Israeli Public Diplomacy in the Gaza War

Israel’s wartime public communications involved the IDF Spokesperson, Foreign Ministry, Justice Ministry, Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, National Public Diplomacy Directorate in the Prime Minister’s Office, Prime Minister’s Office, and President’s Office.[1] Their activities included international-media interviews, digital publishing, briefings for officials and influencers, responses to false reports, requests for platform content removals, and proactive messaging.[1] Civilian organizations operated alongside these institutions, sometimes receiving official resources or messages and sometimes maintaining organizational independence.[2]

A central purpose was to communicate the events of October 7 and Israel’s explanation of its military response.[3] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the war’s objectives as destroying Hamas’s and Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s military and governing capabilities in Gaza, returning the hostages, and preventing future terrorist threats from Gaza against Israel.[5] He also repeatedly used the formulation “total victory,” encompassing the destruction of Hamas’s capabilities and recovery of all hostages.[6]

The communication effort combined explanations of policy with documentation, emotional appeals, and attempts to engage particular audiences.[1][2] Researchers distinguished traditional hasbara—explaining and justifying Israeli actions—from a proposed approach emphasizing audience-specific narratives, dialogue, and identification with the people in a story.[7] This distinction became a recurring theme in assessments of how Israel should communicate in an environment shaped by rapid social-media circulation and images of civilian suffering.[7]

Citizen-led digital advocacy preceded the October 2023 war: a study of Israel Under Fire examined 926 English-language Facebook posts from the 2012 and 2014 Gaza conflicts.[8] It identified four strategies: Israel’s right to defend itself, “What Would YOU Do?”, exposing Hamas propaganda, and “Free Gaza from Hamas.”[8] The perspective-taking question generated significantly greater engagement than the other strategies, leading the researchers to suggest its usefulness for countries facing a perceived “Goliath image problem”; the study did not evaluate the later war.[8]

Responsibility for official public diplomacy had moved among government institutions before October 2023.[9] A public diplomacy ministry was revived in 2009 after years of responsibilities being distributed across ministries, folded into the Strategic Affairs Ministry in 2015, and re-established by the government formed in late December 2022.[9] Netanyahu also assigned it responsibility for promoting the government’s judicial overhaul to audiences in Israel and abroad.[9]

After October 7, the Prime Minister’s Office’s National Public Diplomacy Directorate assigned wartime coordination to the Diaspora Affairs Ministry alongside the Foreign Ministry.[9] Public Diplomacy Minister Galit Distel Atbaryan resigned on October 12, explaining that the reassignment made her office redundant.[10] On October 22, the cabinet voted to close the ministry and transfer its unused budget and allocation of 29 full-time positions to the Tekuma Authority for rehabilitation of communities near the Gaza border.[9] The unused budget comprised NIS 9.4 million for 2023 and NIS 14.4 million for 2024; finalization of the redirection was to be brought to the Knesset.[9]

The funding problem extended beyond the closed ministry.[11] At a November 14 Knesset meeting, subcommittee chair Ze’ev Elkin called it “unthinkable” that the Foreign Ministry’s ongoing public-diplomacy system abroad could be disabled during wartime for lack of funding, while a Finance Ministry representative said allocated funds awaited Finance Committee approval.[11] Foreign Ministry official Emmanuel Nahshon warned that global diplomacy activity had stopped because of insufficient funds, citing an earlier activity budget of about NIS 80 million and a reduction of about NIS 30 million following the establishment of the Diaspora Affairs Ministry.[12] The Foreign Ministry subsequently clarified that the Finance Ministry’s budget division had agreed to advance NIS 100 million for wartime ministry activities, including diplomacy and advocacy.[12]

Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari appeared on television within hours of the October 7 attack and subsequently held daily briefings, published updates and clarifications, and gave interviews.[13] During the war’s opening weeks, he regularly answered journalists’ and public questions while the prime minister and ministers had not held comparable press briefings.[13] The IDF’s international communications office doubled to more than 200 personnel, including reservists and media specialists working in 14 languages, while other offices also recruited spokespeople.[1]

On October 24, the Prime Minister’s Office recruited Mark Regev, Tal Heinrich, and Eylon Levy for English-language foreign-media work; the initial ad hoc team also included Avi Hyman.[4] Levy and Regev worked shifts across international television channels, with Levy describing a schedule extending from early-morning interviews to broadcasts ending after midnight.[14] The Directorate’s work involved the police, Foreign Ministry, IDF Spokesperson, Israel Prison Service, Shin Bet, National Security Council, and Diaspora Affairs Ministry, the latter producing digital-channel material.[14] Levy served until March 2024, and the initial team subsequently unraveled.[4]

