Israeli Experts Mounted an anti-Qatar Campaign. It Was Abruptly Halted, Without Explanation
9/14/26
Israeli campaign launched right after October 7 attack, to pressure Qatar to force Hamas to release the hostages
It was the sixth day of the war sparked by Hamas' attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken landed in Israel and, at a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, pledged that the Biden administration stood with Israel in the wake of the attack, in which 1,200 were killed in a string of Israeli border communities. That evening, an emergency government was formed: five members of Benny Gantz's National Unity Party were appointed cabinet ministers without portfolio, and a war cabinet was established.
At the same time, a secret initiative was getting underway. One of Israel's most senior political advisers opened a WhatsApp group bringing together some of the country's leading strategic consultants, campaigners, influence experts, advertising professionals and government figures. Their goal was to launch a global civilian influence campaign against Qatar.
The campaign sought to promote an international boycott of Qatar, which was a funder of Hamas. Those involved believed that only international public pressure could compel the Gulf state to force Hamas to release the 251 hostages whom the October 7 attackers had abducted into Gaza. The group included experts in influence operations and psychological warfare, political advisers and researchers.
One of the items developed by the promotional campaign
Sources who spoke with Haaretz described a wide-scale recruiting effort, with some 30 people joining the group. Funds were raised for the initiative, which operated during the initial weeks of the war through a series of civilian public-diplomacy efforts. The individuals involved also sought to recruit figures from the mass anti-government protest movement that was organized to oppose the Israeli government's plans to undermine the independence of Israel's judiciary. There were also efforts to shape opinion among lawmakers in the United States and France, as well as journalists at foreign media outlets.
The initiative was organized by one of Israel's veteran strategic advisers. Presentations and promotional materials were produced for the campaign, a dedicated website was built in several foreign languages, and social media accounts were opened. Editors, writers, translators, marketing professionals and legal advisers were recruited, most of them as volunteers.
But nothing came of it. A month after it was launched, the campaign against Qatar abruptly ground to a halt, without explanation. The website was taken offline. Sources who participated in the initiative said they were surprised by its sudden end.
The initiative, revealed here for the first time, was one of several civilian efforts that emerged from the chaos and government dysfunction in the initial days of the war.
#Boycott_Qatar
The operation began with a WhatsApp group called Free the Kidnapped, created several days after October 7. Among those recruited were tech protest activist and businessman Noam Lanir; strategic adviser Lior Chorev, who would later head the Hostages and Missing Families Forum and now heads Together leader Naftali Bennett's Knesset campaign; then-Haaretz commentator Alon Pinkas, before he went to work for lobbyist Jay Footlik; and many others. The names of those who initiated the operation are barred from publication.
In the initial days after the massacre, it was far from clear that Qatar would become a key mediator in negotiations to end the war and secure the hostages' release. The Israeli-led campaign sought to inject Qatar's role in financing Hamas into the international debate.
"Do we know how much Qatar gives Hamas every year or some other monetary figure that we can hammer home?" one adviser asked in the group. Another shared a report about a meeting in Qatar between Iran's foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. "Qatar – the hostages are on you," another communications adviser wrote. Chorev replied in English: "Qatar-ISIS Ltd." Within hours, the message "Hamas is ISIS" had moved from the group to the campaign website and from there to the campaign's Facebook profile picture.
Four days after the group was created, Udi Levy joined it. A former senior Mossad official, Levy had headed the Harpoon unit, established to target the financial infrastructure of terrorist organizations. "I have a complete dossier documenting Qatar's involvement in terrorism around the world over the past 15 years," he told the group.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu touring the Kfar Azza border kibbutz on Oct. 14, 2023 Credit: Avi Ohayon/GPO
At the time, Levy was largely unknown to the public. His first significant public appearance came in September 2024, when he testified before a privately initiated unofficial civilian commission of inquiry about the closure of the Harpoon unit. Two months later, Haaretz exposed the Qatar affair, in which associates of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were suspected of working on Qatar's behalf. Levy subsequently became a leading public voice in the campaign over the affair and was even sued by the prime minister.
As part of the civilian initiative, Levy drafted a foundational document for the anti-Qatar campaign, a position paper that formed the basis for the group's messaging. He was also dispatched to appear in the media.
Also joining the group was Yoav Kleiner, now the owner of the influence firm Media Lap, as well as U.S. communications consultant David Eichenbaum, who worked on Bill Clinton's and Barack Obama's campaigns. Contact was also established with Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, founder of Shurat HaDin, an organization that pursues legal and financial action against terrorist organizations. "She's with us," another member wrote.
Under the leadership of the project's organizers, participants joined a conference call every evening for updates on the initiative's progress. The work was divided among teams handling media, creative, research and strategy. They produced videos, raised donations, drafted fact sheets, approached journalists and opinion leaders and arranged media appearances.
