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Israeli army admits to failed online campaign in 2021 Gaza war

Israeli military acknowledges it made a "mistake" in launching secretive influence campaign in an abortive attempt to improve Israeli public's view of army's performance in the war.

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Posts with the Gaza Regrets hashtag drew bellicose comments from Israelis, like “Why are buildings still standing in Gaza?"

Days into Israel's devastating war on besieged Gaza in 2021, the Israeli army began deploying keyboard warriors to a second front: a covert social media operation to praise the military's relentless bombing campaign in Palestine's coastal enclave.

The Israeli military acknowledged on Wednesday that it made a "mistake" in launching the secretive influence campaign on social media in an effort to improve the Israeli public's view of Israel's performance in the war.

The online campaign, which failed to gain traction, was one of several aggressive steps the Israeli military took in the bloody 11-day war.

Israeli aggression killed over 260 Palestinians as the military bombed the blockaded territory and Palestinian fighters launched rockets at Israel, killing 13 Israelis.

Israel’s Haaretz daily first exposed the social media operation on Wednesday, reporting that the army employed fake accounts to conceal the campaign's origin and engage audiences on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

Experts say that although the Israeli military has frequently employed inauthentic social media accounts to gather intelligence on Arab states and on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, this marks the first known time that a military influence campaign has targeted Israeli citizens.

Uri Kol, a digital campaign expert, said the revelation could hint that the army has used the tactic secretively against Israelis.

"With the military's tight censorship laws, the army always has the last word in what gets published and what doesn’t," he said. "What we see here is a tiny facet of an online manipulation campaign that we haven’t ever seen before."

'It shows the army's frame'

The accounts posted and amplified footage and images of destruction in Gaza with the Hebrew hashtag "Gaza Regrets" — boasting about the strength of Israel's military in a bid to counter viral images showing salvos of Palestinian rockets bombarding Tel Aviv.

The accounts targeted far-right Israelis, tagging popular conservative TV hosts and hardline politicians like current National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and posting in groups of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's supporters with the aim of spreading the message to sympathetic audiences.

Popular posts with the Gaza Regrets hashtag drew bellicose comments from Israelis, like "Why are buildings still standing in Gaza?"

"It shows the army's frame of mind that it wants to reassure young people and get them pumped up for war," Kol said.

The Israeli military conceded that it also coordinated the campaign with real social media influencers, providing them with images and hashtags to talk up the military's achievements and showcase the damage it inflicted on Gaza.

But all the army's efforts came to nought as the hashtag failed to leverage audiences, garnering few, if any likes and shares, Haaretz reported.

Experts say that successful online influence campaigns using false identities take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to gain followers' trust.

Fake reports

In a statement, the Israeli military admitted that it used "a limited number" of fake accounts over the course of a day "in order to increase exposure."

"In retrospect, it was found that the use of these accounts was a mistake," the military said, saying it has not employed the tactic since the war.

The army spokesperson's office has long played a key role in defending Israel's military actions in the international court of opinion.

But its relationship with the media has been strained at times, and its tactics had come under criticism, including during the 2021 war, when it was accused of circulating misleading reports among foreign journalists.

Those reports suggested that a ground invasion was under way to lure Hamas into a deadly trap.

Some reporters were told outright an invasion had begun. The military blamed the incident on "internal miscommunication."

Israel's conduct in the war further inflamed tensions and angered international media when an Israeli air strike levelled a high-rise building that housed The Associated Press and Al Jazeera offices in Gaza after giving those inside an hour to evacuate.

The military claimed the building housed Hamas infrastructure but has provided no evidence.

Israel's handling of the shooting death last year of a veteran Al Jazeera journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, became the latest flash point in relations between the military and reporters.

SOURCE: AP