Israel has launched an international online shock campaign as the war against Hamas and Israeli army retaliation in Gaza left thousands dead after the Palestinian Islamist movement attacked on October 7 – showing the tears of a grandmother, a rescuer recounting the horrors, a corpse appearing on screen while playing a video game or on an Internet page is a “new” and “risky” game, according to some experts consulted by AFP and quoted by News.ro.

The most commented video is a cartoon. The unicorn darts into the rainbow and the words “Just as you would do anything to protect your child, we will do anything to protect ours” appear on the screen in black letters.

About 40 short videos were posted on the YouTube page of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs after the October 7 massacre. Since that date, the Israeli side has killed more than 1,400 people, mostly civilians, executed that day by Hamas, according to Israeli authorities.

Photo source: Cristian Dina | Dreamstime.com

Since then, Israel has carried out numerous bombings in the Gaza Strip, killing more than 7,000 people, including 3,000 children, according to the Hamas Health Ministry.

Many of these Israeli clips, translated into English, have been broadcast as interstitial ads on social media, classic websites or even game consoles. After each video, the slogans were underlined: #HamasIsIsis (“Hamas = Daesh”, the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State organization), #BringThemHome (“Bring them home”) for the more than 200 hostages taken by Hamas, or “Stand with Israel”. , stand with humanity” (“Stand with Israel, with humanity”).

Some clips cannot be viewed. The medical examiner gives in when he talks about the bodies of the Israelis found “together, hugging each other, during the burning.” Another comments on photos of burnt child bodies.

In response to questions from AFP about the video, Google made it unavailable for minors on October 25.

“The following content may contain graphic or violent images,” Internet users are warned. The coroner’s first speech, delivered in front of the body of an adult whose face is in the foreground, is instead still available to anyone, despite the digital giant’s rules banning “shocking (or) overt images of physical trauma”.

1.1 billion views

“All over the world we want it to be clear that the actions committed by the terrorists of Hamas are equivalent to the actions committed by the Islamic State group and “that the fate of Hamas will be the fate of IS, that is, total and complete total destruction,” – justifies the Israeli diplomat Emmanuel Nahshon, in an interview with AFP.

After taking control of vast swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq in 2014, the IS jihadist organization, fought by an international coalition led by the United States, suffered successive defeats until it lost all of its territory in 2019.

“This is how to communicate in 2023,” declares the deputy director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, an administration whose “core of work” for several years has been “less traditional media and more social networks.”

Thanks to this campaign, “we exceeded one billion views”, congratulates an Israeli official, in exchange for an investment, in his modest words, “of the order of several hundred thousand dollars”.

These figures are partly supported by the digital marketing company Semrush, whose algorithms recorded 1.1 billion views in about 30 countries, paying Israel $8.5 million. Over 95% of Israel’s international efforts were distributed in three countries: France, home to Europe’s largest Jewish and Arab-Muslim community ($4.6 million), followed by Germany ($2.4 million) and the United Kingdom ($ 1.2 million), according to Semrush. According to the same source, these three countries also accounted for 96% of views between October 7 and 23.

However, many researchers reject the comparison between Hamas and the Islamic State. An expert on jihadist groups, Aymenn Al-Tamimi, considers this to be “false”. The Islamic State group considers Hamas “apostate” because it “does not properly apply Islamic law (Sharia)” and does not want to establish a “worldwide caliphate,” says a researcher at the Middle East Forum Philadelphia. In addition, Hamas repressed IS activists in the Gaza Strip.

“Intolerable images”

Israel’s influence campaign, innovative on a national scale in both form and content, has “one purpose,” according to Stephanie Lamy, an expert on wartime communications strategies, which is to justify Israel’s “right of response” in Gaza, “possible guaranteeing impunity in case of violation of international law”.

Unlike the Ukrainian conflict, where the horror of the Russian killings in Buch in the spring of 2022 gradually unfolded through the “filter of journalism”, Israel and Hamas are now waging their “political struggle” online and “quasi-simultaneously”, Stephanie analyzes Lamy.

Hamas remains less direct than Israel, in the context of which the movement is considered a “terrorist organization” by Israel, the United States or the European Union (EU) and is banned from Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter).

Until this week, Hamas had official Telegram channels and posted numerous images of casualties and destruction from Israeli bombings in the Gaza Strip, as well as videos of the October 7 attacks taken by some militants, and all kinds of anti-Israel messages.

Recently, these channels have been disabled in Android, Google’s mobile operating system. According to data published by the Digital Forensic Research Laboratory (DFRLab) of the American think tank Atlantic Council, the audience of the pro-Hamas Telegram channel “Gaza now” has grown from 350,000 subscribers to over a million since October 7. .

Hamas, which shows civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip, wants to “strengthen Arab and Muslim public opinion” sensitive to the Palestinian cause, emphasizes Professor Arnaud Mercier.

Israel, for its part, wants to “cause emotional electric shock” and “affective shock” in its favor in the West, this information specialist estimates.

The method is “risky” and “potentially counterproductive,” he says, “for an audience “that didn’t want to be exposed to excruciating images.”

Photo: Dreamstime.com