The Identical Machine: How Two States Built the Same Weapon Against Their Own Citizens
When the State Becomes the Troll: Israel's Hasbara and Pakistan's Agahi Are Not Parallel Accidents. They Are the Same Type of Program.
The officer opens his phone before prayers, before tea. His orders did not come in writing. They never do. But the directive is clear enough: log into the account that does not carry his name, find the journalist whose thread is gaining traction, and bury it. Not with facts. With volume. With coordinated contempt arriving from thirty directions at once, each account carrying a different face, a different biography, the same instruction.
Twelve hundred kilometers west, in a Tel Aviv office that does not appear on any government directory, a young man with a university degree and a reservist’s obligation sits before a similar screen. His unit has a name that sounds bureaucratic and innocuous. His work is neither. He searches for the post, the tweet, the op-ed that has moved too many people in the wrong direction. His response is already scripted in the talking points folder shared with three hundred colleagues. The words will pour out simultaneously from accounts that present themselves as students, mothers, rabbis, diaspora professionals. The target will feel the walls close.
These two men have never met. Their governments have no diplomatic relations. One serves an army that cannot conduct a ground war without American resupply. The other serves an army that cannot hold a civilian government in check without periodic constitutional vandalism. They are, in every institutional sense, strangers. And yet the machine they operate is, down to its operational logic, its recruitment architecture, its labeling system, and its intended psychological effect, the same machine.
This is not coincidence. It is the grammar of modern authoritarian information control, and it has found its most complete expression in two states that share nothing except a pathological relationship with dissent.
What Hasbara Actually Is: The Documents
Strip away the diplomatic gloss and Hasbara is a doctrine of preemptive narrative capture. The Hebrew word translates as “explaining,” which is how all propaganda programs name themselves in their founding documents. What it describes in practice is a coordinated, state-resourced effort to ensure that the international and domestic conversation about Israeli policy never escapes the parameters the Israeli state sets for it.
For years this was difficult to document with precision. Governments do not advertise their propaganda budgets. That changed in September 2025, when Eurovision News Spotlight, a joint investigation conducted by reporters from Germany’s BR24, Austria’s ORF, Deutsche Welle, and Belgium’s VRT, published an open-source examination of Israeli government committee minutes, procurement records, and advertising data spanning 2018 to July 2025. What those documents showed was not a loose network of motivated volunteers spreading pro-Israel sentiment online. What they showed was a centralized, bureaucratically managed, and financially escalating state operation with named contractors, emergency exemption clauses, and auditable budget lines.
The operational center is the Israeli Government Advertising Agency, known by its Hebrew acronym Lapam. In 2024, Lapam sponsored approximately 2,000 Google advertisements, with around 1,100 targeted at international audiences. By September 2025 that number had more than doubled to over 4,000 ads, with half directed abroad. The money behind this expansion is not incidental. In December 2024, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, whose New Hope party had rejoined the Netanyahu coalition with the advertising budget as a coalition condition, announced an additional 545 million shekels allocated specifically to what the government calls public diplomacy. Sa’ar described every shekel spent as “an investment, not an expense.” The 2026 national budget allocates NIS 2.35 billion, roughly 730 million US dollars, to Hasbara. That figure represents a 20-fold increase over previous years. This is not a line item for a press office. It is a wartime information budget.
The documents show how the money moves. A single company, Grey Content Ltd., holds exclusive broadcast rights to a one-minute government messaging slot called “Daka LeShemona,” broadcast simultaneously across every major Israeli television channel directly before the evening news. This slot, which government documents repeatedly praise for its “high viewership” and “effective messaging,” has been awarded to Grey Content through a succession of no-bid contracts justified by emergency declarations tied to what Israel officially calls the Iron Swords War. The government’s own exemption committee was repeatedly instructed to find a permanent competitive solution and repeatedly declined to do so, approving extensions based on the same “urgent need” language. An Israeli advertising firm, McCann Tel Aviv, challenged seven of these contracts in court in August 2024. The court ruled against it, finding that halting active campaigns would cause substantial damage to public funds already committed.