Official talking points dated November 20, 2023 framed the war around destroying Hamas’s military and governmental capabilities and securing the hostages’ return.[15] They included “Hamas = ISIS” and the position that there would be no ceasefire without the hostages’ return.[15] The document asserted that Israel was minimizing civilian harm and allowing humanitarian aid, while accusing Hamas of fabricating casualty data and exploiting humanitarian facilities for public-diplomacy advantage.[15] Government and military social-media material similarly highlighted measures the IDF said it used to reduce civilian risk, including Arabic leaflets, telephone calls, and text messages warning residents to evacuate specified areas.[1]

By December 2023, the Foreign Ministry’s Digital Division communicated in English, Arabic, Persian, Russian, Spanish, and Hebrew and coordinated more than 100 Israeli missions adapting messages to local audiences.[16] Division head David Saranga described its intended audience as both supporters likely to share material and people in the middle who lacked information.[16] He reported approximately 30 staff, more than 10,000 posts and tweets, and over 200 videos since the war began.[16] He also said three mistaken posts had been deleted or replaced, sometimes with apologies, and that around-the-clock publishing about Gaza depended on IDF confirmation, which could require waiting half an hour or an hour.[16]

By October 20, 2023, the Foreign Ministry reported more than 3,549 posts and over 1.05 billion impressions in an unusually large digital campaign.[17] Reported language totals included 663 million impressions in English, 97 million in Arabic, 123 million in Spanish, and 135 million in Persian, with approximately 200 million impressions attributed to promoted content.[17] The ministry described the campaign’s purpose as giving Israel’s government and military time to complete their objectives without international pressure to stop operations.[17]

The campaign used graphic photographs and videos from October 7, generally blurring victims’ faces, and Saranga said the published material represented about 10 percent of the brutality.[17] Approximately 25 ministry employees and external consultants worked on the activity, and 40 prominent Israeli TikTok creators were enlisted.[17] Organic publishing accompanied paid promotion on Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, and TikTok.[17] By November, reported Foreign Ministry expenditure on online advertisements containing attack footage exceeded $1.5 million, including placements on YouTube and Angry Birds; a separate $8.5 million estimate concerned government investment without establishing an identical period or scope.[1]

An April 2024 Arabic-language campaign presented material concerning sexual violence attributed to Hamas on October 7.[18] Its translated materials included dozens of articles, survivor and released-captive testimonies, emergency-responder accounts, and the report of UN Special Representative Pramila Patten.[18] Distribution was planned through an Arabic website and more than 20 ministry and embassy channels, which together reportedly had over five million followers and about 10 million weekly views.[18] Foreign Minister Israel Katz described the goal as bringing the allegations to wider audiences, while Saranga emphasized cultural sensitivity.[18]

Commercial advertising techniques also supported civilian outreach.[19] The Slingshot project adapted technology originally developed for commercial advertising to promote October 7 material to selected audiences, including Columbia University students and lecturers, staff at UN headquarters and the International Court of Justice, and users of Iranian and Arab television websites.[19] The project claimed 70 million views on major websites, including BBC, CNN, and Al Jazeera, while founder Hadar Ashuach emphasized tailoring messages to particular audiences.[19]

Digital spending expanded in 2025: a reported NIS 174 million government campaign scheduled from June through December covered Gaza-war messaging and Operation Rising Lion against Iran.[20] Its contracts included NIS 90 million with Google, NIS 60 million with YouTube, NIS 10 million with X, and NIS 14 million with Outbrain and Teads.[20] Government videos rejected claims of “starvation in Gaza,” and the advertising contracts received a tender exemption.[20]

Screenings of compiled October 7 footage brought documentation of the attack to journalists, diplomats, politicians, and other invited audiences.[21][22] Reports described the principal compilation as either 44 or 47 minutes long.[21][22] It was shown at the UN in New York and Geneva and in cities abroad, with an embassy spokesman reporting screenings in about 30 countries.[21] Saranga described the purpose as allowing journalists to view the material and judge for themselves, and considered their subsequent social-media accounts more authentic than ministry posts.[22]

The footage was not released publicly in full, partly because some victims’ families objected and mental-health experts raised concerns.[21] Other concerns included the possibility that broad circulation would reduce its impact, while the IDF considered releasing excerpts with family consent and political approval.[22] On January 10, 2024, the National Public Diplomacy Directorate, collaborating with the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, launched an international documentation website titled “Oct. 7 2023, Hamas Massacre: Documentation of Crimes Against Humanity.”[23] It contained photographs and videos with images blurred for privacy, was inaccessible from Israel, and was presented by Directorate head Moshik Aviv as a reminder of the killings as Israel appeared at the International Court of Justice.[23]

