White House Aide Warns Israel Against ‘Smashing Into Rafah’
The president has grown increasingly wary of a major assault in the densely populated city in southern Gaza.

A White House spokesman warned on Thursday that Israel “smashing into Rafah” would not eradicate Hamas as he urged the country to find alternatives to the long-threatened assault on a city where more than a million Palestinians are sheltering.

John F. Kirby, a White House national security spokesman, said President Biden shares Israel’s goal of eradicating the terrorist group that attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing more than 1,200 people and taking more than 200 hostages.

But Mr. Biden has grown increasingly wary of a major assault in the densely populated city of Rafah in southern Gaza. Since the war began, more than 34,000 people have died in Gaza, according to local health authorities. The United States fears an operation in Rafah would lead to widespread civilian casualties.

“An enduring defeat of Hamas certainly remains the Israeli goal, and we share that goal with them,” Mr. Kirby said. “Smashing into Rafah, in his view, will not advance that objective, will not get to that sustainable and enduring defeat of Hamas.”

Those concerns led Mr. Biden last week to pause the delivery of 3,500 bombs to Israel — the first time he leveraged U.S. arms to try to influence how the war is waged. On Wednesday, he said he would also withhold artillery if Israel went ahead with a major operation in Rafah.

“If they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities, that deal with that problem,” Mr. Biden said in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett.

He also acknowledged that Israel had used American bombs to kill civilians in Gaza, reflecting his growing unease with the mounting death toll as the war grinds on.

Mr. Kirby also tried to assuage concerns that the United States was breaking with its closest ally in the Middle East.

“The argument that somehow we’re walking away from Israel fly in the face of the facts,” Mr. Kirby said Thursday, citing Mr. Biden’s visit to Israel within the days of the Oct. 7 attack, providing money and military expertise for its war, and putting American fighter pilots in the sky to shoot down Iranian drones.

He said the United States believes that Israel has “put an enormous amount of pressure on Hamas, and that there are better ways to go after what is left of Hamas in Rafah than a major ground operation.”

Mr. Kirby said the United States was still working with Israel on ways it can help it defeat Hamas, such as ensuring that the border between Gaza and Egypt cannot be used for smuggling weapons and targeting Hamas’s leaders.

He also noted that while the United States has temporarily paused the transfer of bombs, Israel was “still getting the vast, vast majority of everything that they need to defend themselves,” and that a recent funding package passed by Congress will continue to send billions to Israel.

Mr. Biden’s decision to pause certain weapons shipments to Israel underscored brewing frustrations between Mr. Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

Mr. Netanyahu has said that Israel would move forward with its invasion in Rafah even without global support. In the last week, Israeli forces have carried out a number of targeted strikes in Rafah, and showed other signs of a major ground invasion, including the evacuation of more than 100,000 people.

On Thursday, the Israeli leader said: “If we need to stand alone, we will stand alone. I have said that, if necessary, we will fight with our fingernails. But we have much more than fingernails and with that same strength of spirit, with God’s help, together we will win.”

With a little help from Moscow and Beijing, Israel lost the social media battle
After October 7, dozens of volunteer and tech-backed initiatives organized to fill the vacuum left by the Israeli government. After six months of digital warring, it feels like a losing battle

In the days and hours after the blast in Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza on October 17, social media was rife with claims that Israel was responsible for it. Though it turned out not to be the case, even today, false posts about what happened there continue to appear online, claiming without a shadow of a doubt that it was the IDF that bombed the hospital.

Many in Israel consider these posts as no more than false propaganda – fake news designed to shift international public opinion on the war in the Gaza Strip. But social media researchers and activists who fight fake news see something else: Israel's total failure in its "hasbara" (public diplomacy) campaign, which has come despite an abundance of warning signs.

An analysis of these posts and of other similar ones, demonstrates that its not just popular online support boosting the false claims. Those active against the Israeli narrative are well organized. According to several social media researchers, Israeli high-tech workers who volunteered in the different influence efforts, and sources in the Israeli intelligence community, an array of forces have aligned to back the pro-Palestinian narrative.

They describe a digital distribution mechanism whose nexus is accounts operated by pro-Hamas forces, including in Gaza and Iran. But its not just that: Their content reverberates widely thanks to amplification by known mouthpieces, outlets and even influence campaigns linked to Moscow and Beijing who are interested in vilifying the United States and the administration of President Joe Biden, using Gaza as an excuse.

Among others, researches point to established influence networks that have already been exposed, such as the Chinese "Shadow Play" and the Russian "Doppelgänger" campaigns, both of which suddenly began to share content related to the war in Gaza after historically ignoring the topic and region.

Meanwhile, these two are further amplified, not always in bad faith, by pro-Palestinian and anti-Western media groups and influencers in a variety of fields, including some who belong to the antisemitic right or the progressive left in the U.S. and EU.

