'Burn their homes’: Israeli WhatsApp groups organize attacks on Palestinians

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Several Israeli WhatsApp and Telegram groups, some of which have been active for over a year, are openly calling for and planning real-world violence against Palestinians, including the sale and use of weapons and grenades. 

“Friends, we have to shake the country,” said one user in a WhatsApp group called “Love Israel" that’s been active since April 2021. The user called for members of the group to meet at a specific time and place in the West Bank where many Palestinians pass on their way to work in the occupied territories. “If the government is not going to make a mess, we will!”

Read more: Israeli settlers storm Sheikh Jarrah and attack Palestinians

According to screenshots of communications received by Motherboard, the same message has circulated across various WhatsApp and Telegram groups in recent days.

“Bring knives, brass knuckles, sticks, and stones,” one user said in response to the message posted in a Telegram group. “Molotov cocktails too.” 

“We’re 17 people already, some of us are armed,” another user said.

“Set for tonight,” a user in a WhatsApp Group said. “We will not be silent,” he said, next to a picture of him holding two hand grenades.

Ynet reported that the police identified, questioned, and released the user who posted the picture; a 13-year-old who took the grenades from his older brother, a soldier in the Israeli occupation army.

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“We need to burn their homes,” one user in the same WhatsApp group said.

Users in the same group posted pictures of and offered to sell AK-47 and M-16 rifles.

WhatsApp group members expressly stated that they need to replicate the type of violence that was planned on WhatsApp in May 2021, when Israeli citizens carried out many acts of violence against Palestinians, including the destruction of a Palestinian ice cream parlor in "Bat Yam".

The inciting WhatsApp and Telegram posts by Israelis were gathered and shared with "Motherboard" by "FakeReporter", a nonprofit that monitors and reports disinformation and extremist content online, and "Democratic Bloc", an organization dedicated to "defending democracy in 'Israel'." The posts were also covered by Israeli media.

Read more: Israeli settlers attack Palestinian shepherds

“I don’t want them to monitor groups, but I want a clear process for what you do about these groups,” Achiya Schatz, director of FakeReporter, said.

“As a private messaging service we do not have access to the contents of people's chats. We provide simple options for users to make reports to us and we respond to valid legal requests from law enforcement,” a WhatsApp spokesperson told "Motherboard".

Telegram did not respond to a request for comment.

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According to Schatz, the majority of the organizations are significantly influenced by and support "Kahanism", a Jewish extremist ideology named after Meir Kahane that regards "all Arabs living in 'Israel' as adversaries of a Jewish theocratic state," a place which they insolently occupied to start with. 

"The feeling is that they want violence in the streets and it’s a Kahanist action. They talk about in terms of religious wars. But in many cases people who join these groups are not religious," Schatz said.