If bombarding a besieged population at will, creating ‘Bantustans’ out of occupied territories for decades, and committing egregious, horrendous, and vile war crimes against a population is not horrid enough, the Zionist regime with its far-right demagoguery has employed operational techniques to influence informational and cyberspaces in 2023. Information on what is happening in Palestine has been infiltrated with conspiracy theories, hate speech, derogatory remarks, and ethnic profiling of Palestinians. Furthermore, muzzling out dissenting voices from those exposing Israeli atrocities is another state-sponsored tactic and demonstrates that the regime is an enemy of transparency, accountability, and humanity in 2023 and beyond. 

The strategies adopted are to provide a so-called moral cover for "Israel’s" atrocities. Since the bombardment of Gaza, users of the social media platform ‘X’ disseminated fake news in the form of a memo purportedly from the White House which stated that the Biden administration was sending $8 billion as US aid to "Israel". Similarly, posts that deliberately demonized Hamas through the dissemination of fake footage of a young girl being set on fire by mobs were actually a video from Guatemala in 2015. As a result of such propaganda warfare, platforms such as X, Telegram, and TikTok were censured for failing to prevent the deluge of disinformation as a defining characteristic of real-world politics. 

Such deluges are also gruesome and immoral. Horrific allegations of Hamas targeting babies in "Israel" for example, made their way into the front pages of major tabloids. Yet at the same time, the Zionist administration provided no evidence of infant beheadings. The truth is that it chose to peddle narratives to discredit the Palestinian’s legitimate right to self-determination and label those agitating for freedom, as terrorists. According to the Chief Executive of CREO Point which is a business intelligence group focusing on disinformation, Jean-Claude Goldenstein’s research found a ‘100x explosion’ in the number of viral claims regarding the ongoing fighting between "Israel" and Palestinian resistance which many independent verifiers considered fraudulent and abjectly false. The truth, however, is that the fraught nature of what had been taking place has enabled a battery of Zionist racist zealots to proliferate into cyberspaces, muzzle the Palestinian voice, and promote the ‘victim’ narrative to cloak state-sponsored terrorism.  

According to the New York Times, thousands of Palestinian social media users accused Facebook and Instagram of muzzling out pro-Palestinian posts despite the fact that the messages disseminated did not violate Meta’s rules. This includes messages of support for the displaced, the downtrodden, the injured and those mercilessly killed by the occupation forces. Additionally, some Palestinian users claimed that Facebook deliberately suppressed their accounts over calling for protests against Israeli atrocities in major cities in the United States including San Francisco. While not directly linked, such measures feed into the Zionist regime’s deliberate attempts to control narratives in their own favor.  

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Then comes the brazen and brutal targeting of journalists, media outlets, and organizations exposing Israeli war crimes. The war machinery has been unabashed in Southern Lebanon for example, with Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah being targetted by Israeli airstrikes. Similarly, the Agence France-Presse news agency stated that two of its reporters were injured by Israeli airstrikes. This barbarity prompted the Lebanese Press Editor’s Syndicate to condemn the targeting of journalists and unequivocally equating them as war crimes. What is equally unequivocal is that Gaza’s media has been systematically targeted with telecommunications cut off while narratives of mounting casualties are prevented from reaching the international community. The head of the Gazan government’s media office Salama Ma’arouf stated clearly that offices were targeted by the occupier’s planes while they were covering the evacuation of a residential building that was threatened with bombing in western Gaza. Similarly, the Palestinian Journalist’s Syndicate and the Palestinian Press Union rightly condemned the onslaught which seeks to stifle every ounce of righteous self-determination from the annals of Palestinian history. 

What is noticeable is that much of the blockade of the pro-Palestinian media mirrors the decades-long blockade of Gaza by the Zionist regime itself. Note that mobile networks, deliberately cutting off internet lines and exacerbating the electricity crisis are to perpetuate ‘cyber apartheid.’ which is as dangerous as physical segregation. It entails that it is permissible to wipe out Palestinian stories, history, and reflections which are a key aspect of the discourse in the Middle East. 

While Gazans are long accustomed to such state-sponsored terrorism, the deteriorating situation in 2023 has only compounded their woes. Palestinians have been struggling hard to convey real-time, accurate, unfolding events whether they are civilian casualties, military operations, or rehabilitation efforts. This real on-ground coverage is precisely what "Israel" seeks to prevent as this would only weaken its profile in the international community and result in challenges to the Netanyahu regime. 

Strong lobbying efforts are precluding any possibility of ensuring that the truth lay bare. As thousands of Palestinians are being massacred by an occupation force, information itself is a tool which can illuminate discourses and call out an occupying, fascist force for its crimes against humanity. What has unfolded is a tragedy for justice and a wake-up call for Western countries which often tout the cause of human rights, transparency, and accountability. 

"Israel" is getting away with murder in occupied territories and is stifling dissent in the process.