Anthony Goldbloom, the founder of Kaggle, which was purchased by Google, is considered a leading information scientist. Early on during the war, he sensed there was an issue online. Using his data skills, he collected information from TikTok and found that the ratio between pro-Israel and anti-Israeli videos on was 45:1.

Goldbloom told Haaretz at the end of last year that a large part of the support may be organic, as there are many more Muslims than Jews globally. However, according to his analysis, over 50 percent of the pro-Palestinian videos to which Americans were exposed at the time seemed to originate in Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

He admits that collecting data from TikTok is hard, but says that the posts he managed to collect included graphic videos, October 7 denialism, and some voicing support for Hamas and terrorism, all things that should anyway be taken offline.

Coincidentally, shortly after October 7, Goldbloom encountered TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew at a social event in the United States. He says that he tried to speak to him about the issue, but was unsuccessful. At the same time, Haaretz learned that Jewish and Israeli employees in companies such as Meta, Google and others who also identified similar issues on the platforms, tried to turn to the relevant teams via internal pipelines – and failed.

As Goldbloom and other senior tech workers tried to pull strings and use connections, in Israel too efforts started being made to repel the tsunami of disinformation and incitement on social media. Private citizens who believed that the various hasbara organizations in Israel aren't sufficiently organized and weren't doing their job, began to try to fill the vacuum on their own.

Among other things, an employee at TikTok Israel turned into an informal national complaint center after his personal phone number went viral among concerned parents. He was inundated with requests – but he too was unable to wield any influence.

Not all of the initiatives were by individuals, though. Several civil society organizations, advertising firms and high-tech companies – some of them large and well known – had decided, concurrently and without coordination, to join the online monitoring efforts.

According to information obtained by Haaretz, from the start of the war until the beginning of 2024, dozens of such independent "hasbara war rooms" were set up in an attempt to fight everything from disinformation to misinformation, to antisemitism and incitement, and also to create pro-Israeli content.

But soon, these spontaneous efforts hit a wall, exposing a problem Israeli social media researchers had feared for years: Israel and the Israeli public hadn't prepared to repel an information assault of such magnitude.

Volunteers, even those aided by technology, were unable to properly find content or flag it.

Many resources were wasted on misplaced moderation attempts. For example, content considered insulting or problematic by those reporting was flagged, despite the fact that it didn't violate the rules of the social media platforms, and therefore in the end wasn't removed. Generally, drawing the distinction between content that is illegal, like posts that incite to violence, as opposed to content that is upsetting to Israelis, is tough – and doing so at scale is nearly impossible.

Ari Ben Ami, a social media researcher and the owner of Telemetry, a company that monitors influence activity on Telegram, talks of another issue in social media monitoring. Like other researchers in the field, Ben Ami notes that nowadays, popular social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram focus on video clips – whereas the technological tools developed in the past were built for text.

More importantly, all activists encountered a problem familiar to social media researchers: the inability to gather information from social media platforms, for example from closed groups or private profiles. Social media platforms, for their part, block access to their data both for their users' privacy and for financial reasons.

In order to overcome this problem, the activists used Israeli companies such as Bright Data, which specializes in gathering information from open online sources, and were joined by sophisticated civilian initiatives such as Iron Truth and Digital Dome, which not only develop tools to find problematic content, but also created a monitoring pipeline to make sure that content that should be removed, actually is.

These enabled the volunteers to find and report posts more easily and efficiently.

Moderation was also made possible thanks to the Israeli company ActiveFence, which help social media platforms monitor posts that were reported as harmful or inciting, and to classify them accordingly.

In the case of Digital Dome, a technological initiative that included a team of volunteers, over 110,000 problematic posts were successfully reported over a period of six months – about a quarter of which were removed by the social media platforms themselves. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and even TikTok are in contact with the Israeli Justice Ministry, which notifies them of content classified as inciting according to Israeli law.

However, the volunteers are still finding it difficult to work with Telegram.

Nevertheless, a summary report by Digital Dome obtained by Haaretz asserts that activists who worked closely with the company managed to cause the removal of 24 Telegram channels. The organization also boasts of restricting so-called "super spreaders" of anti-Israel information, taking credit for putting an end to live meetings on X (formerly Twitter) moderated by an official Hamas spokesman, and the restriction of videos by organizations such as Eye on Palestine.

Another success is related to the Israel firm XPOS, which also managed to bring about the removal of Telegram channels that spread false and inciting content, through the Justice Ministry.

According to Maya Zehavi, one of the leaders of Digital Dome, it seems that social media platforms had little motivation to enforce their own guidelines concerning inciting or racist content. "It doesn't seem that there was really any urgency there, as we see in other areas such as pornography and drug dealing," she says.

