Israel pushed the "Great Replacement" myth across Europe, allied to Russian friendly parties

A covert ad campaign traced to Israel pushed the "Great Replacement", the conspiracy theory at the core of the global far right, to 533 million across ad impressions, estimated reach and video views in 30 countries between October 2023 and October 2026.

The "Great Replacement" holds that white Europeans are being deliberately replaced by non-white, mostly Muslim, immigrants under the direction of a hidden elite. In the versions spread by white supremacists that elite is Jewish, with the financier George Soros cast as puppet master. The campaign kept the structure and swapped the villain: in its ads Qatar finances the migration, buys Europe's institutions and plots to "Islamise" the continent.

Production files from the campaign's own channels show a Sunday-to-Thursday working week, Hebrew drive and folder names and a daytime schedule in Israeli summer time. A Wikipedia editing session tied to the campaign exposed an Israeli IP address, and campaign material passed twice through Johnnie Moore, the evangelical public relations executive who later chaired the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The campaign cost between $5 million and $11 million, according to Marc Owen Jones and Sohan Dsouza, who documented it in a report published on 29 October 2026. The client who commissioned and paid for it has not been identified.

The ads' central claim, that Muslim migration is a threat Europe's nationalists must resist, is the argument Israel's governing party has used to build its alliances abroad. Over the three years the campaign ran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud joined Europe's largest far-right alliance as an observer, his ministers ended Israel's boycott of the French, Spanish and Swedish far right and Netanyahu received far-right lawmakers in his office as allies against radical Islam, the radical left and mass immigration.

Amichai Chikli, Netanyahu's minister for diaspora affairs, has said that rising antisemitism in Europe is the product of Muslim immigration. Two of Likud's partners in that alliance signed cooperation pacts with Vladimir Putin's United Russia, and Netanyahu and Putin have both cultivated Donald Trump, whose administration has pledged to back what it calls Europe's patriotic parties against migration.

Elon Musk, the owner of X, pushed the theory's claims to hundreds of millions of users and was welcomed to Israel by Netanyahu 12 days after endorsing an antisemitic version of it.

Meta disclosed in August 2024 that the campaign's first phase alone cost more than $1.2 million on Facebook and Instagram, the largest disclosed spend of any covert network Meta has reported targeting EU states, and said it did not know who was behind it. Meta's takedown in May 2024 did not stop the operation. It returned under new names that November and at scale in October 2025, adding YouTube and TikTok, and was still buying ads in October 2026 in France, Germany and Italy, three countries facing major votes in 2027.

The theory

Renaud Camus, a French writer, gave the theory its name in books published in 2010 and 2011. The Australian gunman who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019 titled his manifesto "The Great Replacement". The man who killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, that August wrote that he was defending his country from "cultural and ethnic replacement". The gunman who killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022 named the Christchurch killer as the man who radicalised him most. The killer of 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 blamed Jews for bringing in immigrants.

Éric Zemmour made the theory the centre of his 2022 French presidential campaign, which drew 2.5 million first-round votes, and later called for a ministry of "remigration". Viktor Orbán told Hungarians in July 2022 that migration amounted to "population replacement or inundation", prompting one of his longest-serving advisers to resign. Belgium's Vlaams Belang uses "omvolking", a Nazi-era term for repopulation. In November 2023 senior members of Germany's AfD, among them Ulrich Siegmund, the party's lead candidate in Saxony-Anhalt, met the Austrian identitarian Martin Sellner near Potsdam to discuss the mass "remigration" of immigrants and of citizens they deemed unassimilated.

Vlaams Belang, Fidesz, the National Rally and the Freedom Party of Austria now sit with Likud in the Patriots for Europe alliance, and Chikli shared a stage with Vlaams Belang's leader Tom Van Grieken at CPAC Hungary in April 2024. Israel still officially shuns the AfD, but the campaign's German Facebook advertising ran until 6 September 2026, the day Saxony-Anhalt voted.

The message

Mosques, Muslim neighbourhoods and migrants on European streets were presented as evidence of an invasion paid for by the Qatari state. A series called "Cities' Stories" profiled Malmö, Bradford and the Goutte d'Or district of Paris as cities already "Islamised". Slogans included "Invade, Influence, Islamicize". Campaign brands included Qonspiracy, Qatarsis, Qataracte, Doha Dirt, The Rotten Emir, Made in Qatar, Plot vs Europe, Invaders, Dark Age and Game Over.

Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, the mother of Qatar's emir, was a target from the start. Early ads demanded she secure the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza, although she has no role in Qatar's mediation. By 2026 the ads called her the "godmother of the Muslim Brotherhood" and showed London, Paris and Rome burning under her gaze.

