Jerusalem: During the 2021 Guardian of the Walls military operation, the Israel Defense Forces illegally targeted the Israeli population with a social media psychological operation to persuade residents that its airstrikes were "taking a toll" on Gaza, according to a Haaretz investigation published on Wednesday.

In order to hide the military origin of the astroturfing campaign, the IDF Spokesperson's Unit posted videos and images of Israeli airstrikes against Gaza with the hashtag #GazaRegrets, using dozens of fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok as well as collaborating with well-known Israeli influencers.

According to Haaretz, the IDF became concerned that Israelis were more impressed by viral videos of Hamas rockets striking Israel than the actions of their own military and launched the campaign a few days into the military operation in 2021.

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The IDF acknowledged to the publication that it had collaborated with influencers to disseminate video of its airstrikes on Gaza and even admitted to creating "a small number of fake accounts" for that purpose, "in order to maximise audience reach," even though the content hardly ever received likes or reposts.

It insisted that the bots had only been in use for 24 hours and that there had been no previous instances of this kind in the previous two years, dismissing the astroturf campaign as a brief, anomalous "error," however.

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Similar manipulation techniques are frequently employed by Israel's military intelligence division to sway public opinion abroad. However, it is illegal to use psychological warfare against the population at home. This law is so strict that the IDF was not allowed to use its tools at home during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, even though some officials wanted to use them for contact tracing.

Hidai Zilberman, the head of the IDF Spokesperson's Unit, has maintained that the division's responsibility is to "report nothing but the truth to the public" and that it will never engage in psychological warfare after he was discovered during the 2021 Gaza operation deliberately disseminating false information through the foreign press.

But Haaretz recently learned that the unit was not only working with local influencers to sway Israeli public opinion on a regular basis, but it was also directing media to a Telegram channel run by a creator the IDF had hired as a consultant for "psychological warfare."

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When presented with the results of their investigation as a whole, a senior defence official called the situation "scandalous... That shouldn't have happened in that circumstance.