The same pattern governs the digital operation. An Israeli exemption committee approved Lapam contracts with Google, X, and the advertising platforms Outbrain and Teads worth 167 million shekels in a single procurement decision, with 150 million of that allocated to YouTube and Google’s Display and Video 360 platform. These were not put to competitive tender. They were granted directly under emergency authority.
The Famine That Was Advertised Away
The clearest demonstration of how this machinery operates in practice came in August 2025, when the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the United Nations-backed hunger monitoring body whose methodology had been applied to Sudan in 2024 and South Sudan in 2020, declared famine in Gaza. The IPC’s findings, based on field data from a population facing a complete blockade of food, medicine, and fuel since March, were unambiguous.
On the same day the IPC report was published, Lapam launched a paid advertising campaign across YouTube in five countries. The videos, hosted on the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s official YouTube channel and produced in English, German, Italian, and Polish, showed restaurants serving customers and markets displaying food in Gaza. Each concluded with an AI-generated voiceover delivering the line: “There is food in Gaza. Any other claim is a lie.”
The campaign was not organic. Analysis of Google’s Ad Transparency Center confirmed that Lapam purchased the views directly through paid placements. Between August 5 and September 2, 2025, the Israeli Foreign Ministry YouTube channel accumulated over 30 million views, almost entirely through paid insertion into users’ feeds across Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, Italy, and the United States. Seven videos received a combined 19 million paid views. When the campaign budget ran out in early September, YouTube’s systems purged the inflated traffic. On September 2, the channel recorded negative 24,000 views as the platform removed the artificial count.
An Austrian correspondent embedded with the Israeli army on a controlled media tour of a Gaza logistics hub during this period described the visit as a Hasbara exercise with a carefully managed perimeter. He told the Eurovision investigation that journalists had been promised access reaching ten kilometers into Gaza and were instead driven six to seven minutes across the border to an expanded parking area with stored aid supplies. The UN, whose assessment directly contradicts the Israeli government’s advertisements, has documented systematic bottlenecks at border crossings that prevent those supplies from reaching the population. The bureaucratic obstruction, the UN found, is Israeli-designed. The advertisement, which shows the stockpile as evidence of abundance, inverts the meaning of what it depicts.
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, when asked for comment by the Eurovision investigation team, did not offer a direct response. It directed reporters to two posts on X by the ministry and a spokesperson, one of which described the IPC famine report as “fabricated... to fit Hamas’s fake campaign.”
Alongside the famine counter-campaign, Lapam has for over a year paid for Google search advertisements appearing above results for the query “UNRWA,” directing users to a government website with the tagline “Paychecks for terrorists or humanitarian aid?” UNRWA formally accused Israel of hate speech and disinformation. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, was subjected to a separate months-long paid ad campaign across Europe labeling her an antisemite. Google mislabeled these advertisements under the category “Family and Community,” a classification that allowed them to bypass restrictions on political advertising in Belgium, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, and Germany.
The Intelligence Unit That Justified Killing Journalists
The advertising operation works in parallel with a harder mechanism. In August 2025, +972 Magazine, the Jerusalem-based investigative outlet, published an investigation based on three separate intelligence sources documenting the existence of an IDF unit internally known as the Legitimization Cell. The unit’s function was to search for documentary material that could be used to posthumously label Palestinian journalists as Hamas operatives, constructing retroactive evidentiary justification for their killing.
The unit operated under a standing directive. Sources described a phrase that circulated among intelligence personnel: “That’s good for legitimacy.” Anything that could serve Hasbara purposes, regardless of its evidentiary quality, was flagged for declassification and public release. The investigation documented the case of journalist Ismail Al-Ghoul, killed in a July 2024 airstrike together with his cameraman. A month after his death, the Israeli army publicly claimed he was a Hamas military operative, citing a document allegedly retrieved from a Hamas computer. That document, the investigation established, dated Al-Ghoul’s military rank to 2007, when he was ten years old.
