During the Gaza war that began after the attack on 7 October 2023, Israel and Hamas have been fighting on two fronts: a physical battlefield and an information war. While Israel’s military response has used overwhelming conventional force, Hamas launched a parallel information campaign, employing media messaging, emotional propaganda and disinformation as strategic tools. This campaign aimed to undermine Israel’s moral and legal legitimacy and to weaken the unity of Israel’s international allies by swaying public opinion in democratic countries. Israel’s ground dominance was met with a fierce struggle over narratives, forcing it to counter Hamas’s propaganda even as it fought the kinetic war. The result was an unacknowledged information conflict that involved not only the immediate fighters but also external actors that amplified Hamas narratives. The Gaza conflict has demonstrated that, in the era of social media, perception has become as crucial a domain of warfare as land, sea, air or cyber. In short, controlling the story is just as important as battlefield victories.
Strategically, the information war aspect of the Gaza conflict has significant implications for future warfare, alliance management, and narrative shaping. Hamas’s propaganda campaign has effectively influenced global opinion, portraying the group as a resilient underdog and Israel as the aggressor, despite Hamas’s initial atrocities. Graphic images of destruction and civilian suffering, often amplified and sometimes fabricated, sparked mass protests and political pressure on Western governments for a ceasefire.
However, by its very nature, war generates images of horror that are emotionally disturbing. This paper is not concerned with the disinformation aspects of the information campaign in Gaza. Through imagery both real and fake, Western unity has been tested as public opinion in democracies has been divided between viewing Israel’s actions as a justified fight against terror or as unjustifiable aggression that went too far in response to the 7 October attack. Hamas and its supporters in places like Tehran and Moscow have actively exploited this to weaken democratic cohesion in the West.
The Gaza war highlights how controlling the narrative during a conflict can significantly influence strategic success, even when one side holds military superiority. This factor is amplified in the social media era, which enables various forms of propaganda and innovative methods of dissemination. A weaker actor can claim a form of victory by breaking the enemy’s will (both military and civil) and eroding international support through information operations, thereby confirming the principle that perceptions of failure often precede actual defeat. For future conflicts, success will not be judged solely by battlefield outcomes but by winning hearts and minds globally. The side that controls the narrative often controls the outcome – a lesson from Gaza that democratic nations must heed
