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.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

Repeated visits reveal fresh insights, revelations and questions.

By Jonathan Feldstein

On the way to the Gaza border, my friend asked how many times I had been there since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack and massacre.

I had to think about it.

I remember the first trip vividly. Several other trips were outstanding whether visiting soldiers and bringing supplies or preparing and providing food, one on one like the time with my friend Marziyeh (Marzi) Amirizadeh and seeing the devastation through the eyes of a woman who suffered the evil hatred of radical Islam growing up and living in Iran and identifying the evil we faced with the evil that she lived under for most of her life, or planning for and implementing our incredible Root & Branch program bringing Christian volunteers to harvest olives in Israel and along the Gaza border.

There were other trips with friends and donors, as well as relatives, media and more. In the car, I estimated that I had visited the Gaza border at least 30 times. In retrospect it’s probably more. Surely averaging once a month. Considering my travels, that’s a lot.

Some trips blur together. Some are memorable for different reasons. All are emotionally draining. Yesterday was no different. It had been a while since the last time.

Along the roads from Routes 34, 232, 25 and more, I noticed the increased number of memorials along the side of the road. From once piles of stones with flags and photographs these have been “developed” to permanent and thoughtful memorials. In America and other countries, you see similar respectful homage where people have died in car accidents. The roads here have been repaved and show no signs of what happened that day anymore. But I remember the countless points where one would drive and see large dark spots on the road with a slight bump as you drove over them, burn marks from the high temperature flames where cars were set on fire. Torched with people inside.

The roads no longer have the scars but the memorials along the side of the roads show the points where hundreds of people were shot and burned to death, their bodies and their cars littering the roads.

I looked at the piles of the shot up and burnt remains of the vehicles from that day. More than 1000 cars, many of which became death traps for their passengers. As we visited the site that also has been built up as a permanent memorial, first I noticed dozens of tour buses. Most were for Israelis for whom the site has become a pilgrimage. People wanting to see, understand, bear witness to the horrors of that day.

There are few tourists in Israel now so most of the guides and survivors telling stories of what happened that day were speaking Hebrew. What broke my heart, other than the memorial itself, was the prevalence of young people. It’s terrible that we must educate our children about this all and it’s part of the legacy we leave them. It’s not new but it is still sad. Many high school students. Some of whom got to practice their English in a spontaneous conversation with Marzi about her life and imprisonment in Iran. She connected the dots of the Islamic Republic and Hamas as the same evil. That we have the same enemy. That the Iranian people are not the regime that hijacked Iran 47 years ago and that the people support Israel.

Three years ago, they were early adolescence and three years from now they will all be serving in the army defending their country. I wondered if in 7 or 10 or 15 years, my own grandson’s will be part of this pilgrimage.

I saw a group of soldiers. Three years earlier they were the age of the high school students we encountered. They stood there with weapons over their shoulders, against the backdrop of piles of dozens of burnt remains of just some of the cars. Their weapons are used to defend us against the evil that perpetrated the crimes that we witnessed with the cars just as one reminder, listening to things they surely remember from three years ago when they were just students and Israel was at its most vulnerable.

At the site of the Nova Music Festival where some 25% of the 1200 people killed that day were slaughtered, the memorials have become uniform and standardized, albeit with personal touches from the loved ones of those who were killed and mutilated there that day. I always describe it as a cross between Woodstock and Auschwitz. We spent nearly an hour there, but what’s really needed to understand the enormity and the scope of the loss is much more, even if you’ve been there multiple times before as I have.

In Sderot, we visited the powerful memorial at the site of the former police station in which all the police on duty that morning were killed and many others on the street. As hard as it is to think, amid the slaughter there was incredible heroism and it was a miracle that more people were not killed there that day. Of course, that’s no comfort for the survivors whose loved ones are no longer with us.

I told the story of the Suisa family, the young parents, Odaya and Dolev, who were trying to flee Sderot in their car and were caught in an ambush and murdered in front of their two young daughters, leaving them orphans. It must be noted that the person who sacrificed his life trying to save the family was a Bedouin Arab, Amer Odeh Abu Sabila. A construction worker who was in Sderot early that fateful Saturday morning, Amer heard Odaya screaming after Dolev had been killed and got into the driver’s seat to try and bring Odaya and her two young daughters to safety at the Sderot police station. Not knowing that the police station had already been overrun by the terrorists, both Abu Sabila and Odaya were murdered, while the two kids, Romi, 6, and Lia, 3, lay on the floor of the car unscathed. There is harrowing video footage from that day that shows the two young girls screaming for help as police officers arrived.

Amer Odeh Abu Sabila’s story is not unique as many Israeli Arabs were killed that day, including a police officer inside the police station, but is important to recount as it reveals the reality of life in Israel of Arabs who tragically died alongside their fellow Jewish citizens.

As the sun was setting, we made our way to one of the lookout points from which Gaza is visible. Despite international claims to the contrary, even with the naked eye one can see entire cities still standing. And even three years and a week after the inhuman Hamas attack and massacre, there was a jarring audible punctuation of the reality as we heard gunfire in the distance coming from inside Gaza, indicating that if these killers are not fought and pushed back, they will rise and try to attack us again and again.

The numbers alone do not sufficiently represent the enormity of the day. Each of the 1200 people, including Jewish and Arab Moslem and Druze Israelis, as well as many foreigners including Christians, is the loss of an entire universe for them and their loved ones. But there’s a national story as well, timeless in the sense that it’s an unfortunate part of the reality of Jewish history and the foreseeable future.

However many times I have gone to visit these sites, each time thinking that there’s nothing particularly new in doing so other than bringing people who have not yet witnessed it, I am sadly shocked at how there’s still so much to absorb and process and how such experiences are necessary.

About the writer:

Jonathan Feldstein ­­­­- President of the US based non-profit Genesis123 Foundation whose mission is to build bridges between Jews and Christians – is a freelance writer whose articles appear in The Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, Townhall, NorthJersey.com, Algemeiner Journal, The Jewish Press, major Christian websites and more.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).