New Delhi: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday accused foreign “bot farms” with operations allegedly traced to Pakistan of fueling anti-Israel sentiment among young Americans on social media.
Netanyahu claimed that Israel had been left exposed in what he described as an “eighth front” of the war: the battle online. The remark came after Israel’s intense ground and air offensive in Gaza and strikes on Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Yemen, and Qatar. According to the UN Relief & Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the Near East, “Between 7 October 2023 and 29 April 2026, according to the [Gazan] Ministry of Health, as reported by OCHA, 72,599 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip and another 172,411 injured.”
Speaking in an interview with CBS News, Netanyahu said foreign actors had manipulated social media platforms to weaken support for Israel in the United States and fracture the US-Israel alliance.
“You hear a text message, ‘I’m a red-blooded Texan. I always supported Israel, but I can’t stand what they’re doing. I’m turning against Israel’,” Netanyahu said. “And then, you trace the address to some basement in Pakistan.”
“That’s something that has hurt us badly,” he then added.
Netanyahu’s comments came amid growing criticism of Israel’s military operations in Gaza and Lebanon, particularly among younger Americans who have increasingly voiced opposition online over civilian casualties and humanitarian conditions in Gaza. The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant on 21 November 2024 for Netanyahu over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Asked whether Israel was losing the “social media front”, the Israeli PM acknowledged a sharp erosion in support among younger Americans but claimed the shift was driven less by organic opinion and more by coordinated disinformation campaigns.
“We have seen the deterioration of the support for Israel in the United States almost 100 percent with the geometric rise of social media,” he said.
He further claimed that ‘authoritarian states’ and organised online networks were manipulating public discourse in the United States through “bot farms” and “fake addresses”, aiming not only to undermine Israel but also to deepen divisions within American society.
“They’re not only attacking Israel. They’re attacking America. They’re trying to create ruptures within America. Not only between America and Israel [but] between Americans and Americans,” he said.
He then went a step further and alleged that foreign influence operations had spread into American universities and academic curricula. When the host asked if he actually believed that to be true, he called it “a true scenario”.
At the same time, he defended Israel’s military assault in Gaza, arguing that the Israeli military had taken extraordinary steps to reduce civilian casualties. “Israel has gone to unbelievable lengths to get innocent civilians out of harm’s way,” he said, citing text messages, phone calls, and leaflets warning residents to evacuate combat zones.
He accused Hamas and Hezbollah of deliberately placing civilians at risk, saying, “In Gaza, they actually shoot civilians who wanted to leave the neighbourhoods, where we said to them, ‘Please vacate those neighbourhoods’.”
He then argued that while civilian deaths had occurred, “the proportion of civilian casualties, non-combatants to combatants, is one of the lowest in the history of modern urban warfare”.
“One of the ways you can measure genocide is to see the ratio of combatants to non-combatants,” he said. “And it’s probably the lowest that’s been in modern urban warfare because of the efforts that we make.”
Human rights organisations and international agencies have sharply disputed Israeli government claims about civilian casualty ratios and the conduct of the war, with critics accusing Israel of disproportionate force and collective punishment in Gaza.
A September 2025 UN Commission report concluded that Israeli authorities and security forces had carried out four of the five acts defined as genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention since 7 October 2023. Those acts, it said, included killings, causing serious physical or psychological harm, deliberately creating living conditions aimed at making life difficult for Palestinians in Gaza, and imposing measures intended to prevent births.
The commission said statements made by Israeli political and military leaders, together with the conduct of Israeli forces during the war, pointed to what it described as an intent to harm Palestinians in Gaza “in whole or in part” as a group.
Netanyahu dismissed those accusations as the result of distorted narratives, which, he said, were amplified online.
“What they see is so many falsifications and vilifications that are unfounded,” he said. “They just get the last reel in the movie. They don’t see the entire movie.”
He acknowledged that Israel had failed to recognise the growing influence of social media early enough. “While we were fighting the physical military battle on seven battlefields, a seven-front war, we were completely exposed on the eighth front, the media war, really the social media war,” he said.
Comparing Israel’s online response to outdated military tactics, he added: “While they’re attacking us with the equivalent of F-35s, we’re trying to fight them with the Polish cavalry.”
“We have to engage on that front, not by censorship, but by finding ways that are applicable to democracies. We have a problem. I recognise it, and we have to get our act together,” he added.
When asked whether some Americans might simply have changed their views of Israel because of the war itself, Netanyahu rejected the suggestion that the backlash was primarily organic.
“The Gaza war was pouring kerosene on a fire that was already there,” he said. “But now we know. We know a lot.”
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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