For the past year or so, Israel has been subjected to an onslaught of fake news, including the widespread dissemination of disinformation through a plethora of digital channels. As Shomrim revealed in an extensive investigative report last year, there are Russian fingerprints all over these attacks. While at first these fake-news attacks were relatively limited in their scope, in the months since October 7 – and while the alliance between Russia and Iran became ever closer – the online attacks against Israel have intensified. In recent weeks, there has been a significant increase in offensive activities. Besides creating fake versions of websites that mimic the appearance of trusted news sources (known as Doppelganger operations, which we will discuss later), the disinformation campaign now employs artificial intelligence to generate fake images and videos.

Shomrim contacted researchers from the @Antibot4Navalny project, which focuses on monitoring Russian disinformation operations, who confirmed that these campaigns are linked. “Some of the accounts which shared the fake videos have, in the past, shared content that was first published exclusively in the framework of a Doppelganger campaign,” one of the researchers told Shomrim. They added that the fake news that was part of the campaign has been disseminated by dozens of bots on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, which also utilized more traditional digital marketing methods to increase online exposure (such as using trending hashtags to increase visibility). By doing so, the people operating these bots were able to drag genuine users into their campaign – and these users went on to share the content and enabled the fake news to spread even further.

The people behind these fake news campaigns deal extensively with every aspect of the war in Gaza, the conflict on the northern border and the polarization of Israeli society. One of the videos that has been shared by several fictitious accounts, for example, claims that if war breaks out between Israel and Lebanon, it would be an Israeli aggression against “the only Christian country in the Middle East.” The video also claims that the “Israeli excuse” for such an attack would be that it was fighting Hezbollah. Watch.

The video shows images from the massive explosion at Beirut port in August 2020, which is erroneously described as being the result of an Israeli airstrike. Watch.

Other videos that have been uploaded in recent weeks deal with the protests within Israel. These videos refer to the Israeli protests as “Maidan”– a reference to the 2014 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, which Russian propaganda tried to portray as an illegal military coup. The videos suggest that “Israel is already undergoing a process of Ukrainization,” while showing images of protestors starting fires on the Ayalon Freeway with ominous narration and music.

Some of the videos also feature articles from the Russian-language media in Israel, which deal with the protests – and claim that Israel is descending into chaos. Watch.

Targeting a Haredi newspaper and a Jewish-American website

As Shomrim revealed last year, groups directly linked to the Kremlin have been conducting online campaigns against Israel since October 7. While there is, of course, a bottomless pit of anonymous fake news on the internet, and identifying the creator is difficult, European governments and organizations (including France and various European Union bodies) have confirmed links to Russia by conducting forensic digital analysis of the campaigns. The identical elements from these campaigns – including the basic strategy, the tools used, the way in which fictitious accounts used to spread fake news are opened on social media platforms and the tools used to generate fake usernames – clearly show the fingerprints of those responsible.

Alongside AI-generated videos, Israel is constantly being subjected to the aforementioned Doppelganger operations, named after the German loanword for a biologically unrelated look-alike or double. This includes the creation and dissemination on social media of fake news reports from Israeli and global media outlets. Among the Israeli websites that have been faked are Walla, Mako and Liberal, while websites like Le Monde and Le Parisien in France, Die Welt and Bild in Germany and several news sites in Ukraine have all been targeted in this way.

In the past few days, new websites have been added to the list of Doppelganger victims, after thousands of bot accounts on X started sharing fake news purportedly from the English-language version of the Hamodia website, which is popular in some ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. Another victim was the Forward, the leading Jewish-American news outlet. This was the first time that these two sites had been targeted by individuals with links to Russia and, as in the previous cases, the Doppelganger websites were an almost exact replica of the original news sites, with perfect facsimiles of the designs and domain names.

A fake article purporting to be from ultra-Orthodox news outlet Hamodia

And how the fake article is disseminated online

The content that was shared using these falsified websites and other methods includes articles critical of U.S. President Joe Biden and praising his opponent in the upcoming election, former President Donald Trump. The campaign, which was written in English and aimed directly at Jewish Americans, tried to paint a negative picture of Biden’s policies on Israel – just five months before the election. One of the messages included in the campaign was that, under the Biden administration, the United States is no longer a dependable ally for Israel and that Israel’s interests would be much better served if Trump were to win reelection.

The fake article, which even falsely indicates the name of a staff reporter at the Forward as its author, also tries to drive a wedge between Israel and Ukraine, by arguing that Kyiv is getting preferential treatment compared to Jerusalem. “Instead of supplying ammunition to the IDF as agreed, the Biden administration prefers to support the Ukrainian army,” the article claims.

A fake article purporting to be from American-Jewish newspaper the Forward

And how the fake article is disseminated online

On X, the army of bots shares links which lead the users to face copies of the Forward and Hamodia websites, using a system known as domain spoofing, and relying on several intermediary websites redirecting users from a link shared on social media to the final destination; a fake media article. Researchers from the anti-disinformation group @Antibot4Navalny told Shomrim that they discovered links between this campaign and previous Doppelganger operations that used exactly the same system.

Appealing to antisemitic sentiments

Europe is another front – which is not related to Israel – on which there has been a marked increase in the number of disinformation campaigns. In recent weeks, campaigns have sought to influence voters in the elections for the European Parliament and the upcoming French election. Fake articles, purporting to be from reputable French news outlets, have been used to promote the interests of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party.

In addition, those responsible for spreading fake news are also trying to stir up antisemitic sentiment. Not content with spoofing Israeli websites, they have also created fake versions of international news outlets in an attempt to engender anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli sentiment in France and other countries. In the past, these campaigns tried to convince internet users that President Macron was doing nothing to stop the war in the Gaza Strip and that he has “Palestinian blood on his hands.”  A parallel campaign used images of the Shoah Memorial, which had been vandalized with blood-red hands, to accuse Macron of not doing enough in the battle against antisemitism. An ongoing French police investigation found that the graffiti of the blood-red hands had been daubed by three men who had prepared their operation from Bulgaria, and whose modus operandi mimics an earlier influence campaign that is believed to have been waged by Russia against France. The pictures of the graffiti were spread online to accuse Macron of having Jewish blood on his hands and of turning a blind eye to antisemitism in order to exacerbate domestic tensions within French society, given the sharp rise in antisemitic acts and hate crimes since October 7.