By Ahmad Qadi
The Israeli government and its affiliates crafted a multi-layered strategy to dehumanize Palestinians and ultimately legitimize its horrific violence.
From the outset of its genocidal war on Gaza, Israel recognized the digital space as a crucial battleground, having long understood the power of online narratives. Alongside its destruction and cleansing efforts on the ground, it waged a relentless digital war aimed at silencing the Palestinian narrative.
Employing a range of strategies to dominate the digital discourse, Israel invested vast resources to suppress Palestinian voices online. Yet, despite its extensive capabilities, controlling the digital narrative has proven far more challenging, as efforts to erase Palestinian realities online mirror its actions on the ground.
As a key tactic in its digital warfare, Israel deployed disinformation campaigns to discredit Palestinians, erode empathy for them, delegitimize their claims, and justify its genocidal attacks.
Last week’s Palestinian Digital Rights Update:
📌Launching #ReconnectGaza: A global campaign to restore connectivity in Gaza
📌The Legal Implications of AI-Enabled Surveillance and Military Operations in Palestine
📌U.S. Tech Giants Fuel Israeli Military with AI
📌Why… pic.twitter.com/yWZ7objP0u— 7amleh حملة (@7amleh) February 28, 2025
Massive Disinformation Campaign
In the aftermath of October 7, 2023, Israel launched a massive influence operation and disinformation campaign to justify its large-scale attacks on Palestinian civilians and infrastructure in the besieged Gaza Strip. Simultaneously, these efforts aimed to delegitimize Palestinian claims to their land and rights while dehumanizing them.
Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs funded a covert campaign aimed at influencing US lawmakers, particularly Democrats, by targeting them with pro-Israel narratives. This effort included the use of AI-generated content across websites and social media platforms.
The Israeli government has also been linked to campaigns spreading Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment as part of its broader disinformation strategy. The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs allocated approximately $2 million to this disinformation operation, which sought to dehumanize Palestinians and spread false allegations.
OpenAI identified and disrupted disinformation campaigns involving Israeli groups that utilized AI to generate content, including short commentaries and long-form articles in multiple languages. Israel has deployed AI tools and bot farms to amplify disinformation, aiming to influence public opinion and further dehumanize Palestinians.
One such effort involved the Israeli firm STOIC, which, with funding from the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, used AI to produce articles and comments across platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and X (formerly Twitter). These AI-generated narratives were strategically targeted at audiences in Canada, the U.S., and Israel. To amplify the reach of these narratives, the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs funded a covert operation, leveraging AI-generated content from STOIC to shape public discourse and sway American lawmakers, using tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
✊في غزة، الحق في التواصل محاصر. انضموا إلينا في حملة #لنُعِد_الاتصال_لغّزة
✊In Gaza, the right to communicate is under siege. Join us in the #ReconnectGaza campaign
🚨 Join Campaign | انضم للحملة: https://t.co/TDv7TiFCjJ
🔗 Sign Petition | وقع العريضة: https://t.co/EzZzB2iIEv pic.twitter.com/mwDGvq8cv4— 7amleh حملة (@7amleh) February 27, 2025
Simultaneously, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched an emotionally manipulative YouTube campaign aimed at dehumanizing Palestinians.
The campaign was analyzed in a report produced by 7amleh – The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, the report concluded that much of the content promoted was emotionally charged to the point of violating YouTube’s community standards.
The campaign featured a wave of graphic ads designed to provoke strong emotional reactions from viewers. Within just three weeks after October 7th, the ministry created 200 ads targeting countries in Europe—such as Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium, the UK, and the USA—reaching millions of viewers. These ads were part of a broader strategy to shape global perceptions and further dehumanize Palestinians.
One particularly controversial ad, as laid in the report, set against a backdrop of rainbows and unicorns, was based on a children’s bedtime story. Google emphasized that the ad had been appropriately labeled to ensure it didn’t appear alongside content aimed at children.
The ad’s text read: “We know that your child cannot read this. We have an important message for you as parents. Forty infants were murdered in Israel by Hamas terrorists (ISIS). Just as you would do everything for your child, we will do everything to protect ours. Now hug your baby and stand with us.” The language—“Stand with us”—explicitly urged support for Israeli military action, yet Google did not classify it as incitement to violence or a human rights violation.