Phase three relied on parody and artificial intelligence. "Grand Theft Qatar" mimicked the Grand Theft Auto video game, with a figure in Gulf dress buying European buildings to turn them into mosques; its Ceuta video folded an image of the Spanish enclave's border into the game's "mission passed" screen. "Qatari Christmas Is Here" ran AI-generated parodies of holiday songs warning that Qatar would abolish Christmas in Europe. "Euro Summer Fest" set anti-Muslim lyrics to the look of a summer music festival. A deepfake of the emir asked visitors to the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy to avoid pork and alcohol near Qatari security staff.

"Qatar Is Responsible" set footage of migrants in European cities against that slogan. A series titled "The Silent Invasion" presented migration as a continuation of the wars between the early Muslim caliphates and the Byzantine Empire, and an "Islamic Terms" series taught viewers Arabic religious vocabulary as warning signs. Polling-style graphics aimed at France claimed to measure the Muslim Brotherhood's reach in the country, and pages imitating tabloids, activist groups and investigative outlets claimed that Qatar was behind antisemitism at U.S. universities.

The YouTube channel "Qatar's Behind This" posted 62 videos with 57.9 million views, 44 per cent of all the campaign's YouTube views, and its most-watched upload reached 16.2 million. It was the longest-running single advertising campaign, at 11 months.

On 10 February 2026 a UK-targeted video titled "Qatar's 2 Blame" claimed that Qatar was behind the candidacy of Shahid Butt, an independent standing for Birmingham City Council in the Sparkhill ward. Butt was jailed in Yemen in 1999 over an alleged bomb plot and says his confession was obtained under torture. The video cited no evidence for the Qatar claim. The video closed by telling viewers that Qatar was "Islamising England". Butt finished seventh in the 7 May election with 453 votes.

Later ads wrote Qatar as "QXTAR" and in other letter-and-number variants to defeat automated text recognition in platform moderation. AI-generated cartoons, including images of Qatari krakens attacking the EU, carried no AI labels despite Meta's stated policy on synthetic imagery.

Israel and the far right

"Antisemitism is a growing problem in Europe due to Muslim immigration," Chikli said at a conference in Jerusalem in February 2025, adding that European right-wing parties understood the threat from radical Islam. In a 2022 interview he said Europe faced an existential crisis and that open borders were eroding its identity, and in 2025 he said multiculturalism in Europe had failed.

Chikli, in office since December 2022, lifted the ban on ministerial contact with Marine Le Pen's National Rally, the party founded in 1972 as the National Front by her father, a convicted Holocaust denier. In May 2024 he took part in the "Europa Viva 24" rally of Spain's Vox in Madrid. Between the two rounds of France's snap legislative elections in July 2024, in the weeks the Qatar campaign was buying French ads, he told Israeli public radio that a Le Pen presidency would be good for Israel and that Netanyahu shared his view. Macron told Netanyahu by phone that the remarks were unacceptable interference.

Likud then joined the far right formally. At the Patriots for Europe congress in Madrid in February 2025, held under the slogan "Make Europe Great Again", the alliance unanimously admitted Likud as its first observer member and the first from outside Europe. Its members include the National Rally, Hungary's Fidesz, Vox, the Netherlands' Party for Freedom, Italy's League, Portugal's Chega, Belgium's Vlaams Belang and the Freedom Party of Austria, which hailed the move as the end of Israel's boycott of it.

Weeks later, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar ended Israel's official boycott of the National Rally, Vox and the Sweden Democrats, a party with roots in Sweden's neo-Nazi movement, citing the three parties' support for Israel and their stated opposition to antisemitism. Sa'ar kept the boycott of Germany's AfD and the Freedom Party of Austria, saying Israel would not legitimise parties that strengthen the neo-Nazi movement. A forum of former Israeli ambassadors called on him to rescind the order. In 2026 Israel's ambassador in Paris, Joshua Zarka, hosted Le Pen at the embassy.

Chikli's first International Conference on Combating Antisemitism, held in Jerusalem on 26 and 27 March 2025, invited Jordan Bardella of the National Rally, Marion Maréchal, Hermann Tertsch of Vox, Charlie Weimers of the Sweden Democrats and Kinga Gál of Fidesz. Germany's antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein, the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy and Britain's chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis withdrew, and the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the World Jewish Congress pulled their support. Ariel Muzicant, president of the European Jewish Congress, called the invitations a betrayal of European Jewry. President Isaac Herzog held a separate reception.

In October 2025 Chikli hosted Tommy Robinson, the British anti-Islam activist, on a visit to Israel, during which Robinson met Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana. Britain's Board of Deputies called Robinson "a thug who represents the very worst of Britain". Chikli later enlisted Robinson for a Likud campaign video and pledged to strengthen Israel's ties with the European right and "the European street".

Chikli's second conference, on 26 and 27 January 2026, brought Bardella back as a speaker. Its guests included representatives of the Sweden Democrats and Vox, former Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Jair Bolsonaro's sons Flávio and Eduardo, and its invitations went to the Sweden Democrats' leader Jimmie Åkesson, Fabrice Leggeri of the National Rally and Dominik Tarczyński of Poland's Law and Justice. It presented an award in the name of the murdered U.S. activist Charlie Kirk, and the Anti-Defamation League's chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt and Mirvis stayed away. Netanyahu welcomed the Bolsonaro brothers from the stage, and Chikli wished Flávio luck in Brazil's presidential race.

