Turkey working to undermine Israel’s October election – report

Israeli officials accuse Turkey of trying to influence Israel’s election through social media.

By World Israel News Staff

Israeli security officials have identified what they believe is a Turkish effort to influence Israel’s approaching national election through social media, according to a report published Monday.

Senior security officials told The Jerusalem Post that the online activity was designed to shape Israeli public opinion, disrupt the election campaign and deepen divisions among different parts of Israeli society.

The officials did not identify the social media accounts, platforms or organizations allegedly involved. They also did not present public evidence supporting the assessment or say whether the activity was being directed by the Turkish government.

No Turkish response to the specific allegation was cited in the report.

The assessment places Turkey alongside Iran among the foreign actors Israeli authorities suspect of attempting to exploit political and social divisions before the October 27 vote.

The claims emerged as Shin Bet director David Zini prepared to brief lawmakers during a classified meeting of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee’s intelligence subcommittee.

Zini was expected to present intelligence concerning indications of foreign election interference and Israel’s ability to detect covert financial transfers intended to influence domestic political activity.

Supreme Court Deputy President Noam Sohlberg, who chairs the Central Elections Committee, was also expected to participate in the closed-door hearing.

The reported Turkish activity appears to involve influence operations rather than direct interference with voting systems. Such campaigns can use false personas, coordinated accounts, misleading content, manipulated images or artificial intelligence to make political messages appear more popular or authentic than they are.

Israeli officials did not disclose which political parties, candidates or sections of the electorate were allegedly being targeted. They also did not say whether the campaign was supporting a particular electoral outcome or was primarily intended to increase mistrust and polarization.

Israel’s National Cyber Directorate has previously told Knesset lawmakers that authorities had already detected indications of attempted foreign interference ahead of the election.

The October vote will be Israel’s first national election since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attack and the prolonged regional war that followed. The campaign is expected to center heavily on responsibility for the attack, the conduct of the wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, national security and the future of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

President Isaac Herzog warned Israelis last week that both foreign and domestic threats could undermine confidence in the electoral process.

“Elections are a test of Israeli democracy, and they are also a test of the unity and cohesion of Israeli society,” Herzog said in a televised address marking the beginning of the campaign.

Herzog said Zini and Sohlberg had briefed him on several threats to the election’s integrity. He urged law-enforcement and security bodies to act firmly while calling on voters to be cautious about material they encounter or distribute online.

The president also warned political leaders against treating opponents as enemies, declaring that elections “are not a civil war.”

Concerns about foreign manipulation were reinforced this month by a special report from State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman, which found significant gaps in Israel’s preparations for digital influence campaigns.

The report said that, as of March, Israel had “no comprehensive national policy” for responding to foreign digital influence and had not appointed a single authority to coordinate the work of the agencies responsible for addressing it.

The comptroller’s office said foreign actors, led primarily by Iran, had attempted to manipulate Israeli public opinion, create political instability, weaken social cohesion and spread fear.

The report also found that much of Israel’s preparation against election-related influence campaigns had historically taken place only shortly before voting, despite the threat having been recognized for years.

Artificial intelligence has made the problem more urgent by allowing operatives to produce large volumes of convincing written material, fabricated photographs, cloned voices and manipulated videos at relatively low cost.

Former Supreme Court deputy president Hanan Melcer, who previously chaired the Central Elections Committee, issued a similar warning earlier this month.

“Election integrity is in danger,” Melcer said at the Herzliya Conference. “But the danger can be prevented.”

Melcer called for preparations against foreign and domestic interference, artificial intelligence and anonymous political activity. He argued that users seeking to shape an election through social media should not be permitted to conceal who is behind their accounts.

Relations between Israel and Turkey have deteriorated sharply in recent years amid Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly hostile rhetoric toward Israel and Ankara’s support for Hamas.

Israeli political and security figures have increasingly identified Turkey as a potential strategic rival following the weakening of Iran and its regional terrorist network.

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