Foreign Ministry opens diplomat- and student-staffed ‘media war room’ to combat anti-Israel content

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar inaugurates a “media war room” at the Foreign Ministry to monitor and respond to anti-Israel activity on internet platforms, Sa’ar’s office announces.

The war room, staffed by diplomats and students specializing in international communications, observes around 250 news channels and some 10,000 Israel-related news items daily, “identifies false or biased reports…and acts swiftly by deploying Israeli and pro-Israel spokespersons to debunk accusations and present Israel’s narrative,” the Foreign Ministry says.

During its trial period in recent weeks, the program was “the first” in Israel “to detect… and act against” a BBC documentary about Gazan children that was subsequently found to have been narrated by the son of a high-ranking official in the Hamas terror group’s government in Gaza, says the Foreign Ministry. The ministry says this happened before the program aired.

The ministry explains that “following intelligence from the war room, Israel’s embassy in London engaged with the BBC.”

Later on, an investigative journalist publicly exposed the documentary participants’ ties to Hamas. The journalist in question, David Collier, told The Times of Israel last week that he found out that Abdullah, the narrator and main subject of the BBC documentary, was the son of a deputy minister in Hamas’s government within five hours of its broadcast.

The BBC has since removed the film from its program, issued an apology, and is now under criminal investigation for allegedly transferring funds to Hamas as part of the documentary’s production.

To further strengthen Israel in the “fight for international public opinion,” Sa’ar or a senior Foreign Ministry official are holding weekly press conferences at the ministry with top global media outlets, says the Foreign Ministry.

The ministry has also established “a network of pro-Israel influencers and spokespersons” to advocate for Israel on social media and other online platforms and plans to launch “additional projects” in “the near future” to fight media bias against Israel.

The new initiatives follow an announcement made after Sa’ar assumed his position last November that the Foreign Ministry would receive a budgetary increase of NIS 545 million ($146 million) for efforts to improve Israel’s public diplomacy abroad.