08-08-2025
A war beyond the bombs
IN the hours before Israeli forces bombed Iran's Evin prison on June 23, social media posts in Persian foreshadowed the strike and urged Iranians to free the inmates.
Moments after the bombs fell, a video surfaced on X and Telegram, appearing to show a blast at the notorious facility, long known for holding political prisoners.
One post included the hashtag, in Persian: '#freeevin'.
The attack was real – but the posts and video were not. According to researchers, they were part of an Israeli deception campaign. It was just one instance in a broader information war.
Over 12 days of missile strikes between Israel and Iran, social media became a digital battleground, with both sides deploying fakes, fabrications and psychological operations (psyops) in an effort to control public perception – even as hundreds died and tensions escalated across the Middle East.
While psyops are as old as warfare itself, experts say this conflict saw an unprecedented level of sophistication and scale, supercharged by artificial intelligence (AI) tools and ubiquitous mobile connectivity.
'The ability to go to scale with this kind of propaganda – there's never really been a previous corollary in history,' said James Forest, a security studies professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Today's technology enables governments to directly reach domestic and foreign audiences in real time – often with messages that seem far more credible than before.
Iran, for example, reportedly sent alerts in Hebrew to thousands of Israeli phones, warning people to avoid bomb shelters because fighters planned to attack them.
On X, a network of accounts attributed to Israel spread messages in Persian, some voiced by AI-generated narrators, aimed at undermining public faith in Iran's government.
The propaganda barrage offers a glimpse into what future conflicts might look like. When US President Donald Trump ordered strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, false images of destroyed American bombers appeared online.
'I think what most people would say is that we are not prepared in the military for the kind of information operations or psychological operations that might become mainstream in this century,' said David Millar, a former US intelligence officer and trainer at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute.
While the Pentagon has long embraced information warfare – renamed Military Information Support Operations – it is often treated as secondary to conventional tactics.
Russia, by contrast, is seen as the most aggressive player in influence campaigns, waging a full-spectrum information war since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Both Israel and Iran have adopted elements of Russia's playbook, now enhanced by widely accessible AI tools.
'If you go back to the early days of Ukraine, we saw disinformation campaigns from Russia, but they were pretty primitive compared to what we saw in the early days of Gaza,' said Hany Farid, a computer science professor at UC Berkeley and co-founder of GetReal Security.
His company was the first to flag the fake Evin prison video.
In both the Israel-Gaza and Israel-Iran conflicts, online platforms were inundated with doctored or misleading content – from crude edits to subtle fakes that initially fooled journalists.
Farid likened it to the leap from World War II-era propaganda, when radio and leaflets were the tools of choice.
'With radio, you had one message and you sent it out,' he said. 'Now you have a million messages that you send out to a million individuals.'
Iran's efforts, analysts believe, were aimed as much at regional audiences as Israel itself. According to Ari Ben-Am, co-founder of Israeli analytics firm Telemetry Data Labs, Teheran sought to maintain its image as a regional power.
Fabricated footage showed explosions at Israel's Ben Gurion Airport. Images claiming to show wrecked Israeli and even US aircraft – traced to Iranian sources – were widely shared.
Iran also claimed to have downed three Israeli F-35 jets, a claim Israel denied. One photo showed an implausible afterburner on a destroyed plane.
Iranian media went so far as to announce the capture of an Israeli pilot named Sarah Ahronot. But the photo was traced by NewsGuard – a disinformation watchdog – to a 2011 image of a Chilean navy officer.
NewsGuard documented at least 28 false claims from Iran, disseminated through a mix of state media, anonymous websites and proxy influencers on platforms including YouTube, Facebook, X, Telegram and TikTok.
Israel's campaign, meanwhile, appeared focused not just on battlefield results but on amplifying political dissent inside Iran.
Horizon Intelligence, a Brussels-based threat analysis firm, cited social media accounts that resurfaced old protest footage and generated AI videos of Iranians chanting 'We love Israel'.
Darren Linvill, co-director of Clemson University's Media Forensics Hub, described the Evin prison video as a textbook case of 'coordination between kinetic and psychological warfare' – a fake video pushed out moments after a real-world airstrike, then amplified by a network of inauthentic anti-Iran accounts.
The digital battle didn't end with the ceasefire on June 24.
The next day, a new account appeared on X, claiming to be the Persian-language spokesman for Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence agency.
Posts offered financial and medical support to Iranians willing to revolt. Videos on the account featured Menashe Amir, an elderly Iranian-Israeli journalist and broadcaster.
Amir confirmed strangers came to his house with cameras and scripts in Hebrew, asking him to record messages in Persian.
He suspected they were Mossad operatives. Mossad declined to comment.
Iran took the account seriously. Its Health Ministry issued a public warning urging Iranians to ignore Mossad's offers, according to state media. — ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