By October 2025, Israel had killed over 292 journalists across Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran. Gaza’s borders remained closed to independent foreign media for two years, leaving IDF-organized embedded tours as the only channel through which international reporters could enter the territory. The embedded tours, controlled for location, duration, and access, are designed to produce specific images. Journalists who broadcast those images become, functionally, unpaid participants in the advertising campaign.
The American Operation: Geofencing Churches
The European investigation documented what Hasbara looks like at the manufacturing end. A parallel set of findings shows what it looks like at the distribution end, inside the United States.
In 2024, the Israeli nonprofit FakeReporter, which tracks state-linked disinformation, identified five websites presenting themselves as independent American political commentary on the Gaza war. All five were traced to an Israeli political consulting firm called STOIC, which was simultaneously receiving contracts from the Israeli government. The New York Times confirmed the connection. NPR reported it in July 2024.
The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, led by Amichai Chikli, was identified as the funding channel. Chikli denied the reports. What the FARA filings showed was that the Israeli Foreign Ministry had signed a six-million-dollar agreement with a US-based firm, Clock Tower X LLC, to produce digital content targeting American audiences and, specifically, to shape how large language models respond to queries about Israel. The contract documentation described the campaign’s objective as combating antisemitism while the operational specifications described the manipulation of AI training environments to embed favorable Israeli government framing in the responses of commercial AI systems.
A separate document associated with the same operational cluster described what internal materials called “the largest geofencing campaign in US history”: the digital mapping of thousands of churches and Christian college campuses across California, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado during worship hours, for the purpose of identifying and subsequently targeting those congregations with pro-Israel advertisements. The campaign aimed to reach an estimated 12 million people, including eight million churchgoers and four million Christian students. It was aimed at a demographic, evangelical and Republican-aligned Christians, whose support for Israel Netanyahu himself had identified as strategically critical in what he called Israel’s “eighth front.”
The Israeli journalist Oren Persico, writing for The Seventh Eye, Israel’s only independent media watchdog, captured the institutional logic behind all of this spending. After every Israeli military operation, he told the Eurovision investigation, the same internal debate resurfaces: why is Hasbara failing, why is funding insufficient, why does the world not understand? The debate produces the same answer every time. More budget. More contractors. More emergency exemptions. The question of whether the policies generating the negative coverage might themselves be the problem does not appear in the procurement documents.
What Agahi Actually Is
The Drop Site News investigation, drawing on documents and insider testimony, established what Pakistani journalists had suspected for years but could not prove: the Inter-Services Public Relations directorate had constructed a parallel social media operation using active military personnel.
The program, designated Agahi, which translates as “awareness,” deployed thousands of commissioned and non-commissioned officers to maintain false civilian identities across X and Facebook. These accounts were not passive. They were assigned targets, given content frameworks, and expected to engage in coordinated amplification of pro-military narratives while simultaneously attacking designated enemies of the institution.
The target list covered significant ground. Judges who had ruled against military-backed legislation. Activists who had documented enforced disappearances in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Journalists who had reported on the institutional mechanics of Imran Khan’s removal from power. Above all, the organized support base of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, whose social media presence proved durable enough to survive Khan’s imprisonment and the state’s aggressive attempts to dismantle the party through legal and extralegal pressure.
The labeling system deployed by Agahi carries its own diagnostic weight. Critics of the military, regardless of their actual political positions, are designated “digital terrorists.” The phrase is not casual. It locates civilian online speech within the legal and moral framework of counterterrorism, making the suppression of political dissent a matter of national security rather than political preference. The label does the institutional work before any formal proceeding begins.
Officers participating in the program were, under the terms of their commission, prohibited from engaging in political activity. The program violated that prohibition systematically and at scale. It did so because the institution had concluded that the distinction between political activity and national security was no longer operationally useful.
The Operational Mirror
Set the two investigations side by side and the correspondence is structural, not incidental.
Both operations are document-driven state programs, not informal networks of motivated sympathizers. The Drop Site investigation found internal ISPR directives and program architecture. The Eurovision investigation found procurement records, committee minutes, and advertising contracts. In both cases, the operational evidence was financial and bureaucratic before it was ideological. Both states created line items for the suppression of dissent and built institutional processes to manage those line items.
