Hamas’s Propaganda War

Gaza is now the frontline of a global information war

The conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine have become key battlegrounds in an information war that goes far wider than their tightly drawn physical borders. Carefully crafted social media posts and other online propaganda are fighting to make people worldwide take sides, harden their positions and even move broader public opinion. Writes Robert M. Dover

Professor of Intelligence and National Security, University of Hull.

Misinformation about Israel and Hamas is spreading on social media.  

Verified users on X shared many misleadingly labelled videos and were eligible for monetisation of their content. A group of 67 X accounts spread coordinated disinformation about the Israel-Hamas war, says a research group. The accounts’ misleading posts and videos have had millions of views.

X, formerly Twitter, is allowing premium subscriber accounts to spread Hamas propaganda videos with violent images of the group’s attack on Israel, in apparent violation of X’s content policies, according to a new investigation from the Tech Transparency Project (TTP).

By land, sea, air and online: How Hamas used the internet to terrorise Israel

Terror propaganda − violent videos and graphic images of kidnappings and murders of civilians and soldiers that flooded social media from the deadly cross-border incursion into Israel − was a key element in Hamas’ military campaign, said Graham Brookie, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

Hamas streamed from the war zone “in closer to real-time than in past conflicts,” indicating that the online strategy “was an essential part of the overall planning for their attack on Israel” to take advantage of how hyperconnected Israel is with its widespread use of smartphones and social media.

Hamas propaganda strategy: the worse, the better

Hamas is using propaganda to intimidate its enemies, mobilise its supporters, recruit new ones, and generate sympathy. Their strategy in the conflict with Israel can be summed up in the words, “the worse, the better”. On the one hand, at the beginning of the recent conflict, Hamas directly reported the killing of more than 1,400 Israelis on social media, thus demonstrating its military capabilities and ideological fanaticism to supporters (and pointing the finger at rival Fatah), on the other hand, Hamas-affiliated channels disseminate footage of people suffering in Gaza as a result of Israeli counter-strikes. Both highly emotionally charged narratives work – for different audiences.

Cyber Propaganda and Disinformation Operations in the Hamas-Israel War

This report outlines that propaganda's essential nature and aim - to influence and modulate the target’s thinking to align with the perpetrator's projections - remains unchanged despite periodic re-designations like Psyops, Influence Operations, Information Warfare, or Perception Management. The stronger side portrays its strengths to impress upon the opponent the futility of his resistance and influence him to reduce his losses and casualties by changing or abandoning his plans and actions. The weaker party seeks to boost morale and divert the attention of its own population away from its limitations by portraying the other as devilish and gaining sympathy from external quarters.

Hamas is waging a propaganda war on Israel with shocking videos

Experts warn that Hamas is using social media propaganda alongside violence to further its goals, according to experts. They have been live-streaming violent acts, posting photos and videos of killings, and spreading messages of helplessness and humiliation. The purpose of this propaganda is to trigger fear and paralysis.

Inside the Hamas media operation, Israel is losing the propaganda war

At the centre of Hamas’s media operation sits Al-Aqsa (literally “furthest mosque”), the name of Hamas’s TV channel, radio station and social media channels (though the latter have mostly been banned). Funded by Hamas’s general budget — which comes from siphoning off aid that comes into the Strip, foreign countries such as Iran and Qatar, and its own tax collecting — it began broadcasting in Gaza in 2006 after Hamas came to power. By the time the terrorist group launched its October 7 attack, Al-Aqsa’s various channels were broadcasting everything from news and drama to children’s entertainment. From its inception, however, a two-pronged strategy has informed all of the network’s content.

Armies of useful idiots in the West drive Hamas propaganda war against Israel

The stream of footage emanating from Gaza is part of this project, released with the knowledge that it will be amplified by armies of useful idiots in the West. Supporting the Palestinians is a perfectly respectable cause. But when the context is a jihadi massacre by Palestinian fanatics, and when such support is accompanied by open expressions of sympathy for Hamas, it becomes rather more shadowy.

Palestinian civilians deserve our sympathy, of course, but we cannot allow this to blind us to reality. It was their fanatical leaders who brought destruction on their heads, as Israel can no longer tolerate such a threat on its border. Its first obligation is to protect its own civilians, like any other state.