On 25 January, the day before the conference opened, Netanyahu and Transport Minister Miri Regev received five Patriots for Europe lawmakers at the Prime Minister's Office, among them Harald Vilimsky of the Freedom Party of Austria, the first representative of that party received there, which Vienna's Jewish community criticised. Netanyahu called them friends and named radical Islam, the far left and mass immigration as threats shared by Israel and Europe. Regev presented the "Patriots of Jerusalem", the alliance's first Israeli branch, which she is to lead.

Netanyahu's closest European ally was Orbán, who has repeatedly portrayed Soros as the puppet master behind migration into Europe and whom the campaign's phase-two ads praised. Netanyahu flew to Budapest in April 2025 despite the International Criminal Court's November 2024 arrest warrant against him, and Hungary announced its withdrawal from the court during the visit. Before Hungary's April 2026 election he recorded an endorsement for CPAC Hungary: "Viktor Orbán means safety, security, stability." Orbán lost on 12 April to Péter Magyar, who has said it is in Hungary's interest to be part of the court.

Netanyahu endorsed Jair Bolsonaro by video before Brazil's 2022 election, which Bolsonaro lost and then plotted to overturn, a crime for which he is serving his sentence under house arrest. In July 2026 Netanyahu sent a video to the convention that nominated Flávio Bolsonaro, calling him a great champion of Brazil, and after the first round on 4 October said he expected Flávio to win. In April 2026 Netanyahu and Argentina's President Javier Milei signed the "Isaac Accords" in Jerusalem, which Netanyahu described as an alliance of freedom. Lula da Silva defeated Flávio Bolsonaro in the 25 October run-off with 51.8 per cent of the vote.

Trump, whose CPAC audience saw the campaign's "Shame on Qatar" video in 2024, urged Israelis on 25 October 2026 to vote for Netanyahu. Partial results from the 27 October election left Netanyahu's bloc short of the 61 seats needed to govern, as Likud and allied media accused Qatar of funding turnout drives for Arab parties. Majed al-Ansari, the Qatari foreign ministry spokesman, called the accusation "ridiculous and dangerous".

Elon Musk

Elon Musk, the world's richest man and owner of X, carried the theory to the largest audience it has had. On 15 November 2023 he answered a post accusing Jewish communities of pushing "dialectical hatred against whites" with the words "You have said the actual truth." The White House condemned what it called an "abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate", and major advertisers left X.

Twelve days later Netanyahu walked Musk through Kibbutz Kfar Aza and joined him for a live conversation on X, in which Musk backed Israel's war on Gaza, the assault a UN commission of inquiry found in September 2025 to be genocide. The same day Israel's communications minister, Shlomo Karhi, said Starlink would operate in Gaza only with Israeli approval. Musk later apologised for the November post, calling it the dumbest he had ever made.

Netanyahu had already visited Musk at Tesla's California factory in September 2023. In July 2024 Musk sat in the House gallery as Netanyahu's guest when the prime minister addressed Congress.

In a March 2024 interview with Don Lemon, Musk said he did not subscribe to the theory. On 27 April 2024 he quote-posted the Dutch far-right commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek's CPAC Hungary speech, which called the replacement a reality, and wrote that the theory's problem was that it failed to address low birth rates. By 31 October 2026 his post had drawn 52 million views, according to the counter on X.

Through the 2024 U.S. election Musk told his followers that Democrats were importing voters, and one July post saying the goal was to import as many illegal voters as possible drew more than 45 million views. The Center for Countering Digital Hate counted more than 2 billion views on his false or misleading election posts that year.

On 20 January 2025, at a rally after Trump's inauguration, Musk made a straight-armed gesture widely compared to a Nazi salute. Netanyahu wrote that Musk was being falsely smeared and called him a great friend of Israel. Five days later Musk spoke by video to the AfD's campaign launch in Halle, in Saxony-Anhalt, telling the crowd there was too much focus on past guilt.

On 13 September 2025 Musk addressed Tommy Robinson's Unite the Kingdom rally in London by video, telling a crowd of more than 100,000 that they would fight back or die. Éric Zemmour invoked the great replacement from the same stage. The following month Chikli hosted Robinson in Israel. Musk also reposted a 20 September 2025 meme mocking the theory's critics for moving from denying the replacement to celebrating it.

In December 2025 Musk reposted the commentator Matt Walsh's 2 December post saying critics had moved from calling the replacement a racist conspiracy theory to calling it real and good. On 26 December he wrote that Brussels was no longer Belgian, and the next day, citing a StatBel figure that 72.9 per cent of the city's children had a migration background from outside the EU, he wrote that the Great Replacement had already happened. Musk's Brussels post has drawn 9.3 million views. On 28 December he reposted a chart captioned with the claim that Western populations were being replaced by the third world by design, adding his approval.

