Dr. M. W. Malla

On October 7, 2023, the Palestinian militant Hamas launched surprise attacks across the Gaza border into Southern Israel. The sheer magnitude of these attacks shattered the myth of the Israeli military invincibility and shocked everyone. In the following days with the unfolding events, the extent of Hamas military incursion deep inside the fortified Israeli towns became apparent, killing hundreds of military personnel and civilians, the largest casualty count for Israel in decades of its occupation of Palestine, and taking nearly 200 Israelis hostages.

Israel has since responded with sheer military brutality against mostly civilian targets inside the Gaza Strip to its south. The resultant and yet continuing air attacks have seen Israel pound the besieged enclave with over 7,000 bombs, killing over 4,000 Palestinians, including hundreds of children and women alike. The rightwing government has amassed over 100,000 soldiers on the Gaza border while recalling over 300,000 reservists to service and hundreds of tanks for an imminent ground invasion, even as it continues to pound hundreds of air strikes on the enclave, targeting mostly the civilian residential and health infrastructure. It has warned over 1 million Palestinians to evacuate the northern Gaza region as it readies for the ground assault.

As the saying goes, “The first casualty of war is truth.” Subsequent events saw unprecedented misinformation and disinformation campaigns around the unfolding events emerge, making it nearly impossible to discern veritable news sources, as the two sides bid to control the war narrative. The evolving technological landscape and its pervasive penetration have facilitated the proliferation of disinformation campaigns across various social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Notably, the platform owned by Elon Musk, X, previously Twitter, has emerged as a frontrunner in these efforts. Unlike its previous system of granting verified badges (blue ticks) based on authenticity, X allows account verification through a small monthly payment.

Initially, Hamas utilized information warfare as a psyop by widely publishing videos of its military actions to showcase its capabilities and challenge the besiegement imposed by one of the region’s most potent military forces. However, a counter-narrative emerged on social media, alleging Hamas atrocities against civilians, including claims of sexual assault against Israeli women and the horrifying notion of babies being beheaded.

Remarkably, a wave of unverified claims emerged, primarily from Israeli sources and further propagated by various Israeli government officials. These assertions gained significant traction after being amplified by Western media outlets and political establishments, along with a section of Indian rightwing across social media platforms, as has been exposed. It is crucial to approach such claims critically, considering their potential implications, and as such, making verifying information from credible sources paramount.

One of the most pervasive and impactful claims that took social media by storm and aimed to shake the world’s conscience came from Nicole Zedek, a Tel Aviv-based i24 news channel reporter. Zedek accused Hamas of a horrifying act, which was the “beheading” of 40 Israeli babies at the Kfar Azza kibbutz. The i24 news reporter shockingly attributed these unverified claims to an unnamed Israeli soldier. This was enough for the Western media outlets to seize upon as they campaigned for strong military action against Hamas militants. Below are the cover pages of some of the prominent Western media publications, with the New York Post calling this unsubstantiated incident “pure evil” in its banner head. At the same time, the Daily Mail described it as “a holocaust pure and simple”.

The source of this unsubstantiated news was later revealed as the controversial rightwing settler leader and army reservist, David Ben Zion, presently serving as Deputy Commander of Unit 71 in the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). The investigative news portal The Grayzone dubbed him an “extremist settler leader” who had incited violent riots against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank earlier that year. In a subsequent interview conducted by Zedek on October 10, 2023, Ben Zion made deeply troubling statements, referring to Palestinians as “animals” devoid of compassion, as they “don’t have any heart.”

Stuart Ramsay, the chief correspondent of Sky News, who was part of a select group of journalists permitted to access Kfar Azza kibbutz to inspect the site of the Hamas attack, in his report explicitly stated that neither of the two soldiers he interviewed mentioned anything about Hamas having “beheaded or killed 40 babies or children.” He further emphasized, “I believe that if it were the case, they would have told me and others there.”

Similarly, Oren Ziv, a reporter from +972 Mag who was also part of the journalist group visiting the kibbutz, posted on X (formerly Twitter) that no evidence supporting these claims was found during the tour, with “the army spokesperson or commanders also didn’t mention any such incidents.”

Crucially, it should be remembered that the Israeli army never confirmed the authenticity of these claims despite accusing Hamas of killing children and women in a manner reminiscent of ISIS. It appears unsurprising that given its credibility was shattered by this Hamas incursion, the IDF did nothing to counter the claims that were attributed to them, thereby allowing these to be amplified and hence exploit this engineering a narrative to justify its brutal air attacks on mostly civilian facilities in Gaza. The very unfounded and unsubstantiated claims did not deter Israeli and Western media outlets and government officials from amplifying them.

For instance, Tal Heinrich, an Israeli journalist serving as the spokesperson for Prime Minister Netanyahu, reiterated the claims. Furthermore, US President Joe Biden added credibility to these assertions by stating he had seen pictures of beheaded Israeli babies. He remarked, “I never really thought that I would see, have confirmed, pictures of terrorists beheading children.” President Biden also claimed that Hamas militants had committed sexual violence against Israeli women who were “raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies” by the Palestinian armed groups. However, no credible source has substantiated these allegations. The White House later retracted these statements, clarifying that the president’s remarks were based on unverified news reports and that “US officials and the president have not seen pictures or confirmed such reports independently.”