The denial of Hamas sexual violence

The irrefutable proof of the sexual abuse that counters the rape deniers.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3: In this three-part series, CAMERA will expose some of these deniers, and offer irrefutable proof of the sexual abuse of Israeli women by the Palestinian attackers both during and after the October 7 atrocities.

Among those seeking to discredit the idea of widespread sexual violence are the usual suspects — the Hamas apologists and conspiracists that inhabit the gutters of the Internet. And among their arguments are the usual tactics — falsehoods, omissions, distortions, and table pounding. It’s just another day in the cellar.

But such noise can carry up the walls, and in this case, make their way to the mainstream. What began as a campaign of mud-slinging by fringe activists like Max Blumenthal, Ali Abunimah, and Mondoweiss was amplified by The Intercept, an anti-establishment publication that exists a half-step closer to the mainstream, and from there it spread — outward to the mobs, but also upward to institutions like NPR, CNN, and The New York Times, which deferentially reported their skepticism.

Telling the truth: NGO analyses online denial of Hamas Oct. 7 sex crimes

NGO CyberWell released a report on the widespread online denial of Hamas’s October 7 sexual violence. CyberWell charged that, despite the overwhelming evidence that Hamas terrorists willingly uploaded online, the denial narrative spread by extremists online is spreading at a rapid rate. “The denial of rape is an attempt to rewrite history - to obfuscate the deliberate crimes committed against women and redirect sympathy away from the victims and toward justification and celebration of their attackers,” CyberWell explained.

There are a new group of rape deniers

The interesting question is, why? Why the refusal to believe that Hamas, which butchered children in their beds, took elderly women as hostages and incinerated families in their homes, would be capable of that?

I’ll get to that in a moment, but first it’s worth looking at the forms this denialism takes. One method is to acknowledge, as one recent article put it, that “sexual assault may have occurred on Oct. 7,” but nobody has really proved that it was part of an organised pattern. Another is to raise questions about various details in stories to suggest that if there’s even a single error, or a witness whose testimony is at all inconsistent, the entire account must also be false and dishonest. A third is to treat anything an Israeli says as inherently suspect. Writes Bret Stephens, opinion columnist for The Times.

Why the left must lie about October 7

You don’t have to read left-wing publications like The Intercept or The Nation or watch the “Democracy Now” program available on NPR and Pacifica to have encountered denial about the atrocities of Oct. 7. They’re commonplace on social media, and unless you only follow or interact with small bubbles of pro-Israel posters, it’s hard to avoid. But the push to deny that rape was not merely widespread but an important element of Hamas’s plans and tactics in their cross-border assaults isn’t rooted in genuine skepticism about events. Writes Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate)

Muslim activist shocked by world ignoring Hamas rapes of Israelis

This isn't the first time Anila Ali, a Muslim-American of Pakistani heritage who works to promote the rights of women in conflict zones around the world, has come to Israel. But this visit is different. The sexual assaults carried out by Hamas terrorists and Gaza Strip residents on Israeli women touched her personally. "How can one not cry over the girls who were raped by the terrorists?" She's not just horrified with the crimes themselves; she's shocked by the global silence over the sexual violence.

Denying the Gender-Based Violence of Oct. 7 Helps No One 

In Israel and Gaza, war is being fought as wars have long been: with bodies and steel, on land and from the sky. Around the rest of the world, though, the Israel-Hamas war is being waged with propaganda, protest and social media posts, declarations and dismissals, all too often by ideologues speaking to an audience primed to believe them. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the too-long silence about, downplaying and even outright denial of the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas. Writes Jill Filipovic a lawyer and author who writes on gender, politics, law and global affairs.

Debunking Al Jazeera’s biased coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict

Nicholas Woode-Smith argues that Al Jazeera has been a firm supporter of the Palestinian cause, and has made a business out of heaping Israel with as much one-sided condemnation as possible. Al Jazeera has been unequivocally anti-Israel and anti-USA, with its Arabic programming leaning even into radical Islamic programming. Ignoring History and Decontextualising Conflict While the documentary doesn`t baulk from showing a range of footage depicting the honest savagery of Hamas, it almost seems to glorify this violence, providing a one-sided historical context.