The Gaza war has been extensively covered by media outlets around the world. This coverage ranges from traditional news outlets to social media platforms, and covers a wide variety of perspectives and narratives.
During the conflict, Israel imposed strict controls on international journalists, requiring military escorts and pre-broadcast reviews of their footage. In January 2024, the Supreme Court of Israel upheld these requirements on security grounds. Prominent U.S. media organizations like NBC and CNN confirmed that Israel had the authority to approve content from Gaza, with journalists embedded with the Israeli military required to submit materials for review.
Social media has played a significant role in sharing information, with platforms like TikTok seeing billions of views on related content. Research from October 2023 found that pro-Palestinian posts vastly outnumbered pro-Israeli ones on TikTok and Instagram. The conflict has led to the spread of misleading information and propaganda. Hamas has been banned from most social media platforms, although content from the group still circulates on sites like Telegram. In Gaza, local content creators documented their experiences, gaining significant followings.
In Israel, social media has been used to garner support for military actions, with the government running ads portraying Hamas negatively. Some Israeli influencers and content creators have mocked and dehumanized Palestinians, leading to widespread criticism. Videos posted by Israeli soldiers showing abuse and destruction in Gaza have gone viral, prompting international condemnation and internal investigations by the Israel Defence Forces.
The war has had a severe impact on Gaza's infrastructure and economy, with extensive damage to homes, hospitals, schools, and essential services. The conflict has caused significant job losses and economic decline in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. International scrutiny and media coverage have highlighted the human toll and the challenges faced by journalists operating in the region.
Coverage by type Social media Social media has played a major part in sharing information about the conflict, especially platforms like TikTok where war-related videos have garnered billions of views. , the hashtag #Palestine has some 27.8 billion views, and the hashtag #Israel has 23 billion on TikTok. Similar statistics were seen in later analysis with research done by the company Humanz, a tech company founded by former IDF intelligence officers. Humanz showed that during October 2023 there were 7.39 billion posts with pro-Israeli tags posted to Instagram and TikTok, while there were 109.61 billion posts with pro-Palestinian tags published on the sites in the same time. The documentation and spreading of information of the conflict is not a new phenomenon with multiple clips showing the continued conflict going viral since the app was first public. However, this has also resulted in the dissemination of misleading information and propaganda.
In mid-October, the Communications and digital minister Fahmi Fadzil confirmed that the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) would meet with TikTok's parent company ByteDance following complaints from Malaysian TikTok users that content containing words like Hamas were removed by the social media company.
'Esther Project' Israeli influencer network
News outlets reported that Israel is paying US influencers to improve its public image on Instagram, TikTok, and other social media platforms by paying them to post content. Records filed with the US Department of Justice, as required by the Foreign Agents Registration Act, show that the Israeli government is funding a clandestine political messaging campaign in the US, including influencer campaigning and more traditional big-budget political campaigning, to "assist with promoting cultural interchange between the United States and Israel." The campaign includes up to US$900,000 in payments and comes amid Israel's contract with AI-driven political campaign firm Clock Tower X LLC and Brad Parscale, former campaign manager of Donald Trump, worth US$1.5 million per month.
According to the DOJ filings, the firm responsible for Israel's influencer network, Bridges Partners LLC, was established in June 2025 Delaware by Israeli consultants Uri Steinberg and Yair Levi. The firm then received about $200,000 to recruit social media influencers based in the US. The arrangement went through the German division of the global public relations firm Havas.
In a meeting with influencers in New York, Netanyahu said, "We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we engage, and the most important ones are on social media."
Hamas and in Palestine In the hours after the attack, Hamas "employed a broad, sophisticated media strategy" using bot accounts to spread graphic, emotionally charged and false propaganda that was picked up and repeated by official accounts and foreign governments. Cyabra, an Israeli social media intelligence company found that on the day after the attack, one in four posts about the conflict on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X were from fake accounts. The New York Times described the start of the Gaza war as releasing a "deluge of online propaganda and disinformation" that was "larger than anything seen before". It described the conflict as "fast becoming a world war online" and stated that Russia, China, Iran and its proxies had used state media and covert influence campaigns on social media networks to support Hamas, undermine Israel, criticize the United States and cause unrest. James Rubin of the U.S. State Department's Global Engagement Center called coverage of the conflict as being swept up in "an undeclared information war with authoritarian countries".
