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What other challenges is the Christian community experiencing today in the Holy Land? For example, a Christian who lives in the Palestinian territory has difficulty traveling, working, and doing business. What can the Israeli government and Palestinian authorities do to ease the lives of Christians?
The problem is above all a political problem. That is, the Christians are not a population apart. The Palestinian Christians experience the same situation as any other Palestinian. The limitations that there are for Palestinians are not for Palestinian Christians but for every Palestinian. So, the solution to resolve the problem of Christians needs to resolve the political problem for the Christians that are in the [Palestinian] territories. And I donât see an easy solution, nor is the solution on the horizon. Therefore, this situation of occupation that continues with all of its consequences, I think will continue to influence for a long time our Christian community, which, however, has a strong spirit of resilience.
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UN Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights:
Occupied Palestinian Territory: TĂźrk condemns over 500 West Bank killings, calls for accountability
Arab News:
80 Palestinian journalists detained by Israel since October, human rights group says
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Ah, Nuke Akehurst. One of those Labour candidates who are probably worse than the Tories. I donât know how he manages it.
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âIDF considering plan to genocide Lebanonâ is not a good look. 
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Can they point to âHezbollahâ on a map? If not, they canât declare war on them. Anti-terrorism is not a war.
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That did not stop US, UK and Spain to launch a disastrous war on terrorâŚ
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Precisely the point. Treating counterterrorism like a war doesnât work, which the US and others have learned through hard experience.
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NYT: Israelâs Ministry of Diaspora Affairs ordered the operation, which used fake social media accounts urging U.S. lawmakers to fund Israelâs military, according to officials and documents about the effort.
Israel organized and paid for an influence campaign last year targeting U.S. lawmakers and the American public with pro-Israel messaging, as it aimed to foster support for its actions in the war with Gaza, according to officials involved in the effort and documents related to the operation.
The covert campaign was commissioned by Israelâs Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, a government body that connects Jews around the world with the State of Israel, four Israeli officials said. The ministry allocated about $2 million to the operation and hired Stoic, a political marketing firm in Tel Aviv, to carry it out, according to the officials and the documents.
The campaign began in October and remains active on the platform X. At its peak, it used hundreds of fake accounts that posed as real Americans on X, Facebook and Instagram to post pro-Israel comments. The accounts focused on U.S. lawmakers, particularly ones who are Black and Democrats, such as Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader from New York, and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, with posts urging them to continue funding Israelâs military.
ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, was used to generate many of the posts. The campaign also created three fake English-language news sites featuring pro-Israel articles.
The Israeli governmentâs connection to the influence operation, which The New York Times verified with four current and former members of the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and documents about the campaign, has not previously been reported. FakeReporter, an Israeli misinformation watchdog, identified the effort in March. Last week, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, said they had also found and disrupted the operation.
The secretive campaign signals the lengths Israel was willing to go to sway American opinion on the war in Gaza. The United States has long been one of Israelâs staunchest allies, with President Biden recently signing a $15 billion military aid package for the country. But the conflict has been unpopular with many Americans, who have called for Mr. Biden to withdraw support for Israel in the face of mounting civilian deaths in Gaza.
An Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip on Monday. The secretive influence campaign signals the lengths Israel was willing to go to sway American opinion on the war in Gaza. CreditâŚRamadan Abed/Reuters
The operation is the first documented case of the Israeli governmentâs organizing a campaign to influence the U.S. government, social media experts said. While coordinated government-backed campaigns are not uncommon, they are typically difficult to prove. Iran, North Korea, China, Russia and the United States are widely believed to back similar efforts around the world, but often mask their involvement by outsourcing the work to private companies or running them through a third country.
âIsraelâs role in this is reckless and probably ineffective,â said Achiya Schatz, the executive director of FakeReporter. That Israel âran an operation that interferes in U.S. politics is extremely irresponsible.â
Israelâs Ministry of Diaspora Affairs denied involvement in the campaign and said it had no connection to Stoic. Stoic didnât respond to requests for comment.