In January 2026 Musk posted about race almost every day, including a repost claiming that "white genocide is the official Democrat party platform". On 24 January he reposted an account named Kitler ridiculing the description of the replacement as a far-right conspiracy theory.

On 20 October 2026, nine days before the report on the Israel-traced campaign was published, Musk wrote on X that the Great Replacement had objectively already occurred. The post had drawn 8.1 million views by 31 October.

Israel, Russia and Trump

Likud's partners in Patriots for Europe include some of the Kremlin's oldest allies in Europe. The Freedom Party of Austria signed a cooperation agreement with Vladimir Putin's United Russia party in Moscow in December 2016, and Matteo Salvini's League signed an almost identical one in March 2017. Le Pen's party took a €9.4 million loan from the First Czech-Russian Bank in 2014 and paid it off before the 2024 European elections. Orbán, who founded the alliance, flew to Moscow to meet Putin in July 2024 on what he called a peace mission, without any mandate from the EU, and spent the war blocking and diluting EU support for Ukraine.

Jair Bolsonaro stood beside Putin in the Kremlin on 16 February 2022, eight days before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and declared Brazil "in solidarity with Russia". He flew on to Budapest to see Orbán.

Netanyahu kept his own channel to Putin open throughout. Likud's 2019 election campaign hung banners on its Tel Aviv headquarters showing Netanyahu shaking hands with Putin, Trump and India's Narendra Modi under the slogan "a different league". After the 2022 invasion Israel declined to join Western sanctions on Russia and refused Ukraine's requests for weapons, citing the deconfliction arrangement with Russian forces in Syria that Netanyahu and Putin agreed in 2015.

On 8 December 2025 Netanyahu told the Knesset that he spoke to Putin regularly and that their personal relationship of several decades protected Israel's vital interests. When Ukraine's ambassador criticised the remarks, Israel's foreign ministry summoned him for a reprimand. The two leaders spoke again on 16 January 2026, about Iran.

Russia and Israel split over the genocide in Gaza. Russia received a Hamas delegation in Moscow weeks after 7 October 2023 and condemned Israel's assault, and in a call that December Netanyahu protested Russia's cooperation with Iran. By 2025 their calls had resumed, on Gaza, Iran and Syria.

Russian influence operations push the migration fear the Qatar campaign sold. Storm-1516, a network that Germany's foreign intelligence service said in December 2025 was run with Russia as its central actor, has concentrated its European output on immigration and terrorism, according to analysis based on Viginum's findings. Before Germany's February 2025 election, a site in the network claimed Germany planned to bring in 1.9 million Kenyan workers, a fabrication aimed at boosting the AfD. Doppelgänger, the Russian operation whose disclosed spending the Qatar campaign outstripped about 11 times, has cloned European news sites since 2022.

Donald Trump met Putin in Alaska in August 2025 and on 25 October 2026 urged Israelis to vote for Netanyahu. His administration's National Security Strategy, published in December 2025, warned that Europe faced civilisational erasure through migration and that, on current trends, "certain NATO members will become majority non-European". It called the growing influence of patriotic European parties a cause for great optimism and pledged to cultivate resistance inside Europe to its current course. Vice-President JD Vance, who had made the same charge against European leaders in Munich that February, travelled to Hungary in April 2026 to campaign for Orbán.

The scale

The operation ran as 72 named campaigns carried by 64 Facebook page identities, 15 YouTube channels, five TikTok advertiser accounts and one TikTok brand account, using 88 payer and beneficiary names across seven platforms. It placed 1,473 Facebook ads with a combined reach of 94.7 million, 189 YouTube videos with 132.2 million views and 359 TikTok ads with 72.2 million reach. A further 105 videos on its TikTok brand account drew 5.6 million views. Nine campaign websites and an unknown volume of web display advertising sit outside those totals.

The 533 million figure combines ad impressions, platform reach estimates and video views and is a floor. Ads in public platform archives alone account for 304.8 million exposures. YouTube publishes no viewer locations, so YouTube views were allocated to countries by the campaign's targeting.

Britain absorbed the most exposure, 154.1 million. France followed with 120.6 million, the U.S. with 99.7 million, Italy with 76.2 million, Germany with 34.3 million, Lebanon with 15.2 million and Belgium with 4.1 million. France received the most individual placements, 991 of 2,748, ahead of Germany with 391, Italy with 356 and Britain with 242. Europe took 76 per cent of exposure with a recorded target country.

A few identities carried most of the reach. The three largest Facebook pages, Sauvons le Liban with 203 ads, Défendons la laïcité with 200 and an Arabic-named page with 157, placed 38 per cent of all Facebook ads. "Euro Summer Fest" alone delivered 26.2 million of the 94.7 million Facebook reach from 65 ads. On TikTok, the advertiser Alemira placed 251 of the 359 ads and 64.6 million of the 72.2 million reach.

