Israeli Foreign Ministry Claims X’s New Location Feature Unmasked pro-Hamas Network

Social net­work X’s new user loca­tion fea­ture unmasked a vast pro-Hamas dis­in­for­ma­tion net­work, the Israeli For­eign Min­istry has claimed. On 24 Novem­ber 2025, the Pitts­burgh Jew­ish Chron­i­cle, repub­lish­ing Jew­ish News Syn­di­cate (JNS), report­ed that a new trans­paren­cy tool on X had revealed that many sup­posed pro-Hamas Gaza eye­wit­ness accounts were actu­al­ly oper­at­ed from coun­tries world­wide, expos­ing what was char­ac­ter­ized as a coor­di­nat­ed influ­ence net­work. The arti­cle begins:​

In recent weeks, a new trans­paren­cy fea­ture released by Elon Musk’s social media plat­form, X (for­mer­ly Twit­ter), has trig­gered one of the most dra­mat­ic shake-ups in online dis­course since the Gaza war began on Oct. 7, 2023. With a sin­gle click, users can now view an X accoun­t’s real-world geo­graph­ic loca­tion, the date it was cre­at­ed and its name-change his­to­ry. The result has been star­tling: Dozens of accounts that claimed to be civil­ian ‘eye­wit­ness­es’ inside Gaza, many shar­ing emo­tion­al accounts of bomb­ings and life under siege, were exposed as oper­at­ing from thou­sands of miles away. The rev­e­la­tion, pieced togeth­er by Israeli media and now acknowl­edged pub­licly by Israel’s Min­istry of For­eign Affairs, has begun to pull back the cur­tain on what appears to be a broad, coor­di­nat­ed dis­in­for­ma­tion net­work. What mil­lions of glob­al view­ers believed to be heart­break­ing per­son­al tes­ti­monies of ordi­nary Gazans were actu­al­ly accounts traced to coun­tries across the world, includ­ing Pak­istan, Afghanistan, Rus­sia, Bangladesh, Nige­ria, Turkey and the Unit­ed King­dom. Accord­ing to Ynet, the new ‘About this account’ option enables users to view the loca­tion of an account, as well as, in many cas­es, the loca­tion where the X appli­ca­tion was first installed.

Read more: https://www.jns.org/xs-new-location-feature-unmasks-pro-hamas-disinformation-network/

SOURCE NOTE

Jew­ish News Syn­di­cate (JNS) is a pro-Israel news out­let that gen­er­al­ly sup­ports the Israeli gov­ern­men­t’s posi­tions and focus­es on Jew­ish and Israel-relat­ed issues. Its own­er­ship struc­ture cen­ters on pro-Israel donors and orga­ni­za­tions that pri­or­i­tize advo­ca­cy-ori­ent­ed report­ing and com­men­tary on Mid­dle East and Jew­ish affairs. The JNS arti­cle failed to acknowl­edge that VPNs, prox­ies, and app-store set­tings can alter the appar­ent ori­gin of accounts. X’s Head of Prod­uct, Niki­ta Bier, acknowl­edged the fea­ture had “a few rough edges” and would be updat­ed peri­od­i­cal­ly, while the plat­form added a dis­claimer stat­ing that loca­tion data “may not be accu­rate” due to fac­tors such as recent trav­el. The fea­ture ini­tial­ly mis­la­beled sev­er­al accounts, includ­ing those of U.S. gov­ern­ment offi­cials and Cana­di­an jour­nal­ists, while Human Rights Watch warned that loca­tion dis­clo­sure could com­pro­mise the anonymi­ty of jour­nal­ists and activists whose safe­ty depends on it.​ Despite the arti­cle’s short­com­ings, the GIOR edi­tors believe the infor­ma­tion is still valuable.

Key Points

• X’s new loca­tion fea­ture reveals that many “Gaza eye­wit­ness” accounts actu­al­ly oper­ate from coun­tries such as Pak­istan, Rus­sia, and the UK.​

• Israeli media and Israel’s For­eign Min­istry describe a coor­di­nat­ed pro-Hamas dis­in­for­ma­tion net­work manip­u­lat­ing glob­al per­cep­tions of the Gaza war.​

• Intel­li­gence firm Cyabra iden­ti­fied tens of thou­sands of pro-Hamas social media accounts post­ing hun­dreds of times per day across major platforms.​

• X’s new loca­tion fea­ture is increas­ing trans­paren­cy and account­abil­i­ty in online war report­ing while expos­ing large-scale deception.​

Coordinated Disinformation and Information Control in Gaza and Ukraine Wars 

Between 2018 and 2022, Hamas built a coer­cive sys­tem that fil­tered human­i­tar­i­an data at its source, intim­i­dat­ed jour­nal­ists and civ­il soci­ety, and con­strained UN staff to cre­ate a struc­tur­al dis­in­for­ma­tion envi­ron­ment where infor­ma­tion appears neu­tral by the time it reach­es West­ern audi­ences. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al, and the Com­mit­tee to Pro­tect Jour­nal­ists doc­u­ment­ed sys­tem­at­ic tor­ture of crit­ics and repeat­ed arrests of jour­nal­ists, while UN agen­cies explic­it­ly stat­ed that Gaza casu­al­ty fig­ures “can­not be inde­pen­dent­ly verified”.

This infor­ma­tion con­trol occurs along­side Russ­ian auto­mat­ed dis­in­for­ma­tion oper­a­tions tar­get­ing Gaza nar­ra­tives, with more than 800 like­ly auto­mat­ed accounts post­ing 11.1 mil­lion times in the last year on issues includ­ing Gaza, Ukraine, and cost-of-liv­ing crises in the US and UK. The Amer­i­can Sun­light Project iden­ti­fied accounts that post­ed hun­dreds of times dai­ly and retweet­ed overt Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da with­in 60 sec­onds, demon­strat­ing how coor­di­nat­ed net­works exploit Gaza-relat­ed con­tent for broad­er geopo­lit­i­cal messaging.

Exter­nal references:

• Who’s behind Israel-Gaza dis­in­for­ma­tion and hate online? — BBC News
• Mea­sur­ing Influ­ence Oper­a­tions — Carnegie Endow­ment for Inter­na­tion­al Peace
• How BBC Open Source Jour­nal­ists Inves­ti­gate, Ana­lyze, and Counter Gaza Mis­in­for­ma­tion — GIJN

Dis­claimer:

The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) uti­lizes AI through­out the post­ing process, includ­ing the gen­er­a­tion of sum­maries for news items, intro­duc­tions, key points, and, often, the “con­text” sec­tion. We rec­om­mend ver­i­fy­ing all infor­ma­tion before use. Addi­tion­al­ly, all images are gen­er­at­ed using AI and are intend­ed sole­ly for illus­tra­tive pur­pos­es. While they rep­re­sent the events or indi­vid­u­als dis­cussed, they should not be inter­pret­ed as real-world photography.