Israel reportedly paid tech giant Google $45 million to spread its propaganda amid growing international outrage over its siege and destruction of Gaza, an investigation by Drop Site News revealed earlier this week.
The outlet said that discussions in the Israeli Knesset regarding the PR campaign had begun hours after the Israeli government announced a total halt on food, medicine, fuel, and other essential supplies entering the Gaza Strip on March 2 2025.
Knesset members expressed concerns for Israel's image in the world as a result of the siege, but not for the Palestinian civilians who would be affected.
Since then, at least 367 Gazans, among them 131 children, have died of starvation.
The Israeli government signed the 45 million dollar contract with Google for a six-month advertising campaign in late June, at a time when its forces were killing scores of desperate Palestinians at aid sites run by the widely condemned Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) and in daily airstrikes on civilian areas of the Gaza Strip.
The campaign was suggested to Knesset members by Avichay Adraee, the Israeli military’s notorious Arabic-language spokesman, who said: "We could also decide to launch a digital campaign in this context, to explain that there is no hunger and present the data", according to Drop Site News.
One of the campaign's most prominent advertisements appeared on the Google-owned video sharing platform YouTube, purporting to show Palestinians preparing and eating food and ending with the words: "There is food in Gaza. Any other claim is a lie."
This appeared amid global outcry over starvation and malnutrition deaths in Gaza and shortly before the UN declared a famine in Gaza City and its surrounding areas.
The Israeli government also paid $3 million for an advertising campaign with the social media platform X, according to Drop Site News, and brought US influencers to Gaza to spread its propaganda at a time when international journalists were banned and Israel was regularly killing Palestinian journalists reporting from the devastated territory.
Despite its attempts to convince the world that no one was starving in Gaza, ministers in the Israeli government have openly advocated the starvation of Gazans to force them out of the territory.
"In my opinion, you can besiege them," Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, has previously said. "No water, no electricity, they can die of hunger or surrender."
Amichay Eliyahu, the far-right heritage minister, has also said that Palestinians "need to starve" unless they agree to leave Gaza.
Israel's use of Google to promote its propaganda follows a statement by the tech giant's co-founder Sergey Brin calling the UN "transparently antisemitic" after UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese called out Google for profiting from Israel’s genocide by providing cloud services to the Israeli government.