Most other identities were thrown away within days. Of the 64 Facebook identities, 28 ran five or fewer ads, and the median identity advertised for three days. Of the 72 campaigns, 47 were live for a month or less.

Meta's Ad Library showed between $726 and $896 in visible spending for the first-phase ads it holds, more than a thousand times less than the $1.2 million the company later stated. The gap exists because almost none of the ads were declared as political or social-issue advertising, the category that requires an advertiser to verify its identity and publish what it spends. Google and TikTok publish no spending figures for ads of this kind.

The commercial tracker Ad Clarity measured $1,594,324 in first-phase spending across 17 page labels for 261.8 million impressions, about $6.09 per thousand. At those rates the campaign spent at least $5.08 million across its three phases, rising to $8.22 million once gaps in the archives are filled. Among the 13 EU-facing influence networks with disclosed spending in Meta's reports from 2018 to 2025, this one accounts for 69 per cent of the combined total, about 11 times what Meta reported for Doppelgänger, the Russian operation that cloned European news sites.

The beginning

Qatar has hosted Hamas's political leadership since 2012 with U.S. approval and, alongside Egypt and the U.S., mediated the hostage and ceasefire negotiations that followed the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023. Its European investments, from Paris Saint-Germain and Harrods to the fashion house Valentino, would supply the campaign's boycott targets.

Netanyahu's own government had kept that Qatari money flowing to Hamas for years. In August 2018 his security cabinet approved monthly Qatari cash payments into Gaza, and Israeli officials escorted a Qatari envoy through the crossings with suitcases of cash, The New York Times reported in December 2023. Israel's Mossad eventually concluded that Qatar's funding channels were also financing Hamas's military wing.

Netanyahu had lobbied Washington against U.S. sanctions on Qatar in 2017, and Avigdor Lieberman resigned as defence minister in November 2018 over the payments. Several Israeli outlets reported that Netanyahu told Likud lawmakers in March 2019 that anyone who wanted to thwart a Palestinian state had to support strengthening Hamas and transferring money to it; Netanyahu has denied saying it.

Israeli intelligence obtained Hamas's assault plan, a 40-page document code-named "Jericho Wall", more than a year before 7 October, and a Unit 8200 analyst warned in July 2023 that Hamas training matched it. Between March and July 2023 Military Intelligence sent Netanyahu four letters warning that Israel's enemies saw the internal rift over his judicial overhaul as an opening, the military confirmed in May 2024, and security chiefs including the defence minister and the head of the Shin Bet warned him repeatedly that deterrence was eroding.

Netanyahu pressed on with the overhaul, which would have curbed the courts while he stood trial for bribery, fraud and breach of trust, and fired his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for speaking out before reinstating him under public pressure. His office says he received no warning of an attack from Gaza.

Netanyahu has refused a state commission of inquiry into 7 October, and in November 2025 asked President Isaac Herzog for a pardon before any verdict, after Trump publicly demanded one; Herzog said in April 2026 that the parties should first try to reach a plea deal.

Israel's war on Gaza that followed has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's health ministry, figures Israeli military officials told Israeli media in early 2026 were accurate. In September 2025 the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry found that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, carrying out four of the five acts defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention with the intent to destroy Palestinians there, and that Netanyahu, Herzog and Gallant had incited it. Israel called the finding false and demanded the commission's abolition. Killing continued after the October 2025 ceasefire, with more than 1,000 Palestinians killed during the truce by 2026, according to the ministry.

The campaign's first traces appeared in Lebanon days after 7 October 2023. Billboards carrying the slogan "Lebanon does not want war" went up across the country, many credited to "One Peace Global", an entity with no existence beyond the campaign. Accounts on X, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram and Facebook, with names such as "No to the Iranian Occupation", "Shia Against War" and "Remember the 2006 War", blamed Iran and Hezbollah for the threat of war and made no mention of Israel.

A short run of paid ads then targeted Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, before turning to Sheikha Moza and the hostages. Websites called "Shame on Qatar" and "It's in your hands" appeared in English, French and Spanish, calling for boycotts of Paris Saint-Germain, Harrods, Qatar Airways and the Plaza Hotel in New York.

In the same weeks, about 30 Israelis, among them political campaign strategists, advertising professionals, psychological warfare specialists, government officials and a former Mossad official, formed a WhatsApp group called "Free the Kidnapped" to run a global civilian pressure campaign against Qatar, Haaretz reported in September 2026. The group built foreign-language websites and social media accounts, ran research and messaging teams on nightly calls and planned to shame companies with Qatari investment. About a month after it began, it stopped without explanation, its websites came down and their traces were scrubbed from search engines. The identities of its initiators are barred from publication in Israel.

Israeli officials also intervened at least twice during the war to suppress anti-Qatar material because the government needed Qatar as a mediator with Hamas, Israel Hayom reported in March 2025. About three weeks after 7 October, a representative of the Mossad director had an Israeli military video portraying Qatar as Hamas's financier removed from X within minutes. In January 2024 an anonymous account called "The Qatari Project" posted six items attacking the emir over two days before a caller identified as speaking for the Prime Minister's Office told its operators to stop.