Chorev, one of the group's members, urged the others to move faster: "The government is embracing the Qatari conception, and in my view, we absolutely have to get out there quickly."
The all-stars of influence
Many of the group's members began their careers during the Oslo Accord era of the 1990s. They had worked together on political campaigns abroad, sometimes even for opposing sides. The person who wrote the scripts for the anti-Qatar campaign had worked overseas alongside Srulik Einhorn, a former Netanyahu campaign adviser. Einhorn is now a suspect in both the Qatar affair, which involves allegations that the prime minister's associates were working on behalf of Qatar, and the classified documents leak case, involving the alleged leak of a classified document to the German daily Bild.
A week after the group was formed, the veteran campaigners began flooding it with ideas and possible strategies. One adviser suggested showing the campaign materials to American journalists for a story about the "civilian actors in Israel and around the world" behind a campaign to shame Qatar and the major publicly traded companies in which it holds stakes. Another proposed "running a global poll" on attitudes toward Hamas and Qatari funding.
Lanir shared a graphic video of the massacre, saying that he had sent it to the president of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, "and from there to the entire Congress and Senate." Ilan Goldstein proposed a street-level campaign: "Someone should film themselves outside the Ritz [the London hotel that came under Qatari ownership in 2020] and say that the place belongs to Qatar, that Qatar funds Hamas – and that anyone who comes here is funding terrorism."
For a week, members circulated drafts of a position paper titled "Hamas' Blood Money Train," whose main points were posted on the website under the slogan: "Qatar funds Hamas > Hamas is ISIS > Boycott Qatar 2023." The paper was signed by Udi Levy and Ronit Marzan, a historian of the Middle East.
A demonstration in September 2025 calling for the release of the hostages. Credit: Itai Ron
When someone proposed approaching members of the U.S. Congress directly, one of the advisers who initiated the operation warned that "we must not approach them" due to the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act. He suggested a workaround: having one of the families of the hostages with U.S. citizenship file a class-action lawsuit against Qatar.
But messages among the group's members dwindled after two weeks, and by December, the group was inactive. The campaign, which never got off the ground, left behind a digital trail that was reconstructed through network analysis. Its website was registered after October 7, on the day the WhatsApp group was opened but very little was actually published there. The campaign's Facebook page had no followers, nothing was posted on its X account, and its YouTube channel featured three videos that attracted few views. Its Instagram account was deleted, and the campaign did not pay for a single advertisement. The website has long since gone offline.
In the government's service
After the anti-Qatar initiative was shut down, the existence of an Israeli government "influence operation" was revealed. According to the report, it worked "to influence decision-makers around the world in response to pro-Hamas campaigns."
Through the nonprofit Hatzlacha, Haaretz submitted freedom of information requests to the Prime Minister's Office and the Diaspora Affairs Ministry – both of which ran influence campaigns abroad – seeking details about the employment of one of the project's initiators. Both ministries said they had no information. However, researchers from Active Info found two meetings on the Diaspora Affairs Ministry director general's calendar with a communications adviser that was held precisely as the anti-Qatar initiative he had established was winding down.
"After a while, it was shut down. We stopped dealing with the Qatar campaign," one person involved in the initiative told Haaretz. "I never heard anything more about the campaign."
A second source said: "They approached me, they were very enthusiastic about it, and then they just disappeared."
A third person involved in the group said: "We had no idea where the project's funding came from. The vast majority of us didn't receive a penny. And the person who initiated it should have explained why it ended. But nothing was ever said."
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As Haaretz previously revealed, amid the chaos immediately following the Hamas attack, high-tech workers and technology companies mobilized to establish a war room for intelligence and public-diplomacy initiatives. Those efforts were intended to counter what was described as an anti-Israel "poison machine" spreading pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas disinformation and denial of the massacre. Most of the initiatives focused on monitoring publicly available information and responding through public diplomacy and influence operations. The Diaspora Affairs Ministry invested millions of shekels in additional monitoring initiatives and dozens of operations, some of them covert.
The anti-Qatar campaign revealed here overlapped with that volunteer-run civilian public-diplomacy war room. In its wake, the Israeli government decided to formalize its influence activities through the Diaspora Affairs Ministry. Later, all of those initiatives were centralized under a government "influence body" and dealt with a range of targets and issues, including Hamas, Iran and other state actors.
As Haaretz-TheMarker revealed, a wide-ranging Persian-language influence campaign on social media was operated by a private Israeli organization that received government funding. Launched on the eve of the war with Iran, the campaign promoted regime change in Tehran, sought to bolster the image of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi and amplified calls for the restoration of the Pahlavi monarchy. The same accounts also amplified posts by Pahlavi's ally in Israel, Science and Technology Minister Gila Gamliel.
None of the individuals or organizations mentioned in this article provided a response.