From opposite sides of war, a hunt for elusive facts

In the panicked early hours of October 7, amid blaring sirens and rumors of gun battles along Israel's southern border, Achiya Schatz rushed into a bomb shelter near Tel Aviv with his toddler and heavily pregnant wife.

He didn't stay long.

Initial reports of the Hamas attack had already merged with rumors, spreading in social media feeds and private chat groups in an emotionally charged and largely unverified mass. Mr. Schatz, one of Israel's best-known disinformation researchers and fact-checkers, rushed back to his computer, knowing he had little time to prevent the false claims from spreading.

In a sense, he was already too late.

Since the first attack, the region's disinformation watchdogs have been overwhelmed by baseless stories, manipulated media and conspiracy theories. The content has proliferated in enormous quantities: video game clips and old news reports masquerading as current footage, attempts to deny authentic photos as artificially generated, inaccurate translations, and false accusations spread in multiple languages.

In the fog of war, rumors and lies are particularly dangerous because they can take on the veneer of fact and influence decisions. The intention is for fact-checkers and disinformation analysts to be part of the defense and provide a clear examination of the available evidence.

However, the work is tough, even for seasoned professionals, who have faced setbacks in the fight against false and misleading narratives during multiple elections and a pandemic. In the Middle East, where fact-checking and disinformation research websites are relatively nascent and often poorly funded, the challenges have become even greater.

“You don't have many established fact-checking organizations in the region with a long track record, and that makes it more difficult,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, which supports fact-checkers worldwide. “On the ground, it is a new area that needs development.”

Many Israeli and Palestinian fact-checkers have entered the field in recent years. They have done valuable work in recent months, sometimes without pay, trying to get the facts from a combat zone, Ms. Holan said. Being so close to the conflict makes them deeply rooted in the truth and better equipped to understand the cultural nuances that shape it.

It also exposes them to accusations of bias. Neutrality can be difficult in a region where political and religious differences have been fiercely contested for generations, and even more so during an intensely polarizing war.

Adding to the difficulty, access to reliable information is poor, especially in Gaza, where heavy bombing and power outages are disrupting efforts to investigate claims. Intimidation and threats have increased. Their mental health is in a precarious position: fact-checkers face post-traumatic stress disorder caused by constant exposure to violent and explicit images; some mourn murdered colleagues and family members.

The emotional burden weighs heavily on Baker Mohammad Abdulhaq, a journalist and fact-checker in Nablus, a Palestinian city in the West Bank less than 50 miles from Jerusalem. Eight years ago, he founded a fact-checking initiative called Tahaqaq Observatory, which translates to “verification.” Between October 7 and December 25, he and his team of nine fact-checkers published an average of almost two reports per day – almost four times as many as in September.

Conducting their research has been a painful process, sometimes requiring them to “witness harsh scenes in Gaza of children and women killed as a result of Israeli airstrikes,” Mr. Abdulhaq said by email.

“We also communicate directly with their families and collect harrowing testimonies from those who are suffering, creating significant psychological pressure,” he said.

Tahaqaq's main audience is Palestinian, and most reports are written in Arabic. Many are unflattering toward Israel: Mr. Abdulhaq and his team have reviewed inaccurate claims about prisoner exchanges, as well as concerns that Israel has used white phosphorus against civilians. Tahaqaq, he said, was the target of 179 cyber attacks on October 23 that attempted to take down the website after he wrote about the deadly explosion at Al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City.

Mr. Abdulhaq said he had some distressing interactions with Israeli authorities before Oct. 7, including a weeks-long detention in 2018 in an Israeli prison after returning from a conference on Palestinian issues in Lebanon and receiving a media award in Cairo. He said he was questioned about his journalistic activities and then released without charge.

Such experiences, however, have limited effect on his fact-checking, he said.

Tahaqaq also investigated false and misleading claims from Palestinian and other Arab accounts, including a video that was mistranslated to suggest an Israeli officer was complaining about the difficulty of fighting Hamas, when in fact he was discussing the precision and professionalism of his troops . Another video claiming to show a Palestinian child whose entire family had been killed by Israeli airstrikes actually documented a boy surviving the summer floods in Tajikistan.

Tahaqaq started in 2015 as part of Mr. Abdulhaq's master's thesis on fact-checking. The money ran out two years later, but it restarted in 2020 to report Covid-19 claims. Now the group relies on the donated time of its fact-checkers and occasional financial assistance through the Arab Fact-Checkers Network.

The network, a three-year-old project of the media organization Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, includes more than 250 fact-checkers from Egypt, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere. Saja Mortada, the Lebanese journalist in charge of the organization, said the war between Israel and Hamas has been the most complicated crisis to monitor in a year, which also includes claims regarding the war in Sudan, earthquakes in Syria and Morocco, and storms in Syria. Libya.

“Fear and uncertainty can allow false information to spread quickly because people can easily believe and share things that align with what they fear or already think,” she said.

The warning signs of such a wave of disinformation were immediately apparent to Mr. Schatz, the Israeli researcher, on October 7.

“I was in shock, like everyone else, but I realized that it is in that state of shock that the worst things happen and go viral on the Internet,” he said.

His group, FakeReporter, relies on a team of fourteen people to investigate and investigate conspiracies and rumors circulating on social media. It is known for uncovering an Iranian disinformation campaign in 2021 that used WhatsApp groups to sow confusion among Israelis. That fall, the organization also discovered WhatsApp groups formed by Israeli extremists to carry out attacks on Palestinian nationals. FakeReporter's findings are cited in both left-wing and right-wing Israeli publications.

Mr. Schatz came to researching disinformation through political activism. He joined fellow Israeli reservists in a group protesting the country's military occupation of the Palestinian territories and participated in demonstrations against government corruption along with thousands of other Israelis in 2020.

He started noticing strange claims about the protesters appearing in the WhatsApp groups used to plan and carry out the rallies. Accounts using strange syntax joined the group and soon spread false claims that the protesters were being paid or deliberately gathering in large crowds to spread Covid. Rumors that the Israeli government would use online bots to spread disinformation had long circulated, he said, but had been little studied.

“The tactics were so manipulative, it seemed like something bigger was going on,” he said. He eventually traced some of the misleading messages about protesters to bot accounts.

Later that year, Mr. Schatz started FakeReporter with five friends. The project asked Israeli activists to report strange or misleading social media accounts and WhatsApp messages; thousands of messages poured in. After a year of full-time unpaid work, the group began turning to grants and donations to fund its efforts.

Mr. Schatz said reporting on disinformation requires people to put aside their politics. His team receives claims from Israelis across the political spectrum to analyze, and the group also recently started accepting reports in Arabic. During the first month of the war the group was emasculated images purporting to show Israeli children locked in cages in Gaza. (The footage was years old and it was unclear where it came from.) It also debunked claims that Israel had fabricated artificial intelligence or used artificial intelligence to simulate the deaths of its own citizens at the Nova music festival.

“We work hard to stick to what we know or don't know, and to put our political views aside,” Mr. Schatz said. “Especially now, in a time of war, we must work carefully not to let our opinions cloud what is factual and what is not.”

Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.