Key Takeaways
- Israel lacks a national policy or designated government body to coordinate responses to foreign online influence campaigns, despite the threat being identified nine years ago.
- Repeated attempts to create an interagency framework since 2017 failed, leaving responsibility unassigned and initiatives abandoned.
- A 2024 proposed national action plan remained unexamined by the Prime Minister’s Office for nearly a year, highlighting systemic inertia.
- Critical gaps persist in monitoring, public reporting channels, platform removal tracking, and election preparedness, leaving citizens vulnerable to manipulation.
- The State Comptroller urges immediate action, including a dedicated coordinating body, mandatory digital literacy education, and stronger Shin Bet oversight.
Israel remains without a unified national strategy to counter foreign influence operations online nearly a decade after the threat was first recognized, according to a scathing report from outgoing State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman. Released as Israel enters an election year—a period deemed especially susceptible to manipulation—the audit reveals a persistent failure to transform repeated warnings into effective, coordinated defense. Englman emphasized the urgency, stating that hostile actors like Iran exploit social media covertly to deepen societal divisions, spread panic, and distort public perception of reality. The absence of a central authority or approved policy framework, he warned, leaves the Israeli public exposed and necessitates decisive national action.
Historical Inaction Despite Early Warnings
The comptroller’s investigation, spanning July 2024 to January 2026, documented a pattern of ignored opportunities dating back to 2017. Multiple key institutions—the National Security Council (NSC), the National Cyber Directorate, the now-defunct Intelligence Ministry, and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency)—independently identified the danger of foreign digital influence campaigns at various points. Despite this shared recognition, efforts to synchronize their responses were consistently abandoned. No overarching national policy was ever formally adopted, and responsibility for addressing the issue remained diffused and unassigned across agencies. This institutional paralysis meant that even as threats evolved, Israel operated without a cohesive strategy to monitor, disrupt, or counter sophisticated online manipulation efforts originating from adversarial states.
Unexamined Plans and Bureaucratic Drift
A concrete example of this inertia emerged in 2023 when a national-security assessment included specific recommendations for improving surveillance and disruption of foreign influence on social media. Critically, this assessment was never presented to the security cabinet for review or approval. More strikingly, in August 2024, the Cyber Directorate developed and submitted a detailed national action plan to Prime Minister Benjamin Netayahu’s office. However, as confirmed by the comptroller’s audit, this plan sat unexamined in the Prime Minister’s Office until mid-July 2025—nearly eleven months later. Only after the State Comptroller’s Office intervened was the plan transferred to the NSC for consideration. By August 2025, both the NSC and the Cyber Directorate had largely retreated from active engagement on the broader issue of foreign influence, with the Cyber Directorate narrowing its focus solely to cases where influence operations were directly tied to cyberattacks. This retreat, the report warned, resulted in Israel maintaining only a fragmented and incomplete picture of hostile online activities targeting its society.
Monitoring Gaps and Public Vulnerability
While the Shin Bet retains responsibility for monitoring suspected foreign influence operations, the audit uncovered significant unresolved technological and operational challenges hindering its effectiveness. A pilot program designed to enhance monitoring capabilities, initiated to address these shortcomings, was still under evaluation as of July 2025 before the Cyber Directorate withdrew from broader coordination efforts. Compounding these deficiencies, Israel entirely lacks a formal mechanism for civil society organizations or individual citizens to report suspected foreign influence activity to government authorities. This gap is particularly alarming given the central role of digital platforms in Israeli public discourse. A survey cited in the report revealed that approximately 58% of Israelis routinely obtain their news through social media channels, creating a vast audience susceptible to coordinated disinformation campaigns, especially during politically sensitive periods like elections. The absence of a public reporting channel not only hinders early detection but also undermines community resilience against manipulation.
Documented Campaigns and Platform Response Failures
The report detailed specific instances of foreign influence activity to illustrate the real-world consequences of Israel’s unpreparedness. One notable example was the ISNAD campaign, analyzed in a 2024 study, which sought to sway Israeli public opinion regarding the war through thousands of messages disseminated between December 2023 and August 2024, operating via 300 to 1,000 fake accounts on the platform X (formerly Twitter) alone. Another campaign, identified by the Israeli firm Next Dim, emerged in the initial days of the Gaza war to amplify the “GazaGenocide” narrative online, with visualizations showing its rapid integration into broader anti-Israel discourse. Perhaps most alarmingly, the National Cyber Directorate attributed a September 2024 barrage of approximately five million fraudulent SMS messages—falsely warning recipients to seek immediate shelter—to Iran and Hezbollah, demonstrating the capacity for large-scale, disruptive psychological operations. Efforts to counter such content through voluntary platform removals also revealed systemic weaknesses: requests from Israeli security bodies and ministries to the State Attorney’s Office Cyber Department surged from 8,600 in 2021 to over 106,000 in 2024, yet between 15% and 25% of these requests forwarded to social media platforms went unanswered in those years. Crucially, the department does not categorize or track requests specifically tied to foreign influence operations, preventing the government from assessing how platforms respond to this distinct threat category.
Deficiencies in Education and Election Preparedness
The comptroller further criticized Israel’s lack of proactive societal defenses. Educational resources on disinformation recognition and critical thinking remain optional in schools, despite growing risks from AI-generated deepfakes and sophisticated manipulation tactics. The Education Ministry’s “Fake or Not” initiative, designed to promote digital literacy, achieved minimal reach, logging only about 9,000 site visits and 45,000 content views over roughly eighteen months—indicating negligible penetration into the student population. Regarding election integrity, the report identified significant shortcomings. The Central Elections Committee was found to have gaps in its threat assessment protocols for online influence, while guidelines drafted by the Justice Ministry in 2019 for responding to online election interference have not been updated to reflect advancements in artificial intelligence or evolving TTPs (tactics, techniques, and procedures) used by hostile actors. This leaves electoral processes inadequately shielded against attempts to undermine trust in results or distort voter perceptions during critical campaign periods.
Urgent Recommendations for National Resilience
Englman’s report concluded with a clear set of actionable recommendations aimed at closing Israel’s dangerous preparedness gap. Paramount among them was his call for the NSC to submit to the prime minister a concrete framework for a government decision establishing a dedicated, budgeted national coordinating body tasked with overseeing the whole-of-government response to foreign influence. He also advocated for strengthening the Shin Bet’s monitoring capabilities through resolved technological investments and creating a formal, accessible channel for civil society and the public to report suspicious online activity. Additional priorities included mandating the tracking of platform removal requests specifically related to influence operations to evaluate efficacy, implementing compulsory digital literacy and critical thinking education in schools, and instituting more structured, ongoing election preparedness measures—including updated threat assessments and response guidelines from the Central Elections Committee and Justice Ministry. Stressing that passive observation is no longer an option, Englman warned that leaving these gaps unaddressed actively endangers the democratic discourse and societal cohesion of Israel, demanding immediate, sustained leadership to build national resilience against evolving digital threats.
(Word count: 998)