The campaign didnât have a widespread impact, Meta and OpenAI said last week. The fake accounts accumulated more than 40,000 followers across X, Facebook and Instagram, FakeReporter found. But many of those followers may have been bots and didnât generate a large audience, Meta said.
The operation began just weeks into the war in October, according to Israeli officials and the documents on the effort. Dozens of Israeli tech start-ups received emails and WhatsApp messages that month inviting them to join urgent meetings to become âdigital soldiersâ for Israel during the war, according to messages viewed by The Times. Some of the emails and messages were sent from Israeli government officials, while others came from tech start-ups and incubators.
The first meeting was held in Tel Aviv in mid-October. It appeared to be an informal gathering where Israelis could volunteer their technical skills to help the countryâs war effort, three attendees said. Members of several government ministries also took part, they said.
Participants were told that they could be âwarriors for Israelâ and that âdigital campaignsâ could be run on behalf of the country, according to recordings of the meetings.
The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs commissioned a campaign aimed at the United States, the Israeli officials said. A budget of about $2 million was set, according to one message viewed by The Times.
Stoic was hired to run the campaign. On its website and on LinkedIn, Stoic says it was founded in 2017 by a team of political and business strategists and calls itself a political marketing and business intelligence firm. Other companies may have been hired to run additional campaigns, one Israeli official said.
Many of the campaignâs fake accounts on X, Instagram and Facebook posed as fictional American students, concerned citizens and local constituents. The accounts shared articles and statistics that backed Israelâs position in the war.
The operation focused on more than a dozen members of Congress, many of whom are Black and Democrats, according to an analysis by FakeReporter. Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democrat from New York who is outspoken about his pro-Israel views, was targeted in addition to Mr. Jeffries and Mr. Warnock.
Some of the fake accounts responded to posts by Mr. Torres on X by commenting on antisemitism on college campuses and in major U.S. cities. In response to a Dec. 8 post on X by Mr. Torres about fire safety, one fake account replied, âHamas is perpetrating the conflict,â referring to the Islamist militant group. The post included a hashtag that said Jews were being persecuted.
On Facebook, the fake accounts posted on Mr. Jeffriesâs public page by asking if he had seen a report about the United Nationsâ employing members of Hamas in Gaza.
Mr. Torres, Mr. Jeffries and Mr. Warnock didnât respond to requests for comment.
The campaign also created three fake news sites with names like Non-Agenda and UnFold Magazine, which stole and rewrote material from outlets including CNN and The Wall Street Journal to promote Israelâs stance during the war, according to FakeReporterâs analysis. Fake accounts on Reddit then linked to the articles on the so-called news sites to help promote them.
The effort was sloppy. Profile pictures used in some accounts sometimes didnât match the fictional personas they cultivated, and the language used in posts was stilted.
In at least two instances, accounts with profile photos of Black men posted about being a âmiddle-aged Jewish woman.â On 118 posts in which the fake accounts shared pro-Israel articles, the same sentence appeared: âI gotta reevaluate my opinions due to this new information.â
Last week, Meta and OpenAI published reports attributing the influence campaign to Stoic. Meta said it had removed 510 Facebook accounts, 11 Facebook pages, 32 Instagram accounts and one Facebook group tied to the operation. OpenAI said Stoic had created fictional personas and biographies meant to stand in for real people on social media services used in Israel, Canada and the United States to post anti-Islamic messages. Many of the posts remain on X.
X didnât respond to a request for comment.
On its LinkedIn page, Stoic has promoted its ability to run campaigns backed by A.I. âAs we look ahead, itâs clear that A.I.âs role in political campaigns is set for a transformative leap, reshaping the way campaigns are strategized, executed and evaluated,â it wrote.
By Friday, Stoic had removed those posts from LinkedIn.
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This looks as if it might be a low-key ultimatum to Netanyahu and a fuck-you to Smotrich and Ben Gvir:
At this decisive moment, we call on the leaders of Israel as well as Hamas to make whatever final compromises are necessary to close this deal and bring relief to the families of our hostages, as well as those on both sides of this terrible conflict, including the civilian populations.
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