In an April 2024 six-month summary, the Government Press Office reported that more than 4,000 foreign journalists had arrived since October 7.[24] Its services included Jerusalem and Sderot briefings, weekly tours of Western Negev kibbutzim, and updates from public-diplomacy agencies.[24] It reported almost 60 tours and screenings, including visits to Kfar Aza, Sderot, Be’eri, and Nir Oz, and six screenings of attack footage.[24] Outreach also included rallies and meetings with business leaders, politicians, and journalists, alongside visits intended to convey the scale and brutality of the attack.[1]

In August 2025, the Foreign Ministry announced plans to bring approximately 400 delegations, totaling more than 5,000 participants, by year’s end.[25] Potential participants included officials, lawmakers, journalists, influencers, academics, and figures from legal, religious, cultural, and sporting communities.[25] Planned activities combined visits to affected southern communities, meetings with survivors and officials, and footage screenings.[25]

The early December 2023 mapping counted approximately 120 civilian operations rooms, 40 organizations developing hasbara technology, and 100 databases aimed at Western audiences.[2] These totals represented a decline from earlier wartime activity; about 72 initiatives were volunteer and nonprofit-based, and about 13 had undertaken hasbara before the war.[2] Participants included technology and publicity companies, academics, established pro-Israel and antisemitism-focused organizations, and independent influencers.[2]

Social media was the principal arena for these initiatives.[2] Participants circulated audience-specific material, encouraged supporters to publish posts and organize demonstrations, assembled website resources, and developed translation and information-management tools.[2] Some operated openly under organizational names, while others used a “No Logo” approach without organizational identification.[2] Many targeted English-speaking Western audiences, but some projects faded as volunteers returned to employment or concluded that their efforts had limited impact against the volume of pro-Palestinian messaging.[2]

Coordination coexisted with independence.[2] Synchronized Hasbara War Rooms covered approximately 100 independent organizations, while a WhatsApp dissemination group had about 1,000 members.[2] Some groups received government resources or official messages; others preferred to remain separate.[2] Researchers also warned that sympathetic sharing could be counterproductive, citing a widely circulated photograph of a soldier beside hostile graffiti in Gaza as material liable to damage Israel’s image among Western audiences.[2]

The speed and informality of wartime information circulation were visible from the first day.[26] In his contemporaneous essay, Arieh Kovler described Israelis turning to Telegram, where anonymous channels with official-sounding names mixed news, unverified rumors, and public videos.[26] He argued that these channels ran ahead of official news for much of the day partly because they were outside military censorship rules, and described attack videos appearing in Hamas-affiliated channels.[26]

By May 2025, the Foreign Ministry reported more than 130 international-media interviews in the preceding week, over 25 foreign-media briefings and conferences since January, approximately 20 digital campaigns, and more than 300 videos.[27] It claimed over 500 million impressions, while reporting that only NIS 60 million of a NIS 532 million campaign allocation had been used amid budget delays.[27] An August account put impressions above 650 million and said the revised NIS 532 million allocation, reduced from an announced NIS 545 million, had reached the ministry only in April.[4]

The ministry also established a media-monitoring “war room” to identify factual errors, missing Israeli voices, and broader international narratives.[4] Nevertheless, by August 2025 the National Public Diplomacy Directorate’s chief position had been vacant for over a year, and officials and former officials described understaffing, fragmented implementation, and delayed or absent messaging.[4] Verification of information about particular operations depended on the IDF and could take hours while other accounts were already shaping coverage.[4] Levy similarly argued that effective outreach required credible, timely information rather than airtime alone.[4]

A 2026 policy assessment attributed communications shortcomings to the absence of unified management, the unfilled Directorate leadership post, and politicization.[28] It argued that unclear political objectives and insufficient explanation of destruction and deaths in Gaza allowed extreme ministerial statements to shape international interpretations of government intentions.[28] Its criticisms encompassed international-media engagement, social-media handling, and humanitarian-aid communication.[28]

British sympathy figures illustrate a changing public environment without measuring the causal effect of Israeli communications.[29] Sympathy for Israel rose from 10 percent before October 7 to 21 percent on October 9, then stood at 17 percent by July 2024.[29] Sympathy for Palestinians moved from 24 percent before the attack to 15 percent on October 9, then increased to 31 percent by July 2024.[29] More broadly, casualties, destruction, and humanitarian conditions in Gaza prompted international criticism, demands for punitive measures, and calls to end the conflict.[6] US administration criticism increased during the first half of 2024 over Israeli conduct, humanitarian challenges, and whether operations advanced the stated objectives.[6]