Israel's state influence work grew as the war went on. In June 2024 The New York Times reported that the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs had allocated about $2 million to a covert campaign run by STOIC, a Tel Aviv political marketing firm, which used hundreds of fake accounts to press U.S. lawmakers on the Gaza war. Meta and OpenAI disrupted it, and the ministry denied any connection to STOIC. The government later routed millions more through the ministry for public diplomacy and consolidated influence operations in a dedicated body.

The offline campaign

Between December 2023 and May 2024 the campaign's slogans and branded banners appeared at demonstrations in Washington and Paris. In February 2024 a digital billboard in Times Square, on a screen owned by Outfront Media, carried an "It's in your hands" ad targeting Sheikha Moza. Outfront did not say who paid for it.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference that month, a "Shame on Qatar" video calling for sanctions on Qatar was screened shortly before Donald Trump spoke. The conference did not say who placed it. In an Atlanta-area mall, two former beauty pageant winners from Mississippi and Tennessee staged a filmed protest outside a Valentino store; the brand is owned by the Qatari investment fund Mayhoola.

In spring 2024 the campaign promoted a parody "Qatar" entry for the Eurovision Song Contest, hosted that May in Malmö, on TikTok and through Facebook ads aimed at Sweden and other European countries. The TikTok video drew 1.2 million views, 15,200 likes and 934 bookmarks but no comments at all. The account Visegrád24 amplified it on X.

A Change.org petition credited to "John Anderson", president of "Citizens for Human Lives", urged pressure on Sheikha Moza over the hostages and gathered more than 7,500 signatures. The man and the organisation are both fictitious, and Change.org suspended the petition once it was flagged.

Katrina Lantos Swett, president of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice and a former chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, was photographed at a religious freedom summit in Washington holding a poster from the campaign against Sheikha Moza. Her spokeswoman told AFP in July 2024 that Johnnie Moore had asked Lantos Swett to promote it. "We don't know who organised the campaign," the spokeswoman said, adding that Lantos Swett had no affiliation with it.

Moore's public relations firm, JDA Worldwide, issued the press release promoting the pageant winners' protest at the Valentino store. Moore accepted an interview request from AFP in 2024 and then stopped responding when asked about Lantos Swett's account.

Moore was an evangelical adviser to Trump's first presidential campaign and twice served on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. In June 2025 he became executive chairman of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the U.S.- and Israeli-backed group that ran militarised food distribution sites in Gaza, near which more than 1,000 Palestinians seeking aid were killed in its first months, according to UN figures. He later stepped down, and the foundation has since closed.

The money trail

The first-phase Facebook ads were bought through a Vietnamese proxy, Lê Văn Tính, who trades as "LT Media" in Vietnam's market for hijacked and rented advertising accounts. Nearly all visible spending was billed in Vietnamese dong. Lê told AFP in July 2024 that he had sold the pages to unknown buyers on Telegram and knew nothing of the campaign. "I am a middleman," he said. He also said his own Facebook Business Manager account had been hacked, although he had posted YouTube tutorials on getting around Facebook's account restrictions.

By July 2024 the campaign had run at least 978 Facebook ads in English, French and Arabic across 25 campaign pages and about 44 disposable pages, with a minimum reach of 41 million. Meta had removed the network around mid-May and blocked links to its websites. Its August 2024 threat report confirmed the Vietnamese origin, named LT Media, counted 65 Facebook pages, 112 Facebook accounts and 49 Instagram accounts and linked the Lebanese and European strands. It identified no sponsor, and it described the content only as criticism of Shia Islam, omitting its anti-Muslim and anti-migrant character.

Advertising continued after the takedown. A first-phase page called "Défendons la laïcité" ran 27 ads on 13 and 14 June 2024, days after France's European Parliament vote, as campaigning began for the snap legislative elections. Other pages ran 22 ads between 1 June and 1 July 2024.

The paid advertising ran through three payment clusters. The first, active in phases one and two, comprised 34 shared sponsor pages carrying 244 ads and a single hosting account behind nine campaign websites, all tied through Meta's beneficiary field to LT Media. Its campaigns included "Défendons la laïcité", "Sauvons le Liban", "Shame on Qatar", "The Qatar Plot" and "Le vestiaire du PSG".

Brazilian accounts carried the second cluster in phase three. Sponsor details on Lebanon-targeted Google ads, first spotted by users of a Lebanon forum on Reddit, led to Social Media para Empresa LTDA, Agência de Tráfego Pago LTDA and individuals holding Brazilian company registrations with almost no other footprint. Meta's beneficiary field named Larissa F. P. Padilha. Two of the companies shared contact details with Agência Moll, a São Paulo agency whose staff said they had sold their ad accounts to an unknown Facebook user while winding down the business. The cluster carried "Euro Summer Fest", "Grand Theft Qatar", "Qatar is Responsible" and the Lebanese "Thanks Iran" and "We Don't Want You on Our Border" channels.