This alarming situation points to the dangerous misinformation campaign initiated by the Israeli government, aiming to justify its extensive military response to the Hamas campaign. This narrative framing through (m)(d)isinformation aims to obfuscate Israel’s deliberate civilian targeting, which has killed hundreds of Palestinian children and women as of now and renders them mere statistics in the footnotes of the events. This further underscores a troubling trend of manifest selective outrage in the Western world, where Israeli lives appear more valuable than Palestinian lives, which are less deserving of a human being.

In another incident, on October 17, 2023, the Gaza Strip witnessed the most atrocious and devastating attack yet during this war. A Baptist hospital, Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, was targeted by an “Israeli air strike”, killing nearly 500 people and leaving dozens of others critically wounded, mostly those who had taken refuge in the hospital compound. Interestingly, amidst these developments with Israel undeterredly continued bombing the Gaza Strip, a day before the hospital attack on October 16, 2023, BBC News (World) used its @BBCWorld account and the hashtag #BBCYourQuestionsAnswered to ask its followers whether “Hamas builds tunnels under hospitals and schools?”

Palestinian activist Mohammed El-Kurd pointed out the deeply biased nature of Western journalism, describing it as “ushering in genocide.” He emphasized this point by referencing a specific incident: “Yesterday, the BBC insinuated that ‘Hamas builds tunnels under hospitals.’ Today, the Israelis bombed a hospital in Gaza City, killing 500—FIVE HUNDRED—doctors, patients, and refugees inside. This kind of journalism is paving the way for genocide. We won’t forgive.”

The Gaza Health Ministry of the Hamas Government squarely blamed the Israeli airstrike for this horrific attack. Hananya Naftali, Netanyahu’s digital aide, asserted in an X post that the “Israeli Air Force struck a Hamas terrorist base inside a hospital in Gaza,” resulting in the death of “multiple terrorists.”

As the scale of devastation at the Al-Ahli hospital became apparent, drawing widespread global condemnation, Hananya Naftali’s social media post mysteriously vanished. Israel swiftly acted to try and seize the narrative framing,  shifting blame to Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s misfired rocket for the incident. The Israeli Government’s official Twitter account (@Israel) quoted an Israeli Defence Force (IDF) Spokesman, who stated: “From the analysis of the operational systems of the IDF, an enemy rocket barrage was carried out towards Israel, which passed through the vicinity of the hospital when it was hit.”

As expected, President Joe Biden, arriving in Tel Aviv amidst this highly charged regional atmosphere on October 18, 2023, to express US support for Israel and reaffirm Washington’s backing of its right to self-defence, endorsed the Israeli version of the attack. The US president squarely blamed the “other party”, that is, Palestinian groups, for the hospital attack, stating, “Based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it was done by the other party, not you,” effectively exonerating Tel Aviv.

It did not take long for the Western news media to parrot the Israeli narrative at the cost of acknowledging this grave tragedy. Outlets like The New York Times, which initially reported an Israeli airstrike on Al-Ahli Hospital resulting in significant casualties, conveniently altered its headline to a more vague “Hundreds Reported Killed in Blast at a Gaza Hospital,” seemingly to obscure Israel’s involvement. Other widely circulated dailies, such as the UK-based Daily Mail and Daily Express, reported the carnage without explicitly mentioning Israel’s role, with the US-based New York Post directly blaming “Islamic Terrorists” for the incident.

All in all, a significant number of the videos shared during recent events turned out to be outdated, originating from other countries or even from video games. This demonstrates how social media platforms became susceptible to disinformation campaigns, making it difficult to ascertain the verified news. As Peter Bolton pointed out, it turns out most of the claims that have been widely circulated across social media and traditional media and by political and government functionaries have been “misleading or, in some cases, even outright false.”

However, this instance is not the first time the Israeli government has employed information warfare to legitimize its regular military assaults across the occupied Palestinian territories. Back in 2013, it was revealed that the Israeli government incentivized posting pro-Israeli content on social media aimed at international audiences and fighting internet battles. For this purpose,  it recruited over 500 students. In this context, during the Israeli aggression on the besieged Gaza enclave in 2014, Electronic Intifada, an online media outlet focused on Palestine, reported on how a student union in a prestigious Israeli university, Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (IDC Herzliya), established a propaganda war room with a stated aim of inundating internet with content justifying the military assault on Gaza.

The current Israel-Hamas war has once again demonstrated how the digital landscape remains increasingly susceptible to the exploitation by dominant actors, like the Israeli state, to seize the international narrative about the events that present Israelis as the most oppressed victims. More importantly, this manipulation enables Israel to avoid international scrutiny of its disproportionate military campaign in the besieged Gaza Strip, all under the false and misplaced pretext of the right to self-defence, given it has successfully deflected attention from and scrutiny of its years long aggression across the occupied West Bank territories.

 

Dr M W Malla is a Research Fellow with the International Centre for Peace Studies, New Delhi, India. His Primary research areas include geopolitical events in the Gulf and major power engagements with the Middle Eastern region. The views expressed in this article are entirely the author’s personal views and do not represent the institutions he is affiliated with in any manner whatsoever.