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# Inside Hamas's Media Operation — and the Verification Gap That Explains It

All art is propaganda, and the most effective piece of propaganda in this war is not a staged scene; it is an unedited one. A media war over Gaza has run in parallel to the shooting war since long before October 2023 — the BBC observed in 2009 that [the Israelis had also banned foreign correspondents from entering Gaza](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7815630.stm), a restriction that persists today. Hamas's propaganda operation is real, organized and documented. So is the disinformation pushed by other sides, including Israel's own government. The problem is not that observers cannot identify propaganda; it is that the verification system itself has collapsed.

## How Hamas plans its propaganda operations

Hamas's media apparatus did not emerge by accident, and it did not emerge overnight. The plan behind it is documented: research based on files captured in Gaza details Hamas media plans before the war, including blacklists of normalization supporters, paid social media campaigns and psychological warfare led by a close Sinwar aide. Academic analysis of charters, official outlets and online content traces a coordinated evolution from cartoons, flyers, posters and graffiti to a [sophisticated infrastructure of television, radio, newspapers, websites and social media channels such as Telegram](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21520844.2025.2563433). The 1988 charter itself calls upon media professionals and intellectuals to raise the voice of resistance, describing the effective word and the useful book as "elements of the Jihad." Researchers frame this as a hybrid media system: directly controlled outlets — Al-Aqsa TV, Falasteen, Al-Risala and the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades' digital platforms — alongside covert operatives and privately owned but effectively controlled agencies like Shehab and Safa, allowing Hamas to claim external pluralism while maintaining internal dominance. The same study identifies [nine distinct audience groups](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21520844.2025.2563433), from Gazans and West Bank Palestinians to Arab states, Western publics and Israelis, with messages strategically tailored to each audience. This is planning in the ordinary sense of the word: an institution allocating resources toward defined audiences, long before the current war began.

## The channels Hamas messaging travels through

The channels through which Hamas messages travel run from satellite television to encrypted messaging. Hamas operates its own station, [al-Aqsa TV, which shows pictures of destruction, children in prayers, and dead bodies in graphic detail](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7815630.stm), alongside radio, print and web outlets. Internationally, Hamas ran an English-language Twitter handle, @HamasInfoEn, from March 2015 until its suspension in November 2019, sending [the first 2,848 tweets studied by researchers at George Washington University](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.09546553.2020.1761343) — over 55 percent of which linked back to its official English-language website. On October 7, 2023, within minutes of the attack, an official [al-Qassam Brigades Telegram channel posted Muhammad al-Deif's statement](https://voxpol.eu/hamas-telegram-in-the-immediate-wake-of-their-7-october-terrorist-attacks-part-2-propaganda-content/), followed by highly produced videos of pre-attack training, prepared spokesmen's speeches, and photosets of the Israeli dead. As the Washington Post reported during the war, unmoderated messaging services and gruesome video — including footage around a deadly Gaza hospital strike — have helped Hamas prosecute what it calls its "video jihad," using social media to get its version of the war out and to spread fear. Hamas turned to Telegram precisely because it is unmoderated. That Telegram channel disseminated 73 items of officially branded content against a single item of bystander footage — a ratio that says a great deal about how much of what circulates is institutional product.

## What the goal of Hamas propaganda is: legitimacy and recruitment

The goal of Hamas propaganda, per the scholarly record, is legitimacy and recruitment: media activity is treated as an integral part of the jihad, aimed at shaping public perceptions, winning hearts and minds, and reinforcing ideological narratives — particularly after military setbacks. Alex Schmid's widely cited formulation calls media "the oxygen of terrorism." As well as an atrocity, the October 7 massacre was a media sensation: with $150 GoPros strapped to its fighters so that the footage would be seen, Hamas ensured the attack would be watched, and the media operation treats every battlefield outcome as material for the next narrative cycle. David Patrikarakos has argued that Israel is losing the propaganda war because the images do the work themselves — the goal is not to persuade but to let the raw record of civilian death recruit on Hamas's behalf, because as long as Israel bombs, the world will watch, and because anger at that carnage becomes a targeting rationale in itself. When real, documented death occurs at scale — Gaza's Health Ministry has reported more than 70,000 deaths in this war — no staging is required, and citizens of a country whose weapons appear in those strikes cannot be surprised when the world holds the supplier responsible. That is the arithmetic of blowback: propaganda's fuel is the war itself. Human Rights Watch's report on the October 7 crimes, and Hamas's documented killing of civilians that day, belong in the same ledger — condemnation of Hamas does not require funding the war that feeds its narrative.

## How much viral Gaza war footage was fabricated

The viral fog included genuine staged positioning by all sides, but the honest answer about fabrication is that no fact-checking body has found that "many" viral Gaza images were staged. Cyabra, a social threat intelligence company, reported in October 2023 that Hamas and its supporters were [reaching as many as 500 million people on X with fake videos and disinformation](https://www.fdd.org/analysis/hamas-network-spreads-dangerous-disinformation/), its vice president concluding the coordination was "more akin to a state level of organization." BBC Verify and wire services documented recycled and misattributed footage shared by all sides — a 2022 clip passed off as the al-Ahli hospital blast, video-game footage presented as combat — and BBC Verify debunked an Israeli government spokesperson's post claiming Gazans faked injuries. A 2009 precedent endures: the [Israeli army dropped the word "within" from its statement about mortar fire "from" a UN school](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7815630.stm) after UNRWA challenged it.

## Bots, organized units, and the same test for every ally

Hamas does operate organized digital propaganda — Meta removed 141 Facebook and 21 Instagram accounts in 2021 for coordinated inauthentic behaviour linked to the group, and one analyst predicted Hamas would "use bots and trolls" alongside influencers in its information war. Bots play a role in spreading Hamas messaging, but the same test must run in every direction: the New York Times reported in 2024 that Israel's Diaspora Ministry funded a roughly $2 million campaign using hundreds of fake accounts aimed at US lawmakers, disrupted by Meta and OpenAI; the ministry denied involvement. Questioning that is not antisemitism. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have protested their own government during this war, and Americans criticized Bush, Obama and Biden without being called anti-American. An ally is still an ally, not a charity.

## Where journalists and researchers find verified Hamas facts

For ground truth, journalists and researchers rely on hospital records, UN agencies, and Human Rights Watch's documentation of October 7 — not on viral clips from any side. The Committee to Protect Journalists counts 189 Palestinian journalists killed, and Israel has not allowed foreign journalists into Gaza independently since the war began. Until access and independent verification return, the conservative position is the old one: no blank checks. A taxpayer funding $3.8 billion a year is entitled to facts that can be checked — in every direction.
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