‘I fabricate fake news’ says Israeli communications official

“I fabricate fake news,” admitted senior Israeli communications official Eli Hazan in a video in which he declared that truth and facts no longer matter. The extraordinary confession by Hazan was captured in a video that has gone viral on social media.

‘We must flood social media with fake news to defend Israel’

Israeli politician Eli Hazan says the ‘truth no longer matters’ pic.twitter.com/8OuylEPf5U

— HatsOff (@HatsOffff) August 16, 2026

The clip has attracted more than one million views on X, alongside thousands of reposts and comments. In the footage, Hazan states: “The truth doesn’t matter anymore. The facts don’t matter anymore.” He goes on to acknowledge: “I fabricate fake news as a response to them,” before arguing that Israel needs to adopt a communications strategy modelled on US President Donald Trump. 

The Trump model invoked by Hazan is closely associated with the repeated use of false or misleading claims and the dismissal of unfavourable reporting as “fake news”. Trump helped popularise the phrase as a political attack against critics. The term, which had initially been used primarily to describe fabricated stories became a central feature of Trump’s attacks on the media during his rise to power.

Trump’s disregard for factual accuracy has been extensively documented by independent fact-checkers. The Washington Post recorded 30,573 false or misleading claims during his first term as president, an average of around 21 a day. PolitiFact, after examining 1,000 of Trump’s statements by February 2024, found that around 76 per cent of the claims it selected for fact-checking were rated “Mostly False”, “False” or “Pants on Fire”, with “False” the median rating.

Like Trump, Hazan also describes social media as a battlefield in which Israel must wage an online “war” against its opponents. He states that, in this information war, factual accuracy is secondary.

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Hazan is a longstanding Likud communications figure who has served as the party’s foreign affairs director and as a spokesperson for Benjamin Netanyahu. He also served as Israel’s ambassador to Singapore. Israeli media reported this year that Netanyahu sought to appoint him as director of the Government Press Office (GPO), the body responsible for relations between the Israeli government and domestic and foreign journalists. 

The GPO itself describes part of its role as maintaining relations with foreign journalists and carrying out public diplomacy activities intended to improve Israel’s image in the international media. 

Hazan’s remarks have gone viral as Israel pours unprecedented sums into hasbara, the state’s public diplomacy and propaganda apparatus, in an effort to reverse the collapse in international support following the genocide in Gaza.

Israel’s public diplomacy budget had surged to around $730 million, more than four times the $150 million allocated the previous year. That earlier budget was itself around 20 times higher than Israel’s spending on such operations before 2023. The money is being directed towards digital campaigns, influencers, foreign delegations, advocacy organisations and other initiatives intended to reshape international opinion. 

Israel has also paid social media influencers as much as $7,000 per post to publish pro-Israel material. Other contracts have required thousands of pieces of social media content and tens of millions of monthly impressions, while campaigns have sought to influence search results and the information environment used by artificial intelligence platforms. 

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