Hamas hijacked victims’ accounts
Shortly after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, friends and relatives of Gali Shlezinger Idan, who lived in a kibbutz near the Gaza border, received frantic messages to check her Facebook page.
What they found shocked them. Hamas members were using 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 tile floor as missiles and gunfire blasted their building.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” said Keren de Via, a friend of the Idan family who watched Idan’s children hug their parents and cry during the livestream. “How could we watch them terrorize the family like this? How could I watch this on Facebook?”
In a new war tactic, Hamas has seized the social media accounts of kidnapped Israelis and used them to broadcast violent messages and wage psychological warfare, according to interviews with 13 Israeli families and their friends, as well as social media experts who have studied extremist groups.
In at least four cases, Hamas members logged into the personal social media accounts of their hostages to livestream the Oct. 7 attacks. In the days since, Hamas also appeared to infiltrate their hostages’ Facebook groups, Instagram accounts and Whatsapp chats to issue death threats and calls for violence.
Hamas members also took hostages’ cellphones to make calls to taunt friends and relatives, according to the Israeli families and their friends. Israel’s military has said at least 199 people have been taken hostage by Hamas.
Extremist groups have long turned to social media to further their causes by livestreaming attacks and posting propaganda. But hijacking individual hostages’ Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp accounts “weaponizes social media in a way 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 this.”
The tactic is particularly harrowing for those close to the account owners, compounding an already distressing situation.
Social media has become a lifeline for friends and family searching for clues about missing loved ones, and receiving a message or seeing a video posted to the accounts immediately inspired a moment of hope, said two of the families whose relatives were taken hostage by Hamas. But that fizzled when they saw that someone else had made the posts.
“I felt maybe hopeful, for a second — and then confused,” de Via said. “Then just terror.”
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, declined to comment on the commandeering of kidnapped Israelis’ social media accounts but said it had established a “special operations center staffed with experts, including fluent Hebrew and Arabic speakers, to closely monitor and respond to this rapidly evolving situation.”
Two members of the security team which oversees Facebook, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly, confirmed that Hamas had gotten access to the Facebook accounts of Israelis who were taken hostage to start livestreams and post to their accounts. This appeared to be part of Hamas’ strategy from the moment the attacks happened, they said. The accounts have since been made private and the livestreams removed, they added.
Hamas representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
Idan’s Facebook account was seized Oct. 7, roughly two hours after Hamas attacked her kibbutz, Nahal Oz, where she lived with her husband and four children. Suddenly, a livestream appeared on her Facebook page, according to a relative of the family and de Via.
De Via, who was once a neighbor of Idan’s and has children the same age, said she had been trying to reach her when the live video popped up.
“I immediately opened it because she is not someone who makes Facebook videos or does a livestream,” de Via said. “The first thing I saw was how terrified the children looked, and then voices in Arabic. I understood something very bad was happening.”
A recording of the livestream shows Idan, 50, and her husband, Tzachi, 51, crouched on a floor with their two youngest children, a girl and a boy. The boy, 7, was crying and asking, “Where is my sister?”
“It is then I understood, his two older sisters are not there,” de Via said. “And then I saw the blood on Tzachi’s hands and I thought the worst.”
Medical personnel later found the body of Idan’s oldest daughter, Mayan, who had recently turned 18. She had been shot. The couple’s third daughter was not at home, de Via and the Idan family relative said. Idan and her children were eventually left at home; her husband was taken hostage. Idan did not respond to a request for comment.