Israel monitoring
The Israel focus: what we monitor in foreign influence operations aimed at audiences in Israel — and, just as importantly, what we deliberately leave alone.
What and why
This focus watches what foreign influence operations tell audiences in Israel — about the wars, about their own government and army, about the divides inside their society, and about who among them belongs. The operators are principally Iranian state media and Iranian-run networks, and secondarily the Russian ecosystem Syto has followed since its first day, whose Russian-language output reaches Israel's Russian-speaking community of more than a million people.
Israel votes on 27 October 2026, and its own State Comptroller concluded in July 2026 that the country is “completely unprepared” for foreign election interference — no national policy, no responsible authority.Researchers report that roughly a fifth of identified disinformation campaigns reached Israeli media as genuine reporting. We are not re-proving that this happens; we show what is actually being said right now, by sources with published attribution.
The documented operations run a playbook this project already knows line by line: demoralise the home front, impersonate locals at scale, and widen the divides that already exist. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies described one in June 2025 — a Persian-language Telegram channel of roughly 400,000 subscribers handing volunteers ready-made Hebrew phrases so they could post on X as Israelis. That is the Ukrainian playbook with the nouns changed, which is precisely why we think we can be useful here.
This is a single-lens focus: every narrative in it comes from sources addressed to audiences in Israel — in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian or English.
The direction test
In scope: a narrative is in scope if it addresses people in Israel and pushes them somewhere that serves a hostile foreign state's interests. In practice that means home-front demoralisation; claims that the army and the political leadership have failed or are lying; the impersonation of Israelis by foreign-run accounts; and the wedges aimed at particular communities — reservists, the protest movement, the nationalist right, Haredi communities, Arab citizens, and Russian speakers.
Hebrew-language is not the same as Israel-directed, and neither is “about Israel”. Iranian domestic messaging, regional diplomacy and religious broadcasting are out of scope even when Israel is mentioned throughout. The deciding question is never which country a text mentions, but who benefits if a reader in Israel believes it.
Israeli domestic argument is out of scope, all of it — the ceasefire, the inquiry, conscription, the courts, the government's conduct of the war. Israelis argue about these fiercely and that argument is theirs. We are not a party to it, and a card that could only be written by taking one of its sides is a card we do not publish.
Where the line sits, and who is NOT on this page
This focus monitors foreign operations only. Our constitution puts it as a principle: Syto defends societies under foreign information attack; it does not take sides in their politics. Applied here, that rules three things out, and we would rather state them than let their absence be noticed and read as evasion.
Israel's own information operations are not monitored by this focus. They exist — Meta and OpenAI both removed an Israeli-run campaign in 2024 — and we do not pretend otherwise. Domestic actors are out of scope in every focus, symmetrically: we do not monitor Ukraine's government communications either. Saying so plainly is the only version of this that survives contact with a sceptical reader.
Organic pro-Palestinian opinion is not monitored anywhere, in Israel or in our own markets. It is not a foreign operation, it rests on contested claims no evidence model can adjudicate, and treating it as propaganda would be exactly the category error this project exists to avoid. Where a Russian or Iranian network pushes Gaza-wedge content at Western audiences, that already belongs to our US, Germany and Poland focuses — as an attributable operation, not as an opinion.
Channels of proscribed organisations are not monitored pending legal clearance. Several are unquestionably part of the information war here. Our archive stores what it reads, and storing the output of a proscribed organisation is a question for counsel in several of the jurisdictions we publish into, so the roster carries a documented do-not-enable list rather than a quiet gap.
What we cannot see
WhatsApp and SMS are closed to us, and they matter here. Both are documented vectors in this campaign — the June 2025 war brought threatening messages sent directly to Israeli phones — and both are private channels that Syto has no honest way to monitor. We do not read them, we cannot measure them, and nothing on this site should be taken as a picture of what is circulating there.
We name this rather than letting the shape of our coverage imply that public channels are the whole campaign. They are not. A monitoring project that quietly omits its blind spot is claiming more than it can support.
How we write about this campaign
We never launder a fabricated claim by repeating it. This campaign's signature moves are impersonation and real footage placed in a false context. Describing that technique must never restate the fabrication as fact, never attribute an invented statement to the person it was invented for, and never imply a real Israeli said what a foreign-run account said in their name.
We keep origin and amplification apart. Grief, exhaustion, distrust of institutions and the arguments between Israel's communities are real and exist without Tehran or Moscow. Where an operation seizes on them we write “amplifies”, never “invented”. Where a claim demonstrably originated inside an operation, we say that plainly instead.
We do not attribute networks ourselves. The findings behind this roster belong to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, FakeReporter, Israel's Institute for National Security Studies, CEPA, Microsoft, and the sanctions authorities of the US and the EU. We cite them; we never claim them. Where a designation names a parent broadcaster rather than the specific channel, we say so.
We do not rank anyone's suffering. Our subject is a manipulation and who is running it — never a verdict on how much a real event mattered, or to whom.
Sources
The full roster for this focus, each entry with a dated receipt — sources — Israel. How we select them and what the T1–T3 tiers mean — source vetting.