The Israeli government has funded multiple ad campaigns to attack and delegitimize Gaza’s main humanitarian aid agency under Google searches for the agency, new reporting finds — the latest instance of how the Israeli government spreads its propaganda online within the U.S.
According to an investigation by Wired, since January at least, Israel has bought ads attacking the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), as part of its longtime campaign to dismantle the agency. The sponsored link has had headlines like “UNRWA Neutrality Compromised” or “Israel Unveils UNRWA Issues.”
The ad campaign is paid for by the Israeli government, and the ad links to a page on Israel’s official government website. At least a portion of the ad campaign appears to be directly targeted toward a U.S. audience.
Google searches for “UNRWA” and “UNRWA USA” at the time of this article’s writing pulled up a sponsored link to a page on Israel’s government website that repeated many of the baseless claims regarding UNRWA that Israeli officials have spread in recent months, like unproven claims about the agency’s supposed ties to Hamas soldiers.
Though many countries, including the U.S., suspended funding to UNRWA due to those claims, the accusations have never been backed up by investigations independent of Israel’s influence. Israel has a vested interest in dismantling UNRWA because a suspension of the agency’s lifesaving services in Gaza would help accelerate Israel’s genocide and colonization of Palestine.
According to Wired, across 300 search terms related to UNRWA, Israel’s attack ad came up 44 percent of the time between May and July.
Israel has also aired videos against the agency via Google’s ad services saying that “UNRWA is inseparable from Hamas.”
Google has said that they don’t believe that the sponsored links violate company policy. Wired notes that the search ads aren’t findable through the company’s Ads Transparency Center.
“There is an incredibly powerful campaign to dismantle UNRWA,” UNRWA USA Executive Director Mara Kronenfeld, who first discovered the ads herself while googling her agency in January, told Wired. “I want the public to know what’s happening and the insidious nature of it, especially at a time when civilian lives are under attack in Gaza.”
Google searches for UNRWA have spiked since Israel began its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in October, meaning that many looking up the agency may have seen these ads. The ads may be influencing public opinion at a time when politicians in the U.S., which was formerly UNRWA’s single largest donor, have sought to indefinitely defund the agency — even as other countries have resumed funding. This spring, Congress passed a bill that would suspend U.S. funding of the agency through March 2025.
Google employees have waged several campaigns to pressure Google into dropping its ties with Israel, railing against several Google projects that directly or indirectly aid Israel’s military. Of particular note has been employees’ opposition to Google’s participation in Project Nimbus, which provides cloud computing services, artificial intelligence, and other technological support to Israel. Google has, in response, fired workers who have protested against the company’s ties to Israel.
The report is one of several that have detailed how Israel seeks to influence U.S. policy and public opinion with no intervention from the U.S. government despite previous media and political frenzy over foreign interference in U.S. politics.
In June, Haaretz and The New York Times revealed that the Israeli government has spent at least $2 million on a campaign to create thousands of fake social media accounts across X, Facebook and Instagram in order to flood American politicians’ replies with pro-Israel stances. Some of these posts also vilified UNRWA.
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