Recently, disinformation watchdog Fake Reporter published an investigation that exposed an Arab-language influence network called Isnad, Arabic for "support" or "reinforcement."

Operated by volunteers, the network provides ready-made databases that contain anti-Israeli materials. It includes Telegram groups in which users receive daily tasks, including the dissemination of anti-Israel content and "reliable" interaction, according to the operators, of fake profiles with Israeli users, to help give the operation credibility. Their declared purpose: "to dismantle the Israeli public's support for the war, to damage the image of Israeli victory and to emphasize Gaza's steadfastness and Palestinian resistance."

According to Ben Ami, other such networks exist and operate from several countries around the world. Other researchers who found similar campaigns, describe how most of them start out on Telegram and from there move to other social media platforms.

Ben Ami says that so far he has been able to identify almost 300 users and channels that work for the benefit of Hamas and are indirectly linked to Iran and groups of hackers working on its behalf. However, attempts to block these channels were only partially successful. Most of the time, Telegram blocks access from Israel to groups connected to Hamas – instead of removing them.

Researchers and other activists say that the true power of these influence networks is not their own. In fact, Hamas and Iran, intelligence analyst say, do not have a proper influence infrastructure in the West. The success of many of these anti-Israeli efforts stems from the fact that they receive the support of Beijing and Moscow and their online proxies.

"Hamas doesn't really have a significant influence apparatus, and what they do have is mainly support from Iran," says Ben Ami. "Most of their influence is directed to the Arab world. They don't have infrastructure in the West, but China and Russia do have it. And we see how they are disproportionately focused on the war in Gaza, and how they're united on this subject in an almost unprecedented manner."

"It's not only nonorganic activity, it's not only fake accounts," adds Zehavi. "If anything, what's disturbing here is that there's money from China, Russia or Qatar, which actually fund initiatives or influencers that are super spreaders – and that is entirely organic."

Whatever the case, almost seven months into the war, it seems that most of the pro-Israeli volunteer organizations and tech initiatives have all but evaporated or merged. Most of them have understood that the tools at their disposal are very limited. Monitoring social media is an expensive business, and it's hard to operate it without an ongoing financial investment.

But above all, it seems that the activists understood that they're fighting tremendous forces. "We're alone, as Israelis – and certainly as volunteers – we can no longer stop this," says one activist. "It's impossible to argue any more; it's simply not a level playing field."

**

TikTok said in response: "In the first six months of the war we removed over 3.1 million video clips and stopped over 140,000 live broadcasts in the area of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, due to violations of the rules of our community. These included content that promoted Hamas, hateful speech, violent extremism and misleading information. During the same period, we removed tens of millions of posts and over 320 million fake accounts all over the world."

"In addition, we mobilized resources to help us to improve our proactive automatic identification and we reinforced our content-checking teams. We clarified our policy, conducted additional training sessions for content checkers, opened a designated war room for the war, and cooperated regularly with legal authorities all over the world."

Israel's National Public Diplomacy Directorate: "From the first hours of the outbreak of the war the National Public Diplomacy Directorate in the Prime Minister's Office has been waging war on an unprecedented scale in the global public diplomacy arena, in order to create legitimacy for Israel's policy and for its actions on the battlefield. The [directorate's] activity embodies a multi-systemic, integrated and adapted effort for engaging in hasbara and public diplomacy, installations and productions, spokesmanship, communications and advertising activity, based on the national hasbara policy that is decided on a daily basis in the special war room that was opened in the Kirya Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv. It's important to point out in particular the 'HamasMassacre' website, which was launched in cooperation with the IDF Spokesperson in order to fight denial of the October 7 massacre."

IDF readies for north Gaza combat, blames Hamas regrouping on lack of diplomatic process

Israeli army forces are preparing for combat in Jabaliya, north of Gaza City, which it had claimed was clear of Hamas battalions in December. 150,000 residents were called to evacuate southward

The IDF deployed forces to the city of Jabalya, north of Gaza City, months after it announced that the Hamas battalions in it had been defeated, and that it no longer has a military framework in the area.

On Saturday morning, the army called on Jabaliya's residents to evacuate to western Gaza City in preparation for renewed combat in the area.

The IDF claimed, unofficially, that the absence of a clear diplomatic process in conjunction with the fighting and the lack of defined objectives are affecting the military achievements of the war.

Most of the IDF forces left the Gaza Strip about a month ago and have since only been stationed along the route stretching from the northern to the southern part of the Strip.

On Saturday morning, 150,000 residents of the city were called to evacuate to Gaza City, southwest of Jabalya. Leaflets dropped by the military in the city and in neighboring Beit Lahia read: "You are in a dangerous war zone, Hamas is trying to rebuild its strength, and therefore, the army will act forcefully against terrorist organizations in the area. Anyone who remains there will be in danger."

