Shomrim has decided not to reveal the full names and other identifying details of most of the people interviewed for this article – but not necessarily because they requested it. We are not revealing their identities because, since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7, they have been subjected to an aggressive campaign of online harassment – a doxing attack. The practice of doxing – a portmanteau of “dropping documents” – has become prevalent among pro-Palestinian individuals and groups across the world, who reveal the personal details of their victims, including their various online accounts, telephone numbers, home address, and even their license plate number. In the case of soldiers or reservists, the details of the unit in which they serve can also be leaked.

“Every day, I get countless phone calls and incessant messages on WhatsApp and Instagram, most of them from Indonesia,” says Noy, an IDF reservist who shares pro-Israel content with his 25,000 followers on Instagram. “I am used to the hate, but this is something different. It’s one step beyond and it’s really annoying. There is a feeling that it is very personal: They have all my accounts, my emails, my location. It’s crazy what’s happening right now.”

Noy is used to fighting. When he was 18, he immigrated to Israel and joined the IDF. Many years later, he was in New York when Hamas launched its October 7 attack and he quickly boarded a plane back to Israel to serve in the reserves. So, although Noy is more than familiar with the rules of the real-life battleground, nothing could prepare him for the virtual hostilities he was about to face.

“There is incessant harassment and it is happening on every platform and every social media network,” he tells Shomrim. “Two seconds before you called, I got five calls from an unidentified number. They sent me texts calling me a baby killer and messages that had been translated into Hebrew using Google Translation. I get endless WhatsApp alerts telling me that someone is trying to register my phone number, in order to get access to my messages – and other messages warning me that hackers are trying to gain access to my email. I have no intention of letting it get to me; I just hope they’ll get bored in the end. In the meantime, I’m trying to ignore it because something like this could really unsettle a person.”

So, what can be done? Noy says that Israeli experts on doxing have advised him simply to keep a low profile. This rather unprofessional-sounding advice was also offered to other victims of doxing, suggesting that the Israeli authorities, including the IDF and the defense establishment, do not have an effective solution for dealing with attacks of this kind. This is something that Sharon, a 22-year-old reservist, discovered when she told her commanding officers that she was the target of a doxing attack and they had no solution for her. Nofar, another soldier who was doxed on social media, was told by her commanding officers to “be strong.” Ben, another victim with whom Shomrim spoke, says that he asked a friend who works for the police to help – but still has not received a response.

"They sent me texts calling me a baby killer and messages that had been translated into Hebrew using Google Translation. I get endless WhatsApp alerts telling me that someone is trying to register my phone number.”

Thousands of Indonesians Learning Hebrew

Doxing is defined as the action or process of searching for and publishing private or identifying information about a particular individual on the internet, typically with malicious intent. The practice has been in use since the early 2000s in online forums such as the notorious 4chan website and, over time, it spread to broader communities. In the past, searching for private information about an individual required a certain degree of hacking expertise. Today, however, much of the work can be done using readily available applications which allow someone to mine sensitive personal data about an individual from databases that have been hacked and the contents leaked. From a relatively marginal phenomenon, doxing has become a global trend – and one which will only get worse.

Since October 7, the number of doxing attacks carried out by pro-Palestinian activists has skyrocketed. In one such incident, hundreds of Australian Jews were doxed. It should be noted that the Israeli side has also used doxing. For example, there were reports that French Jews harassed politicians they perceived as being pro-Palestinian and Israeli Jews who doxed Arab citizens (as well as Jewish Israelis who were identified as “traitors” for expressing reservations about the war in Gaza). Having said that, most of the doxing activity is carried out by pro-Palestinian activists and it appears that the epicenter of online doxing activity against Israel is Indonesia – the most populous Muslim country in the world, whose nationals are known for being highly active on social media.

Shomrim managed to gain access to a private Telegram channel called “Free Data Zionists,” which is the origin of many of the doxing attacks against Israelis. The 400 members of the channel – most of them from Indonesia or other South Asian countries – share the telephone numbers, email addresses, leaked passwords, locations, license plate numbers, and account names on social media platforms of their “targets,” who are usually Israeli soldiers or public officials and their relatives.

The next stage is that the information coming from that relatively small group makes its way to a much larger Indonesia Telegram group which has 20,000 members – all of whom are recruited to harass an Israeli target. Members of this group are part of a semi-organized camp, which is growing daily, of online activists known as #julidfisabilillah. It was founded late last year, at the height of the Israel-Hamas war, by an Indonesian activist known as Erlangga Greschinov, who refers to himself as the “commander of the Anti-Israel Netizen Special Operations Unit.” Greschinov has been barred from social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, for spearheading doxing campaigns, but continued to operate unfettered on Telegram.

Shomrim contacted Greschinov to find out more about his online activities. He was very frank and unapologetic about his operations – the opposite was true – and he revealed the extent of his activities, including the fact that he is learning Hebrew in order, as he put it, to be more effective in the struggle against Israel. “I started sharing daily updates about Palestine on October 7. The operations of #julidfisabilillah began on November 18. We create content about Palestine, we try to disrupt the Zionist narrative and we are learning Hebrew to understand the Zionist mindset.”