Both operations manufacture the appearance of civilian authenticity. Hasbara’s no-bid contractors produce content pushed through a government YouTube channel that presents itself as routine public diplomacy. Agahi’s military officers post from accounts that present themselves as ordinary Pakistani civilians. The audience is meant to believe in both cases that what they are seeing represents organic public sentiment rather than state-directed messaging.
Both operations use amplification as a form of suppression. Lapam’s August 2025 famine counter-campaign did not argue that the UN was wrong by engaging the IPC’s methodology. It flooded the information environment surrounding IPC search results with paid content designed to intercept users before they reached the primary source. Agahi’s flash mob response to critical social media posts does not refute the content of those posts. It buries them under coordinated volume. The goal in both cases is not persuasion. It is exhaustion and preemption.
Both operations have developed labeling systems that function as legal pre-positioning. Hasbara designates critics as antisemites, a category with specific legal weight in European and American jurisdictions. Agahi designates critics as digital terrorists, a category that invokes Pakistan’s counterterrorism legislation and has been used to justify arrest and platform removal. Neither label requires evidentiary support at the moment of application. Both are designed to shift the burden of proof onto the person being targeted.
Both operations use formal procurement and institutional structures to provide institutional cover for what is functionally a political suppression campaign. Israel uses emergency tender exemptions and “special trust” regulations. Pakistan’s army uses the chain of command and ISPR coordination. The bureaucratic wrapper in both cases insulates the program from the accusation of being what it is.
And both operations are expanding. Israel’s Hasbara budget increased 20-fold between 2024 and 2025. Agahi’s deployment of officers scaled alongside the intensification of anti-PTI operations after Khan’s imprisonment. Both programs grow in direct proportion to the volume of dissent they are failing to suppress.
The Ideology Beneath the Tactic
The surface similarity in operational design points to something deeper, a shared ideological premise that makes these programs not just tactically similar but philosophically identical.
Both the Israeli state, in its Hasbara doctrine, and the Pakistan Army, in its Agahi program, have reached the same conclusion: dissent is not a feature of a healthy polity to be managed and engaged. It is an existential threat to be extinguished. The distinction matters because it determines the proportionality of the response.
If dissent is a normal political phenomenon, the appropriate institutional response is argument, counter-evidence, and the slow work of persuasion. If dissent is an existential threat, the appropriate response is whatever level of force is required to eliminate it, including the weaponization of platforms, the destruction of reputations, and the criminalization of speech.
Hasbara frames every critic of Israeli policy as a participant, witting or unwitting, in a project aimed at Jewish annihilation. The framing collapses the distinction between political disagreement and eliminationist threat. It makes the suppression of criticism an act of self-defense.
Agahi frames every critic of military prerogative as a destabilizing agent threatening the territorial integrity and internal coherence of the Pakistani state. The framing collapses the distinction between political opposition and treason. It makes the suppression of dissent an act of national survival.
In both cases, the ideological move is the same: the institution declares itself coextensive with the nation, so that opposition to the institution becomes opposition to national existence itself. Once that equivalence is established, no tool deployed against critics can be considered disproportionate, because the critics have been redefined as existential enemies rather than political opponents. This is not a coincidence of rhetorical style. It is the foundational logic of authoritarian information control, and it appears in this form across every state that has chosen suppression over argument as its primary response to dissent.
The Question of Diffusion
Whether Pakistan’s military studied Israeli Hasbara directly, absorbed it through intermediary actors, or arrived at identical solutions through independent parallel evolution of the same problem is a question the available documentary record cannot currently answer.
What the record can establish is that both programs emerged in their mature forms during the same period, roughly 2010 to 2020, when the global social media landscape created both the opportunity for and the necessity of organized platform-level information operations. States that had previously managed domestic narratives through control of broadcast media and print licensing suddenly faced a distributed information environment that their existing tools could not adequately suppress.