Researchers’ November 2023 assessment characterized Israel’s initial international sympathy as broad but increasingly displaced by images of Palestinian civilian suffering.[7] They treated Hagari’s briefings, battlefield videos, and Regev’s interviews as important efforts, while arguing that factual explanation alone could not secure attention.[7] Their proposed alternative emphasized coherent stories, recognizable characters, audience identification, and understanding why listeners might want to hear Israel’s message.[7] They contrasted this with Hamas messaging that, in their interpretation, connected claims to an already resonant Palestinian narrative.[7]

In January 2024, Irwin J. Mansdorf argued that initial Western sympathy declined while strategic support continued, attributing the change principally to allegations of disproportionate force and civilian casualties.[30] He described Israel’s response as defending its conduct and presenting evidence concerning Hamas’s use of civilians and civilian facilities.[30] He also argued that prior ideological commitments shaped international attitudes and that citizen, Jewish-organizational, and pro-Israel advocacy should continue addressing misconceptions and falsehoods.[30] In August 2024, Dan Diker proposed moving from defensive hasbara to toda’a, an assertive perception-shaping approach involving government, media, and civil society; this was a policy recommendation rather than an adopted strategy.[31]

Public diplomacy also became part of the war’s documentary record.[3] A 2023–2024 hasbara collection preserved videos, pictures, drawings, and ephemera assembled or published by organizations and pro-Israel groups in multiple languages.[3] Its stated purposes included explaining October 7 worldwide and justifying Israel’s existence and wartime actions.[3] Broader archival holdings encompassed Israeli news and social networks, advocacy, solidarity, Jewish-community responses abroad, and Arabic-language material from Gaza, Palestinian Authority territories, and the wider Middle East.[32] The web holdings drew on approximately 1,500 internet addresses.[32] Preservation extended to government, local-authority, defense, advocacy, and private materials, including about 200,000 photographs and videos transferred by the Civil Administration and hundreds of thousands of security-force videos, alongside videos made by Hamas attackers.[33]

Disputes about public diplomacy concerned both evidence and the limits of communication: Israeli officials and citizens disagreed about whether the war’s objectives were achievable or mutually compatible, while Benny Gantz’s June 2024 coalition departure included criticism of postwar planning.[6] Former officials also differed over whether deteriorating international perceptions chiefly reflected communications structures or Israeli policies themselves.[4] A study based on a December 28, 2023 discussion argued that Israeli media acted as “agents of unity,” amplified military messages, and largely avoided the extent of Gaza’s destruction and civilian suffering; some journalists acknowledged insufficient scrutiny of military statements.[34]

The October 17 al-Ahli hospital explosion exemplified contested attribution and response speed.[35] Claims blaming Israel circulated before the military presented its investigation; a recording followed about 12 hours after the incident, and US, UK, and French authorities later publicly supported the Israeli account following their reviews.[35] INSS separately credited civilian influencers, supported by journalists, with helping counter the initial account.[2] Its intelligence-disclosure assessment characterized official disclosures as primarily reactive.[35] The assessment criticized an al-Shifa Hospital presentation for failing to substantiate some claims and for discrepancies between an illustrative tunnel simulation and later findings; it also concluded that an Arabic disclosure concerning the Iran-established Imam Hussein Division did not deter it.[35]

Graphic advocacy and information controls raised further objections.[17][36] Google removed about 30 advertisements as excessively violent, and some users objected to encountering graphic material without consent.[17] Emergency regulations authorized specified restrictions on broadcasters deemed immediate security threats, with November orders against Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Mayadeen.[36] Between October 7 and December 12, security agencies submitted over 39,000 content-removal requests to the State Attorney’s Cyber Unit, which sought voluntary removal of over 26,000 posts, accounts, pages, and groups; platforms removed more than 90 percent of requested material.[36] Authorities characterized it as including terrorist incitement or encouragement, but removal statistics do not independently establish every item’s classification.[36]

Covert activity generated a separate controversy.[37] Meta removed a network operating from Israel that comprised 510 Facebook accounts, 11 pages, one group, and 32 Instagram accounts, attributing it to STOIC and describing fake or stolen identities targeting US and Canadian users.[37] Separate reporting alleged that the Diaspora Affairs Ministry commissioned a campaign using fabricated accounts, AI-assisted posts, and fictitious news websites to influence US lawmakers and the public; the ministry denied involvement and any connection to STOIC.[38] These reports do not establish that the two operations were identical or that the Meta-identified network was an official government operation.[37][38]