According to Greschinov, “at least 200,000 Indonesians have joined the movement. Our hackers have obtained the telephone numbers of senior Israeli officials and we shared them with the public here in Indonesia.” Greschinov adds that the group’s activity is not limited to the internet and reaches the upper echelons of the Indonesian government. He claims, for example, that his group launched a campaign to prevent Israeli-owned vessels from docking at Indonesian ports and to interfere with the transportation of cargoes from Asia to Israel. The campaign went all the way to the president’s office and, in late January, President Joko Widodo announced that he was planning to bar Israeli ships from docking in Indonesian ports in a move to show solidarity for Palestine.

According to Greschinov, the information shared by his group finds its way to other social media platforms, including X and TikTok. This is despite the fact that both these platforms claim that they remove any account that engages in doxing.

Likewise, in order to ensure that the personal information of Israeli soldiers remains exposed to all on the internet and that the companies which run the platforms are unable to monitor and remove it, Indonesian hackers use Doxbin, a hugely popular website among fringe groups in the United States that is dedicated entirely to doxing – as the name implies. As of the time of writing, the private information of more than 100 Israeli soldiers and public officials is readily accessible on the site.

According to Greschinov, “at least 200,000 Indonesians have joined the movement. Our hackers have obtained the telephone numbers of senior Israeli officials and we shared them with the public here in Indonesia.”

‘I Know All Your Info!’

Let’s go back to the victims of this Indonesian doxing group and to 23-year-old reservist Sharon. Like many other soldiers her age, Sharon uploads many photographs and videos of herself in uniform to platforms like Instagram and TikTok. These photos reveal, inter alia, which unit the soldiers belong to, where they serve and with whom. Some of Sharon’s posts are also shared on popular Instagram accounts featuring female IDF soldiers; the comments there always include insults from pro-Palestinians.

Around a month ago, posts containing Sharon’s photos started to garner a lot of negative responses and her cell phone started ringing nonstop. Like hundreds of other Israeli soldiers in the past few weeks, her contact details and sensitive personal information were published online, where they are accessible to anyone who wanted to harass her. “I was called into the reserves and one night, after guard duty, I went to sleep,” she tells Shomrim. “When I woke up, everything had started: I got thousands of WhatsApp and Instagram messages. I got so many messages, most of them from pro-Palestinian activists in Indonesia, all wishing I would die. They also sent me tons of messages containing a lot of information about myself, including my address. There were threats like, ‘I know all your info!’”

In retrospect, Sharon admits that she should have been more careful when publishing information about her whereabouts and that she now understands that the threats could leave her without a safe online space. “There are a lot of stalkers on Instagram and they can see what I do, where I am – and it’s a difficult experience,” she adds. “It has completely interfered with my life. I would get phone calls in the middle of the night, I couldn’t sleep, they would wake me up at six o’clock every morning. I had to put my phone into airplane mode. I blocked incoming calls, but that meant my friends couldn’t call me either. It was really unsettling and pretty scary.”

Sharon says that she tried to contact Meta, the company that owns WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, but did not manage to get through. The messages she received included explicit death threats in English, Indonesian and even Hebrew, with the help of automated translation tools.

Someone with an Indonesian telephone number and a Hamas terrorist as a profile picture, for example, sent her the following message: “Wow, you monkey. We’ll kill you and your family.” The trolls also targeted Sharon’s friends and family whom she had tagged in her Instagram posts and, once they were on the radar, they also started getting countless hateful comments.

Doxing victims say that the practice can ruin somebody’s life. In the case of soldiers, doxing can reveal their identities and put them at risk of arrest and prosecution in certain countries. Moreover, large databases with the details of Israeli soldiers could be used in the future by hostile elements.

"I got thousands of WhatsApp and Instagram messages. They also sent me tons of messages containing a lot of information about myself, including my address. There were threats like, ‘I know all your info!’”

‘The IDF does not have what it takes to deal with the problem’

Israel’s Protection of Privacy Law, which was passed in 1981, defines doxing as an illegal activity – but there’s very little that the Israeli law can do when it comes to thousands of Indonesians living in a country with which Israel does not even have diplomatic relations.

That said, there are ways of dealing with the phenomenon of doxing, as Dr. Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, explains. According to Altshuler, the IDF can instruct soldiers not to post personal information online, not to publish photographs of themselves in uniform alongside personal information. “The army has to take responsibility and issue instructions in this spirit,” she tells Shomrim. “And if doxing has already happened, there are two solutions: the first is to respond to the harassment using cyber warfare, focusing on the attackers, and the second is to put pressure on the social media platforms themselves to put an end to such behavior.”

The fact that Israeli authorities are not taking any action on the issue indicates that there is a broader problem: “The IDF does not have what it takes to deal with the problem,” Shwartz Altshuler says and calls for the establishment of a dedicated IDF unit to tackle the issue. “This could be especially important considering the fact that, in the next few years, the phenomenon of doxing is likely to spread even further. The IDF has yet to assess the phenomenon, its extent, and the nature of this new and dangerous mode of warfare, which does not even rely on a foreign army. Anyone who has internet access can join the campaign.”

The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit submitted the following response: “Since the outbreak of the war, individuals serving in the IDF have become a target for online attacks by the enemy. The IDF is working with a number of tools to safeguard the security of its personnel. The issue is known to us and several relevant bodies are dealing with it.”