The IDF stated that the move was carried out to distance residents from the combat zone in accordance with international law, and a senior officer added that after the evacuation, forces that initially prepared for action in Rafah will enter Jabaliya.

According to Israeli army sources, after the withdrawal of forces from Gaza last month, Hamas reorganized and rebuilt its forces in the northern area, which has not yet been cleared for residents to return to en masse.

In December, a top IDF officer in Gaza combat said that the army defeated Hamas's northern division, including the Jabalya battalion. The city is one of the first places where Israel fought when it invaded the Gaza Strip, two weeks after October 7.

Palestinian sources in Gaza told Haaretz that Hamas and other factions are trying to intensify the fighting in the northern part of the Strip and in Gaza City in particular through guerrilla tactics, attempting to convey that the organization is still functioning and in control of what is happening in the Strip.

According to the sources, Hamas leadership seeks to signal that even a possible takeover of Rafah will not end the war.

On Friday, four IDF soldiers were killed in an explosion in the Zaytoun neighborhood in Gaza, and rockets were fired at the Israeli southern city of Be'er Sheva for the first time in five months.

At the same time, the evacuation area in the southern city of Rafah was expanded westward on Saturday morning, now including the refugee camps of Rafah and Shaboura.

The city's residents, around 300,000 of whom have left for the Mawasi area so far, described chaos around the evacuation and stated that its expansion signifies that the city's capture has already begun, despite Israel's statements about a limited operation.

A few points:

1. President Biden has always been a friend to Israel, but the arms-halt for Rafah is deeply misguided.

Here’s why:
A. Israel’s leverage on Hamas leaders is that we’re coming to kill them and nobody likes dying.
If you prevent Israel from entering Rafah, you’ve taken away Hamas leaders’  incentive to cut a hostage deal.

B. It may create a miscalculation for Hezbollah and the other Jihadists in the neighbourhood.
They might mistakenly think that Israel doesn’t have enough arms and ammo-depth, which might tempt them to attack us.

C. If we run short on precision-bombs we’ll have to use less precise ones>>more civilians will die.
The precise opposite of everybody’s intention.

D. A halt sends a message of daylight btwn US and its ally Israel.
Bad here and everywhere.

E. It’s morally wrong b/c it accepts the false narrative that Israel is supposedly targeting civilians or is nonchalant about civilian death.
If we didn’t care we’d bomb the hell out of Gaza and finish this war in 3 days without losing boys in battle.
We just lost 5 boys over the weekend.
The fact is that almost half the Palestinian casualties are of Hamas members.
THAT IS PROBABLY THE LOWEST FIGHTER:CIVILAN DEATH RATIO IN THE HISTORY OF URBAN WARFARE.

2. Israeli government should have captured Rafah and destroyed Hamas four months ago.
I’ve no idea why our government is so slow and seemingly indecisive.
Neither do understand why we pulled out division 98 that had been sealing the Hamas fighters trapped in Rafah. Sort of like removing the lid on a can in which they were trapped, allowing them to disperse all across the Gaza Strip.

3. We can’t assume we have endless time.
This wavering is damaging: international pressure building,
Hamas has ample time to boobytrap Rafah and escape to other areas.
Speed and continuity are basic tenets of winning wars.
Stop talking, just do it. FAST.

4. If we accept the premise that civilian death is unacceptable in war, it guarantees that all terror groups in the world will adopt Hamas’ MO of human shields. Many more civilians will die. In NYC, London and Paris.

5. Israeli ministers must stop their petty political postering and infantile rhetoric, and stop causing self inflicted damage.
We in Israel know that it’s all hot air, but people around the world assume that a minister’s words are serious.
And Israel pays a tangible price for this clownship.

6. Somehow planning for post-Hamas Gaza has become a taboo in our government.
The mere discussion is portrayed as a“soft lefty defeatist” thing. It’s not.

It’s necessary so that when we capture a certain city (e.g. Han Yunus) in a tough and costly battle, we know who we hand it over to and who runs it.
This ensures that Hamas will not re-enter the moment we leave, thus causing us to have to fight 3-4 times to recapture the same place(!).
We can decide to keep Israeli temporary admin, or local Palestinian, or other options. But we need to decide SOMETHING.
Who fills the void.
Otherwise by default it’s Hamas, the worst of all options. And that’s what’s happening right now.
Thats like mopping water up a slanted floor just to have the water keep sliding down.
I think Israel’s leadership shuns this for (mistaken) political reasons.
So our government must get over it.

Bottom line:
We’ve lost precious time, but this is still winnable.
Israeli government must decide at last what it wants.
If we want to defeat Hamas, then let’s do it.
US should support Israel and if anything, urge its leadership to act more decisively and faster so we finish this ASAP.