The Israeli military operates a special unit known as the “Legitimization Cell” that exists to create propaganda justifying the military’s targeting of civilian infrastructure and civilians, particularly journalists, in order to ensure that Israel maintains its legitimacy on the world stage, an investigation finds.

According to a +972 Magazine and Local Call investigation published Thursday, the Legitimization Cell is a public relations unit that is tasked with finding a narrative to create cover for some of the most highly criticized actions by Israel’s military.

“If the global media is talking about Israel killing innocent journalists, then immediately there’s a push to find one journalist who might not be so innocent — as if that somehow makes killing the other 20 acceptable,” an Israeli intelligence source told journalist Yuval Abraham.

“The idea was to [allow the military to] operate without pressure, so countries like America wouldn’t stop supplying weapons,” another Israeli source said.

Observers have seen this pattern play out numerous times, including in the recent assassination of famous Gaza journalist Anas Al-Sharif, who Israel killed along with five other Al Jazeera journalists earlier this week. Israel has long smeared Al-Sharif as a member of Hamas — claims that he always denied and for which Israel has not provided any evidence that can be independently verified.

Israel does this regularly. Last year, after killing Al Jazeera journalist Ismail al-Ghoul, Israeli officials claimed that he was given a Hamas military ranking in 2007 — when al-Ghoul was only 10 years old.

“[T]hree intelligence sources said the army treated the media as an extension of the battlefield, allowing it to declassify sensitive intelligence for public release,” said the investigation.

+972 and Local Call report that the Legitimization Cell is responsible for narratives like its denial of responsibility for the strike on Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City in October 2023 — a high-profile strike that killed hundreds of Palestinians. The bombing gained widespread media attention as one of Israel’s first strikes on Gaza’s health care system that it has now destroyed, with Al-Ahli put out of service by Israeli attacks.

A flood of disinformation sourced from the military — much of which was later debunked by numerous investigations — followed the attack. The day after, the Legitimization Unit put out a recording of a phone call that it claimed was between two Hamas operatives saying that the hospital was struck by a misfired Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket.

But this claim was roundly debunked by analysts and multiple news outlets. And the phone call, too, was fake — a Palestinian human rights activist told +972 and Local Call that it was actually a benign phone call between him and his civilian friend that had been intercepted by the military. Israel keeps a huge database of Palestinians’ phone calls as part of its vast surveillance network.

In response to the report, the Israeli military outright admitted that Israeli military intelligence maintains “research teams” that have the goal of “discredit[ing]” journalists reporting from Gaza who are supposedly “Hamas members.”

But, despite supposedly being responsible for finding journalists’ ties to Hamas, the “research teams do not play a role in the selection of individual targets to be attacked,” the report finds — meaning that they are looking for justification after the fact.

“There was this phrase, ‘That’s good for legitimacy,’” one source told +972 and Local Call. “The goal was simply to find as much material as possible to serve hasbara efforts.”

Sources recalled a case where the Legitimization Unit falsely represented a journalist as a member of Hamas’s military wing, saying that the propaganda research cell was “eager” and “excited” about the narrative. “In the end, they realized he really was a journalist,” and he wasn’t targeted, one source claimed.

Israel has long had a robust propaganda operation — so robust, in fact, that Israel has exported some of its intelligence and surveillance technologies. Members of one of its well-known intelligence units, Unit 8200, are trained in Israel but go on to work across numerous sectors, including as journalists in the U.S. at outlets key to shaping American opinion.

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