Information Warfare: How Israel countered One-Sided Narrative by deceiving Hamas Shield Strategy

Amidst aggressive aerial exchanges and the high-scale battle-like situation between Israel and Hamas. Israel dug a new way to effectively balance out a one-sided narrative in the media especially Anti-Israel media campaigns by Arab media and inflict heavy damage to Hamas. The new way is called “Information Warfare”.

Understanding Information Warfare
Information Warfare simply means to manipulate the enemy by releasing manipulative information and psychologically manipulate and deceive the enemy on the other hand; this concept is also used to gain information superiority over your enemy by using cyber means to gather and extract more information than your enemy or about your enemy. Information Warfare has various tactics and aims, it depends on what has to be achieved and what is the target depending this the nature of Information warfare gets decided.

The One-Sided Narrative: Far from Strategic Reality
Today what media specifically the Arab Media is channelizing is Anti-Israel propaganda by labeling Israel as a war criminal and killers of hundreds of Palestinians but this is something which is staged and purposely projected to defame Israel and mount international pressure on Israel and continue to wield one-sided narrative which portrays Israeli as oppressors and the Palestinians as the suffers.

However, the strategic reality is different as said, the Hamas make deliberate attempts to color the showdown from their perspective by strategically placing their weaponry, arm, ammunition near to the civilian settlements so that whenever Israel carry out strikes on Hamas positions, naturally collateral or non-intentional damage takes place and Palestinians suffer and thereafter Hamas with Gaza media click photos and take video clippings and label them as ‘Israel Oppression and excessive aggression against civilians but in reality, this isn’t the case.Hamas terrorists use the well-versed strategy of the human shield where they use Palestine settlements- buildings and houses as their favorable location of positioning their rockets, arms, and ammunition so that they can easily initiate propaganda against Israel post-Israel strikes. But yesterday Israel understood this shield strategy of Hamas and countered with perfection through Information warfare.

Tricking Hamas
When Israel Defence Forces realized that Hamas are hardening and increasing their positions near the civilian settlements just to bake the possibilities of collateral damage and further create propaganda against Israel. However, Israel has now started to put a full stop to this shield strategy of Hamas. Israel Defence Forces had launched a low magnitude or small scale information warfare which was psychologically oriented.

On their social media platform, they (IDF) officially released a statement (which was later deleted) which said that IDF has been deployed or about to be deployed on the Gaza Strip post the statement released Hamas got psychologically deviated or affected, and due to fear they changed their positions and went to hide in the tunnels. After they took roof in the tunnel Israel deployed its Air Force to carry out strikes on the tunnels where Hamas terrorists were hiding. The Airstrike gave Israel pinpoint locations and increased the effectiveness of the offense against the Hamas terrorists without inflicting any collateral or non-international damage on the civilians.

Israel’s Strategic Maneuver Counter’s Narrative
This strategic maneuver (Information warfare) from Israel clears one thing that Israel only aims to hit terrorists and not civilians, Israel’s aggression is only towards terrorists and not civilians. This strategic maneuver not only helped Israel in increasing the effectiveness of the offensive against Hamas but also helped Israel to counter a one-sided adverse narrative in the international media and further hardens Israel’s position of exercising legitimate self-defense against the aggression triggered by violent non-state actors (Hamas Terror Group).

Image Courtesy: India Today, The Arab Weekly, Middle East Eye

Originally published at http://www.woodwardjournal.com.