Who is Hananya Naftali, social media-savvy propagandist for Israeli regime?

By David Miller

Israeli regime premier Benjamin Netanyahu’s close aide, Hananya Naftali, styles himself as a social media influencer. He was perhaps the first to claim the bombing of the Al-Ahli Hospital in the besieged Gaza Strip was carried out by the occupation forces. 

On October 17, Naftali posted on X, formerly Twitter, that the Israeli occupation forces “struck a Hamas terrorist base inside a hospital.”

Shortly after, he deleted the post, apologising for the misinformation. “I mistakenly shared this information… I apologize for this error. As the IDF does not bomb hospitals,” he wrote.

But who is Hananya Naftali? Unsurprisingly, it turns out that he has made a career out of peddling lies and propaganda for the Zionist entity.

Naftali likes to mislead on his origins.  Here he is on October 15, falsely claiming to have been “born and raised” in “Israel”.  He has been making this claim for years such as here back in 2014 when he claimed to be a “Native born Israeli Jew”.

He is in fact the child of Russian settler colonists who it is falsely claimed were refugees.

In fact they were smuggled out of Russia by Zionist agents in the Jewish Agency, one of the four so-called “national institutions” of the Zionist entity, which is responsible for encouraging settler colonists to occupy Palestine. 

Born in Safed, he grew up in what the Zionists call “Samaria” - an illegal settlement built on the Palestinian land, occupied by the Israeli regime.

Naftali also likes to pretend he is a civilian social media influencer. He describes himself on his X profile as a "media personality".

According to his online biography, Naftali is an "Israeli Jewish influencer and human rights activist." He and his wife, India, who is an American settler colonist, shot a video together in their personal bomb shelter on October 7 which reportedly went viral on social media.

In the video, he claimed to be a “civilian” under threat from “Hamas rockets”. But his back story indicates that this too was a lie.

Naftali was in the occupation forces terrorising Palestinians during 2014 Operation Protective Edge. He was also involved in the regime operation in the Golan to patch up fighters including from Nusra the Syrian affiliate of al Qaeda and send them back to the regime change operation targeting the Syrian government.

He has remained in the occupation forces reserves ever since. Netanyahu hired him in 2018 as a social media adviser and when he married his wife India, Netanyahu himself gave a speech that is still available on the internet.

Israeli regime’s genocidal campaign in Gaza Strip has a key target – children

The staggering number of child casualties in the besieged Gaza Strip since October 7 points to the heavy toll Israel’s devastating bombing campaign has taken on the territory’s young population.

When he posted his Tweet on the hospital bombing on October 17, he was still claiming to be a civilian but it is clear from other social media posts that on Oct. 9 on X he said he was recently called up to fight for the Israeli military.

In an Oct. 14 Facebook video where he appeared in military uniform, he claimed that he had already been called by Netanyahu to join a “digital media task force” to defend the regime in the media sphere.

As expected, his social media work contains an undiluted stream of lies and misinformation

• He suggests that illegal settlements are not built on “empty” land. The fact is that the land was taken by the Israeli military forces and Palestinians were ethnically cleansed and their land was stolen.
• He uses memes to brazenly justify the genocidal war crimes of the Zionist entity in Gaza today such as in this one blaming Hamas for cutting off the water to the besieged strip. The whole world knows that this was done by the Zionist entity.

Perhaps his worst intervention was also hastily removed from the internet, but not before it was screengrabbed and posted online.

On his Farsi language X account, he posted a photo of dead Palestinian children with the message: “The world should thank us for destroying these little time bombs. In fact, we are preventing similar events from happening to other nations in the coming years."

The idea of children as “time bombs’ is not an aberration of Naftali’s thinking. It is deeply ingrained in Zionist propaganda as can be seen in this image of the propaganda “war room” on the campus of the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Israel’s only private university from back in 2009. As is well known the IDC (recently renamed Reichman University).

The war room was created by StandWithUs a group active in occupied Palestine, the US and the UK amongst other places. It was created with help from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and is a direct regime asset.

The poster in the background asks if the child in the picture will grow up to be a doctor, teacher or “terrorist”. StandWithUs also used a version of the poster in an ad campaign on the San Francisco Bay Area metro system, known as the BART, in 2011.

Of course, whatever a Palestinian child grows up to be, they will be targeted by the Zionist occupation forces, if they have not already been massacred as children.

David Miller is the producer and co-host of Press TV’s weekly Palestine Declassified show. He was sacked from Bristol University in October 2021 over his Palestine advocacy. 

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