Documents of horror that were broadcast live from Facebook, Instagram, Whats App and other social media during the attack by Hamas in the Israeli hinterland are discussed in their investigation by the New York Times, which reveal that the terrorists broadcast live their massacres from the accounts of their victims!
Notably, shortly after the Hamas attack that sparked the war with Israel, friends and relatives of Gali Shlezinger Idan, who lived in a kibbutz near the Gaza border, received distressing messages to check her Facebook page. What they found shocked them.
Members of Hamas used Idan's Facebook account to livestream themselves holding her and her family hostage. During the 43-minute broadcast, gunmen forced Idan and her family to crouch on a tiled floor as rockets and gunfire blasted their building.
"I couldn't believe what I was seeing," said Keren de Via, a friend of the Idan family, who saw Ms. Idan's children hugging their parents and crying during the live broadcast. “How could we watch them terrorize the family like this? How could I watch this on Facebook?” he says.
In a new war tactic, Hamas has seized the social media accounts of kidnapped Israelis and used them to spread violent messages and wage psychological warfare, according to interviews with 13 Israeli families and their friends, as well as experts in social media that have studied extremist groups, as reported by the New York Times.
On at least four occasions, Hamas members logged into their hostages' personal social media accounts to live-stream the October 7 attacks. In the days that followed, Hamas also appeared to infiltrate the Facebook groups, Instagram accounts and WhatsApp chats of their hostages to issue death threats and calls for violence. Hamas members also took hostages' cellphones to make taunting calls to friends and relatives, according to their Israeli families and friends.
Hamas terrorists have long turned to social media to promote their cause. But the hacking of individual hostages' Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp accounts "weaponizes social media in a way that I don't think we've seen before," said Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University. "We are not psychologically prepared for something like this," he says.
This tactic is particularly painful for those close to the account owners, exacerbating an already painful situation. Social media has become a lifeline for friends and family looking for clues about missing loved ones, and receiving a message or seeing a video posted on the accounts instantly inspired a moment of hope, said two of whose families the relatives were held hostage by Hamas. But that hope was dashed when they saw that someone else had made the posts.
"I felt maybe optimistic, for a second - and then confused," de Via said. "Then just terror."
How Zuckerberg's Meta reacts
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, according to the NYT, declined to comment on the seizure of the abducted Israelis' social media accounts, but said it had set up a "special operations center staffed with experts, including whose fluent Hebrew and Arabic, to closely monitor and respond to this rapidly evolving situation.'
Two members of the security team overseeing Facebook, who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly, confirmed that Hamas had accessed the Facebook accounts of Israeli hostages to start livestreams and post to their accounts. This appeared to be part of Hamas' strategy from the time the attacks occurred, they said. The accounts have since been made private and the livestreams have been removed, they added.
Ms Idan's Facebook account was seized on October 7, about two hours after Hamas attacked her kibbutz, Nahal Oz, where she lived with her husband and four children. Suddenly, a live broadcast appeared on her Facebook page, Ms. de Via and a family relative said.
Ms de Via, who was once Ms Idan's neighbor and has children the same age, said she was trying to contact her when the live video appeared. "I immediately opened it up because it's not someone who does a Facebook video or does a live broadcast," Ms de Via said. “The first thing I saw was how terrified the children looked and then voices in Arabic. I realized that something very bad was happening."
