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Monday, October 12, 2026
Lapid says he’ll run war room combatting disinformation on election day
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleAriela Karmel is a political correspondent at The Times of Israel. She previously reported for Calcalist and Haaretz. She holds an MA in Middle Eastern and African History from Tel Aviv University and a BA in Political Science from the University of British Columbia.
Opposition leader and B’Yachad No. 2 Yair Lapid says his party is setting up a war room to combat fake news, which he will personally run on election day.
B’Yachad’s war room will have a phone number where voters can forward suspicious content and “a team of experts will be stationed, both in digital media and rapid fact-checking, ready to debunk all the lies and send a personal message, right to the phone in people’s pockets, with the real facts,” Lapid says, speaking at the Brandeis Institute and civil society organization FakeReporter’s “Law and Lies” emergency conference in Tel Aviv on how to protect the public from incitement and disinformation, both during and following the October 27 election.
“We know there will be an unrelenting barrage of lies, and we’ll respond with an equally powerful barrage of truth,” Lapid says, asserting that disinformation has long been a tool of the coalition parties.
“Since 2017, a range of bodies in Israel, including the Shin Bet, the National Security Council and the National Cyber Directorate, have warned about the danger of fake accounts and fake news. Nothing was done,” he says. “It’s clear why. If they’d held a serious discussion about it, they’d end up looking at themselves.”
Organized by the Brandeis Institute, which conducts research on Israeli society, economy and democracy, and FakeReporter, a civil society initiative that works to combat disinformation, today’s conference is the first time that parties will present platforms on combating disinformation.
Democrats leader Yair Golan is due to speak after Lapid, while a panel featuring representatives of B’Yachad, The Democrats, Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar, Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu and Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am will present the parties’ plans.
The sole coalition representative is MK Michal Woldiger of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, who is positioned far down the party’s slate and unlikely to return to the Knesset.
Organizers say they had hoped to include more coalition representatives, but Woldiger was the only one who agreed to participate.
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