Graphic pro-Israel ads make their way into children’s video games

Maria Julia Cassis was sitting down to a meal in her terraced home in north London when her 6-year-old son ran into the dining room, his face pale, Reuters has reported. The puzzle game on his Android phone had been interrupted by a video showing Hamas militants, terrified Israeli families and blurred graphic footage. Over a black screen, a message from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the child: “WE WILL MAKE SURE THAT THOSE WHO HARM US PAY A HEAVY PRICE.”

Cassis, a 28-year-old barista from Brazil, said that the ad left her son shaken and she deleted the game quickly. “He was shocked,” she said last week, and wanted to know what the “bloody ad” was doing in his game.

Reuters has not been able to establish how the ad came to be in the game, but the family isn’t alone. At least five other cases have been documented across Europe where the same pro-Israel video, which carried footage of rocket attacks, a fiery explosion and masked gunmen, was shown to gamers, including several children. In at least one case, the ads were played inside the popular “Angry Birds” game made by SEGA-owned developer Rovio.

“Somehow these ads with disturbing content have in error made it through to our game,” confirmed the company. They are now being blocked manually. Spokesperson Lotta Backlund did not provide details on which of its “dozen or so ad partners” had supplied it with the ad.

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According to David Saranga, the head of digital at the Israeli ministry of foreign affairs, the video was indeed a government-promoted ad but he claimed that he had “no idea” how it ended up inside various games. He said that the footage was part of a larger advocacy drive by the ministry, which has spent $1.5 million on internet ads since the 7 October attack by Hamas in southern Israel ignited the ongoing genocidal bombardment of Palestinians in Gaza. Saranga insisted that officials had specifically instructed advertisers “to block it for people under 18”.

He defended the graphic nature of the ad campaign. “We want the world to understand what happened here in Israel. It’s a massacre.”

Reuters contacted 43 advertising firms that Rovio listed on its website as “third-party data partners” to try to ascertain who placed the ad in the games. Of those partners, only 12 responded, including Amazon, Index Exchange and Pinterest; they said that they were not responsible for the ad appearing on Angry Birds.

Saranga said the ministry had spent money with ad companies including Taboola, Outbrain, Google and X, formerly known as Twitter. Taboola and Outbrain said they had nothing to do with the gaming ads. Google ran more than 90 ads for the foreign ministry but declined to comment on where it displayed those ads. X didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The news agency found no evidence of an analogous Palestinian digital advertising effort, save for a few Arabic-language videos promoted by West Bank-based Palestine TV, a news agency affiliated with the Palestinian Authority. A representative from the PA foreign ministry said that it was working to sway public opinion by sharing evidence of suffering in Gaza under the Israeli bombardment that followed the 7 October attack, but did not say whether it was using advertising as a tool.

Representatives from Hamas, the Islamist movement that governs Gaza, did not respond to Reuters requests for comment about its media campaigns.

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The Israeli ads are known to have appeared in a game called “Alice’s Mergeland” made by a developer called LazyDog Game; family-friendly digital pastimes such as the block-building game “Stack”, puzzle game “Balls’n Ropes”, “Solitaire: Card Game 2023” and run-and-jump adventure “Subway Surfers”.

Alexandra Marginean, a 24-year-old intern living in Munich said she was surprised to see the pro-Israel video pop up in the middle of her game of Solitaire. “I had a very aggressive reaction to it,” she said.

LazyDog Game did not respond to requests for comment. Stack’s Ubisoft-owned UBIP.PA developer Ketchapp, Solitaire’s Austrian developer nerByte, Balls’n Ropes’ Turkish developer Rollic and Subway Surfers’ Danish developer SYBO Games also did not return messages seeking comment on the ads.

Apple AAPL.O and Alphabet’s GOOGL.O Google, which police the apps on their in-house software platforms for iPhones and Android phones, respectively, referred questions back to the games’ developers.

Rules on advertisements vary by country, but in Britain — where Cassis and her son live — it’s the Advertising Standards Authority that monitors publicity campaigns. The authority said that while it was not currently investigating any ads from the Israeli government, in general any publicity with graphic imagery should be “carefully targeted away from under-18s”.