The response, across states with otherwise entirely different political systems and strategic interests, converged on similar architectures: recruited civilian or quasi-civilian networks, coordinated content distribution, target designation, labeling systems that invoke pre-existing legal or social stigma, and amplification mechanisms designed to manufacture apparent consensus.
Russia’s Internet Research Agency, China’s Fifty Cent Army, Iran’s influence operations during the 2016 US election cycle, and various Gulf state information programs all exhibit structural similarities to both Hasbara and Agahi. The convergence suggests not so much a single point of origin as a shared discovery: that the architecture of social media platforms, with their algorithmic amplification of engagement and their weak identity verification, created a vulnerability that coordinated inauthentic behavior could exploit at scale.
Israel and Pakistan did not need to share a playbook. They needed to face the same problem with sufficient institutional resources and the absence of a principled commitment to political pluralism. The identical machine emerges from identical conditions.
What Remains After the Flood
The conversation about information warfare, particularly among journalists who have worked inside its operational range, carries a texture that does not translate easily into the language of Western media criticism. The question is not abstract. The question is: after the flood of coordinated abuse, after the doxxing, after the labeling, after your editor receives three hundred emails in a single morning questioning your professional integrity and your personal motivations, who continues?
The answer, documented in both the Palestinian and Pakistani contexts, is that the population of people willing to continue shrinks. Not to zero. Journalists of courage exist in both environments and continue to do work that matters. But the threshold for entry into serious investigative journalism rises. The personal cost calculus shifts. Institutional support from employers who have their own vulnerabilities to state pressure becomes less reliable.
This is the intended output of both programs. Not silence. Silence would be obvious and would generate its own resistance. The target is something more durable: a managed narrowing of the space in which uncomfortable questions can be raised, by whom, at what level of specificity, and with what institutional backing.
The Israeli state has refined this narrowing across decades of occupation and has exported elements of its security doctrine, including its approach to information management, through arms sales, training programs, and the global market for surveillance technology. The Pakistan Army has developed its version under the specific pressures of the post-Khan political crisis, but the underlying logic predates that crisis by generations. The army has always understood its relationship with Pakistani civil society as one requiring active management rather than passive coexistence.
What the Agahi documents and the audited procurement records of the Hasbara apparatus together establish is that this management has been fully digitized and fully funded. The troll farm is not an aberration. It is the contemporary form of an institutional function that both states have always considered essential to their survival. One buys its version through emergency government contracts. The other deploys its version through a chain of military command. The invoice looks different. The product is the same.
The Machine Runs at Seven in the Morning
Back to the officer with his phone. Back to the young man in the unnamed Tel Aviv office. Neither of them invented the doctrine they serve. Both of them enforce it with the sincere conviction that what they are doing is necessary, that the alternative is worse, that the critics they target have placed themselves outside the protection of normal political discourse by raising questions that threaten something too important to be threatened.
The sincerity is part of the design. The machine works best when the people operating it believe in the machine.
What the parallel operation of these two programs demonstrates, across the specific historical, political, and geographic distance between Islamabad and Tel Aviv, is that the suppression of dissent through information warfare is not an expression of any particular national character, religious tradition, or civilizational pathology. It is a technology. It is reproducible. It spreads.
The populations that live within its operational range, whether in Lahore or Gaza, whether targeted for supporting a jailed prime minister or for documenting a siege, experience its outputs in terms that require no translation: the sudden swarm, the label, the silence that follows when the cost of speaking becomes higher than most people can afford to pay.
The machine is the same machine. The question that neither program’s architects have satisfactorily answered is what happens when the populations being managed finally notice.
Primary sources include the Drop Site News investigation into Pakistan’s Agahi program; the Eurovision News Spotlight joint investigation by BR24, ORF, Deutsche Welle, and VRT into Israeli government procurement records and Lapam advertising data; the +972 Magazine investigation into the IDF Legitimization Cell; and FakeReporter’s open-source documentation of the STOIC influence operation in the United States, confirmed by the New York Times. This piece is part of ongoing coverage of state information warfare and its effects on civil society.