Amassing troops’ own clips from Gaza, anti-Israel activists are keeping heat on soldiers

In recent months, as Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip pushed well into its second year, the military updated its guidelines regarding interviews with soldiers and asked journalists to conceal troops’ identities. It also warned soldiers against posting photos and videos from the battlefield on social media.

The changes come after months of efforts by anti-Israel organizations — such as the Belgium-based Hind Rajab Foundation, whose activities were exposed in a Shomrim investigation earlier this year — to prosecute Israeli soldiers anywhere in the world for alleged war crimes committed in Gaza.

As Shomrim previously exposed in a series of articles in collaboration with Israel’s Channel 12, the Israel Defense Forces has failed to enforce its own directives regarding the use of phones on the battlefield since the war began, highlighting the army’s broader difficulty in ensuring military discipline in its ranks. Even when the IDF eventually took action, it was unable to stop the spread of social media footage.

In recent weeks, another group, called Israel Exposed, has uploaded a massive database of videos posted to social media by Israeli soldiers, documenting their alleged illegal actions in Gaza and the West Bank.

The database contains more than 350 gigabytes of information, downloadable via peer-to-peer sharing networks using a link shared by the group on Telegram.

Some of the videos could be used to back legal cases alleging that Israeli soldiers committed war crimes, while other footage could be used to “dox” soldiers, a term for publishing someone’s personal details, including their home address, phone number and marital status, allowing anti-Israel activists to potentially track and harass troops.

In March, South Africa submitted a dossier to the United Nations Security Council, which it claimed contains “openly available evidence on the State of Israel’s acts of genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.” The file includes hundreds of references to social media videos of soldiers.

The database put online by Israel Exposed is comprised of backups of existing compilations of clips hosted elsewhere on the internet, such as TikTokGenocide.com, and videos its own activists compiled and sorted via a collective effort the group says it organized on Discord — a social chat app popular among gamers.

According to Israel Exposed, the database includes videos compiled by hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists who gathered and sorted the videos on Discord. The database also archives existing video banks collected by various organizations that monitor the social media accounts of Israeli soldiers, who post footage from the war on a daily basis.

With this large database, the organization seeks to ensure that soldiers’ social media videos will remain in the public record even after soldiers attempt to delete evidence of the IDF’s actions in Gaza from their own social media accounts.

Israel Exposed said on social media that it handed the database over to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, as well as to the legal team at the Hind Rajab Foundation.

Footage on the blockchain

This initiative is only one of several recent efforts by online groups to gather soldiers’ footage and post it online in a searchable manner. Similar projects over recent years have gathered material from various conflict zones, especially following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with footage of the war’s horrors spreading quickly online.

Another initiative targeting Israel’s war in Gaza relies on blockchain technology to store soldiers’ social media footage in a decentralized ledger, making it less vulnerable to potential censorship from social media companies and tech giants should platforms such as X and Facebook try to block their operations.

A third recently launched database presents a catalog of videos of Israeli soldiers’ actions in Gaza, some taken from troops’ posts and some from Palestinian sources. The videos are organized into different genres, including “playing with children’s toys,” and “use of Palestinians as human shields,” and are cross-categorized with the soldiers’ military unit, the type of weapon used, and the exact geographical setting of the incident based on soldiers’ location tags.

The database includes the names of the soldiers who originally uploaded the videos to social media.

One section dedicated to the IDF’s Givati Brigade contains over 50 clips, showing soldiers “desecrating the Quran” and “shooting indiscriminately into Gaza.”

???????? IDF soldiers ransack homes of displaced Palestinians & fulfill sordid sexual desires with women lingerie underwear.

Complete disregard for context of situation.

These are vids taken directly from IDF social media accounts. Brazen, open for all to see. https://t.co/xGr5QFGUvM pic.twitter.com/dvVvGTO0OX

— Iconoclast (@DieOnFeet) March 28, 2024

Some of these databases focus on soldiers who hold dual citizenship, with the goal of putting pressure on foreign authorities to open court cases against them outside Israel. Dual nationals are particularly at risk, as Shomrim reported in an earlier investigation.

Canadian journalist Davide Mastracci, for example, put together a database using media reports and the social media posts of some 85 Canadian citizens who served in the IDF. One of the Canadian citizens mentioned in the database is Ben Mizrachi, who grew up in Vancouver, moved to Israel, and served as a lone soldier combat medic in the Paratroopers. Mizrachi was murdered at age 22 during the Hamas-led terror invasion on October 7, 2023, at the Supernova music festival massacre.

The apparent goal of Mastracci’s initiative is to pressure the Canadian government to ban citizens from joining the IDF. Canadian Jews have raised concerns that the database could be used to physically threaten anyone whose name appears in it.

“We know what ‘Jew lists’ means to Mastracci’s type,” Paul Hirschson, Israel’s Consul General in Montreal, wrote on X.

Other databases go beyond soldiers who served in Gaza with organizations indicating that they are in the process of compiling lists of Israeli journalists linked to the military or prominent Jewish organizations, including Barak Ravid from Axios, who once served in the IDF as part of his mandatory service.

Escape insurance

Israeli authorities have so far struggled to solve the challenges of this digital battlefield. Earlier this year, after an Israeli soldier, named as Yuval Vagdani, was threatened with arrest during a trip to Brazil, the Foreign Ministry rushed to put out a statement saying that “Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar immediately deployed all ministry resources to ensure that the Israeli was not in any danger.”

Yet, in practice, it is unclear whether the ministry has taken sufficient steps to protect service members abroad. When asked if Vagdani paid for his own emergency ticket back to Israel after being spirited out of Brazil, a spokesperson from the ministry refused to comment on whether his office covered the expense, or will reimburse the soldier.

הלוחם יובל וגדני, שהיה מבוקש בברזיל ובארגנטינה, נחת בישראל: "לא אחזור לשם"https://t.co/QXpal0KrZ2@yosefyisrael25 pic.twitter.com/tFwgDAT12Q

— חדשות 13 (@newsisrael13) January 8, 2025

One answer to the question came in the form of an advertisement by the Israeli travel insurance company PassportCard, which recently launched a campaign selling insurance to soldiers in case they need to flee.

“Out of a deep sense of commitment to the security and liberty of IDF reservists and soldiers, we have established a special $1 million fund to cover the expense of emergency plane tickets up to $1,500 for any of our customers who are forced to alter the itinerary of their trip or leave the country they are in against the backdrop of demands for an overseas arrest warrant due to their involvement in Operation Swords of Iron,” Passport Card said in an email.

Last month, The Times of Israel reported that PassportCard paid for emergency flights back from Amsterdam for two vacationing soldiers after anti-Israel groups mobilized to have arrest warrants issued against them.