Israel’s failure in the information war
By Andrew Fox
On 26th February 2025, tens of thousands of Israelis lined the roads for the funeral procession of Shiri Bibas and her sons, Ariel and Kfir. Orange balloons, the colour of the boys’ hair, marked the route. Men dressed as Batman, Ariel’s favourite superhero, saluted as the coffins passed. Ariel had been four when he was abducted; Kfir was nine months old. Through family photographs and a desperate campaign to bring them home, strangers worldwide came to know these two little boys, who were brutally killed by Hamas in Gaza.
Israel’s government should have understood why their story reached people who would never read an IDF briefing. The families had kept their children recognisable through months of arguing about a war in which they had no say. Doing so deserved sustained government support from the start. Leaving so much of it to people already enduring the unimaginable was a failure of both compassion and, if we are being brutally cold about it, strategy.
Psychologists call the tendency to respond more readily to a named person than to anonymous suffering the ‘identifiable victim effect’. In a 2007 study, Deborah Small, George Loewenstein and Paul Slovic compared an appeal about deprivation across Africa with one about Rokia, a seven-year-old girl in Mali. Among participants who received no prior explanation of the effect, those reading about Rokia donated an average of $2.83, compared with $1.17 from those given the statistics.
That said, for balance, later research has been less conclusive: a 2016 meta-analysis found a small average effect, and a subsequent replication using hypothetical donations failed to reproduce it. We cannot turn a charitable-giving experiment into a measure of how many people changed their minds about Gaza. It does, however, give us a useful starting point for understanding why an individual’s suffering can command attention that casualty figures struggle to hold.
There is much less uncertainty about Yahya Sinwar’s calculation. In June 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported on messages in which he treated Palestinian civilian deaths as an advantage in the war. Citing the losses suffered in other conflicts, he called them “necessary sacrifices”. More deaths meant more pressure on Israel. Sinwar believed he could outlast the Israeli offensive whilst the people of Gaza paid for it. The suffering itself needed no invention. In November 2023, footage of Khaled Nabhan kissing his dead granddaughter, Reem, travelled around the world. She was three. In CNN’s account, he remembered the game in which she pulled his beard, and he pulled her pigtails; he spoke about the fruit the children had wanted and the tangerines he had managed to find. Anyone with a child or grandchild could recognise the affection in those small exchanges, and something of the agony of losing them. This is the key to the information war: making the suffering of innocents feel personal to those observing the physical war from abroad.
The opportunity for Hamas arose when that grief provided the sole explanation for the war. The viewer saw a dead child and the consequences of an Israeli strike, with all context stripped away. The men who had launched the massacre on 7th October and who continued to hold hostages could disappear from the account. Whenever sympathy for Palestinians became pressure on Israel to stop fighting, without equivalent pressure on Hamas to release their captives and surrender power, their strategy benefited. Foreign audiences did not have to like Hamas for this to work.
They used Israeli suffering with the same ruthlessness. On 16th October 2023, Hamas released footage of Mia Schem, wounded and captive. Her mother, Keren, recognised her daughter’s fear and believed she could see Mia repeating what her captors had told her to say. Hamas had abducted her; now they controlled what her family could see of her. A Palestinian family’s bereavement could be used to generate pressure against the offensive, whilst an Israeli family’s desperation could be used to press for a deal on Hamas’s terms. Their control over the hostages gave them a way to prolong that desperation.
The bitter irony is that Israel had their own human stories from the first morning, and yet was unwilling, and many will argue, rightly so, to use those stories as an information war opportunity. Shani Louk was a 22-year-old German-Israeli tattoo artist who went to Nova to dance. Much of the world first encountered her through the footage of her body in a pickup truck, subjected to the humiliation her killers chose for her. Her family’s memorial website shows her drawings and offers her tattoo designs for others to use. There is work there which she made before anyone knew her name, and which people can still choose to carry on their skin. Her family have given strangers a way to know her beyond the manner of her death.
The families of the observers at Nahal Oz have done something similar. Roni Eshel was 19 and loved Taylor Swift. Her parents planted fruit trees in her memorial park because she loved them. Her father, Eyal, has also spoken about the warnings she gave before the attack and the army’s failure to listen. Remembering Roni properly means making room for all of this. Her youth and enthusiasms belong alongside the responsibility she carried at the border, and her father’s anger at the people who were supposed to protect her.
These efforts by ordinary Israelis and their friends worldwide began early. The “Kidnapped” posters created by Nitzan Mintz, Dede Bandaid and Tal Huber put names and photographs on streets around the world within weeks of the massacre. Israeli officials spoke about the hostages too, including Kfir Bibas. The Israeli government failed to turn those scattered efforts into a coherent campaign, with the resources and continuity a prolonged information war required.
In October 2025, former IDF spokesman Nachman Shai wrote that Israel still lacked a unified public advocacy structure that brought government and civil society together. He was right. Two years into the war, this was an extraordinary indictment of the government’s priorities. I would go further than Shai’s criticism of the machinery. Explaining why the IDF had struck a tunnel was necessary, but the explanation also needed to reach people who had no understanding of what it meant to live within reach of Hamas or the way in which they weaponised the suffering of their own people. The victims’ families could make that danger comprehensible in ways a military briefing could not.
The Nova exhibition shows what was possible. It opened in Tel Aviv in December 2023 and reached London in May 2026, bringing belongings recovered from the festival together with testimony from survivors and bereaved relatives. A friend of mine went multiple times with a variety of people from different backgrounds, and they all came away with a different perspective on 7 October and the subsequent war in Gaza. The organisers had been doing this work for years. Their achievement makes the Israeli government’s failure harder to excuse: people outside the state had already demonstrated how to give foreign audiences a sustained encounter with the lives destroyed on 7th October. Israel should have helped such work reach far beyond those already inclined to listen.
The audience is more hostile now. Pew’s June 2026 findings showed that 69% of British adults viewed Israel unfavourably, up from 61% a year earlier. Let us be real: anger at Israeli policy and the destruction in Gaza cannot simply be attributed to manipulation, and no poll tells us what a better Israeli campaign would have achieved. It does show how difficult it is to secure a hearing for Israel today.
Israel ceded the initiative while much of the world was forming its understanding of the war. Testimony can still change minds, but a family speaking now may first have to persuade an audience that their loss deserves a hearing at all. The opportunity to shape those first impressions has gone. Recovering ground will take more than belatedly discovering that the dead had names. The government should pay for translation and help willing families take their testimony abroad, without making support conditional on what they say. If ministers want the world to hear Roni Eshel’s story, they must accept that her father will also tell the world who ignored her warnings. They cannot ask for the authority of his grief and then edit out his accusation.
No bereaved family should have to owe the state a PR campaign. Those willing to speak deserve its support, with the freedom to say things ministers would rather the world did not hear. Israel’s government should have understood this when families were putting up posters and pleading for help. By the time people lined the roads with orange balloons, those families had spent months asking the world to care. They should never have had to shoulder so much of that work themselves.
About the writer:
A veteran of three grueling tours of Afghanistan, Major Andrew Fox holds a Batchelor’s degree in Law & Politics, a Master’s in Military History & War Studies, Msc in Psychology and is currently studying for a PhD in History.
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