Hamas has been barred from most social media sites and are unable to post on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok; however, some content from the group has been posted on other sites such as Telegram, where an account reportedly aligned to Hamas would post photos and videos in support of Hamas or documenting their actions, per the Atlantic Council. Following the attack, Hamas used bot accounts originating in countries such as Pakistan to sidestep bans on Facebook and X.
In Gaza, young content creators, such as Hind Khoudary, Plestia Alaqad, Motaz Azaiza, and Bisan Owda, documented their lives through the war, gaining significant followings on social media. A food blogger, Hamada Shaqoura, went viral on social media with videos of himself cooking meals out of canned humanitarian aid and distributing them to displaced children. In Yemen, teenage influencer Rashid, nicknamed "Timhouthi Chalamet", went viral on TikTok and X after posting a video of himself touring the captured ship Galaxy Leader and was later interviewed by streamer Hasan Piker. An image of a teenage boy holding onto his deceased mother in Gaza went viral on social media in February 2024. In June 2024, a former Meta employee sued the company for wrongful termination, stating it was suppressing Palestinian content. In July 2024, a Meta spokesperson stated an interview with Jeremy Scahill on Democracy Now! had been erroneously removed and was restored.
In March 2025, Israel raised claims that Gaza based blogger Saleh al-Jafarawi, who reportedly is known as "Hamas' social media star' raised funds for Hamas, and the rebuilding of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis before pocketing the donations totaling about $4 million. The Palestinian Health Ministry issued a statement that denied any involvement with the fundraising via social media, and the ministry and Palestinian activist Mustafa Asfour condemned the actions.
In Israel In January 2024 The Intercept reported that Israel tech volunteers in the group Iron Truth used their personal connections with those in Big Tech, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X, to censor information from social media they deemed to be harmful to Israeli interests. The project was launched after October 7 by Dani Kaganovitch, a Tel Aviv-based software engineer at Google. A bot on Telegram was created to forward all flagged content to "sympathetic insiders" at Big Tech companies who would then act to remove it. The Intercept reported that "So far, nearly 2,000 participants have flagged a wide variety of posts for removal, from content that’s clearly racist or false to posts that are merely critical of Israel or sympathetic to Palestinians, according to chat logs reviewed by The Intercept." Emerson Brooking, a fellow with the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, told The Intercept: "They’re not trying to ensure an open, secure, accessible online space for all, free from disinformation. They’re trying to target and remove information and disinformation that they see as harmful or dangerous to Israelis.” Kaganovitch said the project also has allies outside Israel's Silicon Valley. The group's organizers met with the director of a controversial Israeli government cyber unit, and its core team of more than 50 volunteers and 10 programmers includes a former member of the Israeli Parliament.
Videos of the attacks against Israel and its citizens were reportedly spread through paid partnership with the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry, and is a part of the Israeli governments sweeping social media campaign to build support for its military actions. Reportedly in the week following the October attacks by Hamas, Israel's Foreign Affairs Ministry had run about 30 ads that were seen over 4 million times on X, which portrayed Hamas as a "vicious terrorist group" similar to ISIS.
Israeli travel blogger and social influencer Ella Kenan pivoted her content shortly after the 7 October attacks and began to push the hashtag 'HamasIsISIS' through her 200,000 followers. She also created a poster stating 'Greta Thunberg Supports ISIS' after Thunberg posted a picture of herself and friends at a rally for Gaza. The poster spread across multiple different social networks.
In early November 2023, a satirical video created by Israeli actress Noa Tishby was criticized for being Islamophobic and queerphobic after it went viral. The video was captioned as showing "...pro-Hamas college students on their journey to normalizing a massacre", adding that "a huge part of our Jewish culture is using humor to deal with trauma". In the video the actors stated that "everyone is welcome, LGBTQH..." with the H to stand for Hamas and held a fake interview with a freedom fighter in Gaza, while wearing outfits that were "oppression chic".
In December 2023 it was reported that a Telegram channel with at the time about 10,500 members was created and run by the IDF's Influencing Department. The channel was originally titled "The Avengers" but was soon changed to Azazel, to sound closer to the Hebrew pronunciation for Gaza and another word for hell and had posted over 700 photos and videos. Many of the videos showed the destruction of Gaza and mocking it or degrading Palestinians such as images where two Palestinian men were dressed as pigs and captioned claiming they were roaches and products of incest.
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