How Telegram Became a Terrifying Weapon in the Israel-Hamas War

 

At around 8 am local time the morning of October 7, Haaretz’s cyber and disinformation reporter, Omer Benjakob, was woken by his wife at their home in the historic port city of Jaffa. Something was happening in southern Israel, she said, but Benjakob shrugged it off, presuming “another round of the same shit.” Flare-ups between the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and militants in southern Israel are not uncommon. “No, no,” Benjakob’s wife insisted. “It’s more serious.”

There was nothing yet on television or state media except unverified reports of casualties. The authorities were silent. In response to requests from Haaretz, the IDF said the situation was “under review.” On social media, a different story was unfolding. There were clips of dead IDF soldiers. Paragliders descending on a rave in the Negev desert, 3 miles from the $1.1 billion militarized Gaza-Israel Barrier. Militants commandeering IDF military vehicles. “You’re seeing videos of kidnapping. Hamas guys going over the border, and then like shoot-’em-up-style videos going in kibbutz houses,” Benjakob says, still sounding stunned. Like many other Israelis that morning, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

Telegram was already familiar to many Israelis, who, among other things, often procure cannabis through the app. Sustained government pressure on the country’s press had also driven people in search of alternative news sources, Benjakob says. Previous escalations of violence tended to coincide with an uptick of activity on Telegram. Now the Hamas attacks brought a surge of users. “Hundreds of thousands are signing up for Telegram from Israel and the Palestinian Territories,” Pavel Durov, Telegram’s Russian founder, posted on his public channel on October 8, adding that the company was bringing support for Hebrew and Arabic to the app. “Everyone affected should have reliable access to news and private communication in these dire times,” Durov said.

Maria Rashed, a longtime resident of Tel Aviv who recently moved to London, had flown home to Nazareth for her sister’s engagement party the night before the October 7 attacks. “It was overwhelming to wake up facing war,” she tells WIRED. A Palestinian who grew up in a Christian family, Rashed is now an independent journalist. The morning of October 7, she scoured mainstream platforms, especially Instagram. But in the absence of official information, she wanted to see for herself how Hamas fighters had entered Israel. “The only way for me to do that was to go on Telegram, enter the channel related to Hamas’ press team,” she says. “And there you could see unfiltered videos of the attack.”

During the course of the day, Telegram, which has 800 million users worldwide, became the main source of videos and information spreading to other social media platforms, including X, Instagram, and TikTok, where content was being reposted with little to no verification.

In one open source intelligence war-watching group on Telegram, Benjakob saw videos of IDF forces being humbled—basic quad drones dropping grenades on Israel’s state-of-the-art Mark IV Merkava tanks, followed by footage of soldiers fleeing their vehicles and being captured by Hamas fighters. But Benjakob couldn’t be sure if the videos were real. “All the [official] Israeli groups are silent. The official government groups are silent,” he says. “Fucking crazy.”