1:29
- ABC News
- November 24, 2023
Inside 'information war' in Israel-Hamas conflict
"Online, what speaks powerfully is images," one expert said.
1:29
Alaqad often posts firsthand accounts of the war along with videos showing the aftermath of bombings, some shot from the balcony of her apartment in Gaza. In another recent post on TikTok, the sounds of loud explosions could be heard outside her apartment.
\"We're inside the house right now and literally we can't breathe,\" Alaqad said in the post. She then went to her balcony and recorded the thick smoke filling the sky. \"No view. You can't see anything,\" she said.
When ABC News attempted to reach Alaqad for an interview, she did not respond. In one of her recent posts, she said, her videos speak for themselves.
On the Israeli side, Adiel Cohen -- a social media content creator and influencer, and an enlisted IDF reservist currently on the frontlines on Israel's northern border -- told ABC News his number of followers has doubled since the war began.
\"When it comes to views, likes and engagement and even the amount of pieces of content put out there, we are largely outnumbered,\" the 25-year-old Cohen said, referring to pro-Israel and pro-Jewish content compared to pro-Palestinian social media content.
![\"PHOTO:](\"http://a.abcnews.com/images/International/Adiel-Cohen-ht-gmh-231117_1700250744556_hpEmbed_2x3_384.jpg\")
Cohen recently posted an emotional video from inside Kfar Aza in southern Israel, where numerous residents were killed on Oct. 7 when Hamas terrorists stormed through a security fence at the edge of the kibbutz, shooting indiscriminately at residents, setting fire to homes and killing entire families.
In the video, a tearful Cohen described how one woman was in a bomb shelter that was set on fire by the terrorists to force her out.
Cohen -- a college student who boasts more than 51,000 followers on Instagram, 65,000 on TikTok and more than 12,000 on X -- said he sees himself as a pro-Israeli \"messenger\" debunking misinformation that goes around on social media.
\"I'm not here to read out messages put out by the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs or something, or the IDF spokespeople,\" Cohen said. \"I'm here to speak of my experience as an Israeli Jew living here through the conflict, suffering from terror, suffering from rocket attacks for years, telling my story as much as I can, as much as the security allows me to as a soldier, as a student who left everything behind and was drafted to a war that was imposed on me.\"
Cohen said he also believes Israel is losing the social media information war.
\"It's just that there are a lot less of us [Israelis] and there are a lot more of those who claim to be pro-Palestine, and the images from Gaza to the regular person who doesn't understand the context of what's going on are a lot more horrifying,\" Cohen said. \"It also has to do with the popular narrative nowadays that Israel has the upper hand and Palestinians are the underdog in this conflict. And for a lot of people, it's almost impossible when they live abroad, when they live in America, to understand the nuance, that it's not about Israel versus the Palestinians because the war is not against Palestinians, it's against Hamas.\"
The unfiltered social media posts from inside Gaza have become a vital source of information for the world as Egypt and Israel control entry into the Gaza Strip, not allowing many foreign reporters to enter independently. The battlefield inside Gaza is mostly off-limits to major international news organizations. An ABC News crew was recently allowed into Gaza while embedded with an IDF unit.
Inside Gaza, citizen journalists, filmmakers, mothers, poets, writers, students and photographers posting on social media say they've seen their engagement exponentially grow as the fighting rages on.
\"The impact is huge. That's the power of the iPhone, arming people to be media outlets for the democratization of information,\" Valerie Wirtschafter, a fellow from the Brookings Institute studying the impact of emerging technologies, told ABC News. \"At its core, to be able to document and share is really, really important, especially in places that journalists don't have access to because everyday citizens are living there. The challenge is that there is such a high volume of information now that the footage gets muddled with other videos and it's leading to an overarching sense of mistrust.\"
![\"PHOTO:](\"http://a.abcnews.com/images/International/motaz-azaiza-ht-gmh-112316_1700157433868_hpEmbed_5x7_384.jpg\")
Gaza photojournalist Motaz Azaiza recently posted to his more than 14.8 million Instagram followers a photo of two Palestinian children lying on a hospital gurney, their heads and limbs bandaged and their faces bloodied. \"Children in Gaza have been witnessing endless violence by the Israeli forces,\" Azaiza wrote in the post, which garnered more than 840,000 likes. \"These children do not deserve what they are currently experiencing.\"
In another recent post, Azaiza is seen running through the dust of a recently bombed Gaza neighborhood, horns blaring in the background. \"It was closer to my grandma's house, an airstrike near here!\" he wrote in the post, which was viewed more than 700,000 times.
Hind Khoudary, a Palestinian journalist inside Gaza, has more than 825,000 followers on Instagram, gaining thousands of them after the war started, and that number continues to grow. In a recent post on Instagram that generated more than 100,000 likes, she appealed for assistance in getting flak jackets and protective clothing so she can continue reporting in the region. In a Nov. 8 post, she showed a home reduced to a pile of rubble, saying as she panned the camera over the destruction, \"There are still 24 family members who are buried under this rubble.\"
![\"PHOTO:](\"http://a.abcnews.com/images/US/hind-khoudary-ht-gmh-231113_1699894118369_hpMain_4x3t_384.jpg\")
Patrikarakos said that under Hamas, Gaza has been a \"hugely patriarchal society.\"
\"If you were to pick someone who should be the most powerless person in that society, it would be a young female civilian. But now, because of the power of her posts, she [Khoudary] became an incredibly powerful voice for the Palestinian point of view,\" Patrikarakos said.
But as Patrikarakos pointed out, there is a greater context to these posts, saying the ultimate tragedy of this war is that the suffering of the citizens of Gaza is being used by Hamas to set their narrative to the world.
\"Hamas needs influencers to highlight the suffering of its own people because Hamas doesn't have an Air Force. So, it needs the influencers,\" Patrikarakos said. \"You see the more Israel destroys Gaza, the more battlefield victories it has, the less the sympathy of the world because Hamas has a strategy to brandish its own people's bodies to the world. It's the goal. They can't defeat Israel with airpower, so they stack the media with images of dead Gazans and hope that the world sees.\"
Since its Oct. 7 attack, Hamas has said in multiple statements it was expecting retaliation by Israel, but that it would be the price the group is willing to pay for change for the Palestinian people. \"Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it,\" Ghazi Hamad, a member of the Hamas politburo, told Beirut's LBCI Lebanon News TV station in an interview that aired Oct. 24. \"We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.\"
The impact of this narrative could have consequences for how the war plays out eventually and the international pressure on Israel, Boot told ABC News.
\"Israel doesn't want to alienate the Western world,\" Boot said. \"I think this is something Hamas understands. I think Hamas has made a judgment that creating more Palestinian casualties will lead to its own benefit.\"
Ben Jensen, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, D.C., said it's important for the public to use a skeptical eye when taking a close look at all the aspects that go into shaping a narrative of the war on both sides -- including social media posts, the videos and the press conferences.
\"Take a close look at those emotionally laden stories. You can't just accept it, you should ask, is that really true? What's the other side? What is their perspective?\" said Jensen, who authored the book \"Information at War: Military Innovation, Battle Networks, and the Future of Artificial Intelligence.\"
\"It's important that we do it because if we don't do it soon, we are literally going to be tearing ourselves apart jacked up on emotion. TikTok is the ultimate emotional drug,\" Jensen added.
ABC News' Bruno Roeber and Bill Hutchinson contributed to this report.
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