 40,717 Gazan fatalities identified by the Ministry were civilians, and that this is likely to be an underestimate.
[69] The Henry Jackson Society's Andrew Fox published a report on 13 December 2024 alleging that the Gaza Health Ministry inflated the number of civilians deaths caused by Israeli attacks.
[70] Professor Michael Spagat of AOAV responded by noting that such errors were marginal and random, as Fox only identified 2 adults registered as children, 3 "natural deaths", and misclassified sex cases affect 0.5% of the overall figures.
It also noted that its findings "underestimate the full impact of the military operation in Gaza, as they do not account for non-trauma-related deaths resulting from health service disruption, food insecurity, and inadequate water and sanitation.
[3] An analysis by Haaretz found that hundreds of fake accounts on social media were targeting Democratic Party lawmakers with spam messages repeating Israeli government accusations relating to UNRWA and Hamas.
[74][75] In June 2024, Israel's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs was revealed to have paid $2 million to Israeli political consulting firm Stoic, to conduct a social media campaign, fueled by fake accounts and often employing misinformation, targeting 128 American Congresspeople, with a focus on Democratic and African-American members of the House of Representatives.
[108] In October 2023, disinformation experts uncovered an account on X that published false reports about Qatar threatening to cut off its gas exports if Israel continued to bombard the Gaza Strip.
[109] The public diplomacy of Israel, known as hasbara, is the country's efforts to communicate directly with citizens of other nations to inform and influence their perceptions, with the aim of garnering support or tolerance for the Israeli government's strategic objectives.
[4][5][6] 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.
"[6] He added that "Israel’s hasbara campaign is reminiscent of the Bush administration’s monthslong carnival of lies, sanitized and promoted by major media outlets, about alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
"[115] In June 2024, Israel's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs was revealed to have paid $2 million to Israeli political consulting firm Stoic, to conduct a social media campaign, fueled by fake accounts and often employing misinformation, targeting American Congresspeople, with a focus on Democratic and African-American members of the House of Representatives.
[116][117] In October 2023, shortly after the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion, Israeli sources published audio purporting to show two Hamas militants in a phone call claiming responsibility for the act and blaming it on a malfunctioning rocket.
[140] After bombing a tent camp in Rafah in an area that Israel had designated as a "safe zone" for civilians, killing 45 people, Israeli officials initially told their American counterparts that they believed their airstrike ignited a nearby fuel tank, creating a large fire.
[145] The Israeli army also denied responsibility for the killing of 5-year-old Hind Rajab, her family and the Palestine Red Crescent Society paramedics sent to rescue her, saying that their forces were not in firing range on the day of the girl's death.
[149] The Associated Press, however, stated that after months of investigations, it found that Israel had provided "little or even no evidence" of a significant militant presence near the al-Awda, Indonesian, or Kamal Adwan hospitals prior to their raids.
[154] In September 2024, the IDF stated it was launching an investigation into the release of forged Hamas documents that were leaked to the international press, apparently in an attempt to sway Israeli public opinion against a hostage-ceasefire deal.
[158] A fake memo that purported to show President Biden authorizing $8 billion in aid to Israel circulated on social media[159][160] and was cited in articles by Indian news outlets Firstpost and Oneindia.
[164][165][166][65][63] The European Union warned Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg that X and Meta were hosting disinformation and illegal content about the war, with potential fines of up to 6% of the companies' global revenue according to the Digital Services Act.
[176] According to AP's David Klepper, pictures from the Gaza war have "vividly and painfully illustrated AI's potential as a propaganda tool, used to create lifelike images of carnage... digitally altered ones spread on social media have been used to make false claims about responsibility for casualties or to deceive people about atrocities that never happened.
In response to criticism, TikTok issued a press release on 20 November asserting that younger Americans, particularly Millennials and Generation Z, tended to be more sympathetic to the Palestinians than to Israel, citing Gallup polling data dating back to 2010.