Belgian accounts carried the third. Google listed "Liliane Kaufman" in Belgium as the payer, an identity that may have been hijacked, and her advertiser record vanished from Google's Ads Transparency Center while the ads kept running. Across 31 ads on four page identities, the cluster's Meta beneficiary field read "i don't no". It carried "Qatar's Behind This", "Qatari Christmas", "The Silent Invasion", "Islamic Terms", "Q2B" and "Stop Qatar". One of its pages, "Keep Qatar out", ran an ad on 24 November 2025 billed in Vietnamese dong, the currency of almost all first-phase spending.

On TikTok the declared advertisers carried German-sounding names: Alemira, Goge and NovaTech Solutions GmbH. Some TikTok payer fields read "Iran" or repeated campaign names, billing labels that carry no evidence of Iranian involvement.

The elections

Phase one ran from October 2023 to July 2024, mostly on Facebook, and peaked in February 2024 with 247 items. It produced 1,018 Facebook ads and 260 million tracker-measured impressions across 21 countries. Britain took 128.2 million of its exposures, or 48 per cent, and the U.S. 98.7 million, or 37 per cent. France received 28.8 million exposures but the most placements, 570 of the phase's 921, as buying ran through the months before the European Parliament election on 9 June 2024 and the snap legislative elections that President Emmanuel Macron called that night, held on 30 June and 7 July.

British buying stopped on 17 May 2024, five days before Rishi Sunak called the general election held on 4 July. The last UK placement came more than two months before the 29 July murders of three girls in Southport and the anti-Muslim and anti-migrant riots that followed.

Phase two, from November to December 2024, placed 97 Facebook ads with 4.5 million reach across 24 page identities, mainly in Hungary and Belgium. The Hungarian ads began two weeks after Budapest hosted the European Political Community summit and praised Prime Minister Viktor Orbán under page names including "He Was Right", "Orban is right" and "Dominate". Other ads urged the Princess of Wales to boycott Qatar during the emir's state visit to Britain in early December 2024.

The Europe-facing ads paused on Meta from about January to September 2025 and returned in October 2025 across Facebook, YouTube and TikTok. Phase three produced 358 Facebook ads, all 189 YouTube videos and all 359 TikTok ads, for 259.6 million recorded exposures, the largest of the three phases. France took 90.1 million, Italy 76.2 million, Germany 33.7 million, Britain 25.3 million and Lebanon 15.2 million.

The EU's Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising regulation, which requires labels identifying who paid for a political ad, how much and for which election, took effect on 10 October 2025, the month the campaign returned. Meta stopped accepting political, electoral and social-issue ads in the EU in early October 2025, calling the rules "unworkable", and Google had already stopped serving political ads in the bloc. The campaign's ads escaped both bans because they were never declared political.

Germany received 339 placements in 2026, second only to France's 358. A TikTok run began on 23 February 2026 with 141 placements over five weeks. A second run began in the week of 29 June and continued until the last German Facebook placement was delivered on 6 September, the day of the Saxony-Anhalt state election. German TikTok advertising resumed on 22 September, and 82 more ads ran between 2 and 21 October.

Italy had received no placements in phase one. In phase three it took 76.2 million recorded exposures, more than double Germany's total, about half of them from 36 YouTube videos, as the Winter Olympics deepfake, the Christmas parodies and "Euro Summer Fest" were pushed to Italian audiences.

Between 2 and 13 October 2026, Alemira placed 56 TikTok ads questioning air safety and the reliability of Muslim pilots, 41 under the title "What will be the next flight?" and 15 under "Air Alert", invoking the Dubai carrier FlyDubai. They reached 5.5 million accounts, about half of them in France, which holds its presidential election in April 2027.

France has already faced one Israeli-linked interference operation in 2026. During the March municipal elections, fabricated websites and ads accused three La France Insoumise candidates of crimes and claimed to guide "Muslim citizens" towards candidates favouring sharia. In June, Viginum, the French government's foreign digital interference service, named the Israeli firm BlackCore as the probable source. Viginum did not connect BlackCore to the Qatar campaign.

The Iran and Lebanon strands

At least 118 TikTok ads with 12.6 million recorded reach called for the overthrow of the Iranian government and opposed negotiations with it between 24 February and 27 April 2026. The first was running four days before the U.S. and Israel began striking Iran on 28 February. Between 2 and 12 March, 45 ads ran under captions including "Revolution in progress", seen mainly in Germany and Italy.

In Lebanon, early material aimed at Shia audiences under the "Shia Against War" brand, which the Lebanese party Taharor publicly disowned, and a "Sauvons le Liban" strand addressed French speakers. In phase three, 208 placements reached Lebanon, about 185 of them in the two weeks from 22 June 2026.