@NadimNashif , director and founder of @7amleh , echoed these concerns. “Palestinians have become subjects in Israel’s laboratory to develop these techniques and weaponize AI, all for the purpose of maintaining [an] apartheid https://t.co/iOMXMfmecI
— 7amleh حملة (@7amleh) March 7, 2025
Influencers and Social Media Platforms
At the same time, influencers on social media platforms were contacted via email and invited to spread Israeli propaganda in exchange for financial compensation. One TikTok influencer shared an email offering him $5,000 to post pro-Israel content, along with “brainwashing” sessions to better understand the situation. While the exact number of influencers reached or who accepted the offer remains unclear, it is reasonable to assume that many did.
At the same time, Israel and pro-Israel groups pressured social media platforms to remove pro-Palestinian content, silencing journalists, activists, and influencers through threats or by undermining their careers.
Meta, for example, has taken several measures to censor pro-Palestinian content, in addition to its existing practices that already disproportionately target Palestinian voices. One such measure involved lowering the trust threshold for Palestinian content from 80% to 25%, meaning that content now had a higher likelihood of being removed if it was deemed to potentially violate community standards. This shift resulted in a significant increase in content removals based on another report produced by 7amleh.
On the other hand, many pro-Israel groups have actively threatened pro-Palestinian activists and journalists, attempting to damage their careers, smear their reputations, and discredit their work in order to obscure what is going on the ground. One notable example is HonestReporting, which has sent over 50,000 letters to media outlets across Canada since October 2023, targeting journalists.
‘Human Animals’
The spread of misinformation about the Israeli genocidal war involved several common forms of disinformation: Manipulated photos and videos, false claims, fake news reports, reusing old content, fabricated content, emotionally charged narratives, fake accounts and bots, altered content, out of context content, influencer and celebrity engagement.
It employed notorious tactics, including framing the October 7 attack on Israel in a way that stripped it of historical context, presenting it as an isolated event rather than a consequence of decades of colonization and repression.
Israel attempted to push the narrative that Palestinians attacked Israel without cause, portraying them as “human animals” inherently destined for violence. This narrative, propagated by Israeli politicians, entities, and affiliates, falsely claimed that Palestinians acted out of a desire to eliminate Jews, rather than as a reaction to historical injustice and siege spanning many years.
At the same time, while Israel worked diligently to amplify the impact of the attack, showcasing the destruction and victims, it needed stronger justifications to manufacture global consensus for its actions in the Gaza Strip.
To achieve this, Israel fabricated exaggerated claims about the scale of violence against Israelis during the October 7 attack, including false reports of “40 beheaded babies,” “babies in ovens,” and “systematic rape” of Israeli women. These claims went largely unchecked and were adopted by legacy media worldwide, before many outlets later retracted them. This included U.S. President Joe Biden, who initially endorsed the claim before reversing his position.
Additional falsehoods were fabricated and spread during Israeli operations to justify and legitimize attacks on civilians and healthcare facilities. One such claim was that a Hamas operations center was located under Al-Shifa Hospital, or that Hamas had taken control of the hospital. These claims were intended to provide a pretext for Israel’s extensive attacks on healthcare facilities in the Gaza Strip.
While these false claims were designed to prepare the public and global opinion for accepting ethnic cleansing and the destruction of entire communities, another layer of this disinformation campaign worked in parallel, attempting to whitewash Israel’s actions by alleging that Palestinians were faking their deaths and discrediting the victims.
E-Racing Palestine: A Particular Form of Anti-Palestinian Racism
”Pallywood” Campaign
The “Pallywood” campaign is a prominent example of content taken from acting scenes in different contexts or time periods, falsely claiming that death scenes were staged.
This campaign wasn’t limited to ordinary users; a notable instance involved the Arabic-language spokesperson for the Israeli Prime Minister’s office, who shared a scene from Lebanon, falsely claiming it was from Gaza. Another video suggested that Palestinians were faking their injuries in Gaza, though the footage was actually from a 2017 report about a makeup artist working on Palestinian films and with charities. Numerous other examples were circulated by Israeli or pro-Israel users to diminish global empathy for Palestinians.
The Israeli disinformation campaign is deeply intertwined with the genocide on the ground. Without such a vast influence operation, Israel would not have had the leeway to carry out the destruction of Gaza and its communities.
The Israeli government and its affiliates crafted a multi-layered strategy to dehumanize Palestinians, delegitimize their rights and claims, discredit them, undermine solidarity, sow confusion among activists and the media, and ultimately legitimize its horrific violence.
– Ahmad Qadi is a writer and digital rights advocate from Palestine. He serves as the Documentation Manager at 7amleh – The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media. His work focuses on digital censorship, online harm, and platform accountability. He contributed this article to the Palestine Chronicle.