"Thank You Iran" mocked billboards that appeared on the Rafic Hariri airport road around 21 June 2026, after Hezbollah publicly thanked Iran on 9 June and again on 15 June. The campaign's videos turned the slogan into "Thanks for destroying the South". Two YouTube channels carrying the material posted 25 videos aimed at Lebanon, 17 of them built from AI imagery, drawing 922,398 views. A Lebanon-only Meta ad that ran from 2 to 8 July 2026 delivered more than one million impressions for $2,000 to $2,500, about two-thirds of them to men.

Two further Lebanon-facing operations, Make Lebanon Great Again and Al Ghaliboun, share branding and advertising methods with the campaign but no identified payer, administrator or domain, and are excluded from its totals. Make Lebanon Great Again posted 1,010 times on X between May 2025 and May 2026, drawing 49 million views, according to the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism network, and Lebanon's prime minister's office denounced one of its videos as fabricated.

The Israeli fingerprints

The campaign's "Made in Qatar" Telegram channel held about 80 videos, 78 of which were examined. Telegram keeps metadata that the ad platforms strip: file paths, drive and folder names, software details and export times.

The files were produced on a Sunday-to-Thursday schedule, the Israeli working week, with daytime activity in UTC+3. Drive and folder names were written in Hebrew. A computer clock shifted by an hour between 22 and 27 October 2024, matching the end of Israeli daylight saving time on 27 October. The EU changed its clocks the same day, and eastern member states also run on UTC+3 in summer; the Hebrew folder names and the Sunday-to-Thursday week are what place the production in Israel. Project links connected the files across several machines and storage volumes, the signature of a shared production environment.

Of those clips, 12 reused material from @RadioGenoa, a prominent anti-Muslim account on X, with captions copying or rewording its posts. All 12 were rendered on 23 May 2024, about a week after Meta's takedown.

The Telegram metadata also contains a name identical to that of a prominent Israeli political creative campaigner, Shuki Duchovni, who has made election campaign videos in Kenya, Zambia, Eswatini and Mozambique among other countries. Duchovni has worked with Lior Chorev, chairman of the Israeli consultancy Percepto International, who was implicated in the reportedly aborted anti-Qatar operation of October 2023. A name in file metadata records the registered owner of a machine or software licence and does not on its own show who made a file or who ordered it.

Chorev ran strategy for Ariel Sharon's prime ministerial campaigns and advised Ehud Olmert in 2006. He describes himself on X as chief strategist and campaign manager for the Hostages Family Forum, and in March 2026 he joined the campaign of Naftali Bennett, who has called for Qatar to be declared an enemy state, for the Israeli election held on 27 October.

Between January and February 2024 at least 24 accounts and 11 IP addresses edited English Wikipedia pages about Qatar, inserting links to shameqatar.com and creating an article titled "Qatari soft power", which editors tagged that February for possible undisclosed paid editing. Wikipedia's sockpuppet investigators linked the accounts to a network catalogued as TronFactor. In one editing session on 30 January 2024 the edits ran through German proxy exits, but an interleaving error exposed an Israeli fixed-line IP address.

The production files, the Wikipedia address and the route through Moore place the campaign's origin in Israel with moderate to high confidence. LT Media, Agência Moll and the European payer accounts were contractors. The client who commissioned the campaign remains unidentified, as does any role for the Israeli government.

The platforms

Meta took an average of 2.3 days to remove a campaign ad once it acted, and TikTok four days. TikTok removes individual ads but leaves advertiser accounts in place: it took down 93 Alemira ads, which remain listed under the company's business identity, and Alemira kept advertising. X suspended "No to the Iranian Occupation", which reappeared under a nearly identical handle and posted about 18 times a day.

Meta's 2024 report named the Vietnamese proxy but not the buyer. Google's transparency records lost an advertiser identity while its ads ran on, and TikTok's payer fields carried a country name.

Under the EU's Digital Services Act, very large online platforms must keep a searchable repository of the ads they serve in the EU, including who paid, and must assess and mitigate systemic risks to civic discourse and elections. The political advertising regulation allows fines of up to 6 per cent of a platform's annual turnover.

Most of the ads spread racist and Islamophobic speech illegally, Le Monde wrote. France's 1881 press law makes public incitement to hatred or violence on grounds of religion or origin a criminal offence, and section 130 of Germany's criminal code punishes incitement to hatred against national, religious or ethnic groups.

The ads found an audience. Of 406 comments under UK-targeted Facebook ads in 2024, 61 per cent supported the anti-Muslim views expressed and 19 per cent opposed them. Of 2,560 top-level comments under the YouTube videos, 28 per cent supported the message, 42 per cent opposed it and another 15 per cent attributed the videos to Israel. Italian-language comments were the only group in which support outnumbered opposition.

YouTube removed none of the campaign's videos for at least 221 days. In October 2026 it terminated four channels, Grand Theft Qatar, EURO Summer Fest, Qatar is Responsible and AirAlert, for breaching its terms of service. On 26 October new channels under the first three names posted eight videos.