In mid-April, a picture showing an Israeli soldier taking a sledgehammer to a statue of Jesus in the southern Lebanese town of Debel found its way online, rapidly zooming across social media and leaping into mainstream news as it ignited a firestorm of anger directed at Israel.
Most versions of the picture being circulated included a prominent watermark near the center of the image bearing the X handle of Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi.
Tirawi did not take the photo, however. Rather, it was another soldier who snapped the offending image and proceeded to post it on social media, where Tirawi, one of a cadre of online sleuths trawling troops’ online feeds to collect evidence of wrongdoing, could find it and show it to the world.
The incident, which drew a swift apology, underscored what critics claim is the Israel Defense Forces’ widespread maltreatment of civilians and disregard for Christians. But it also underscored the military’s lack of success in cracking down on soldiers posting a steady stream of photos, videos and other content to social media, exposing themselves and others to charges of misconduct, often justified, and offering fuel to the country’s many detractors.
Weeks later, on May 6, a new photo emerged from the same town, this one showing soldiers placing a cigarette in the mouth of a statue of the Virgin Mary. Like others, it had been found on a soldier’s Instagram feed.
Following the initial incident, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir said that soldiers, both in the standing army and reserves, “must not use social media as a tool to spread controversial messages or for self-promotion.”
“This is a red line that must not be crossed, and those who do so will be dealt with disciplinarily,” he said.
The message is one that the army has been repeating since early in the war in Gaza. As thousands of troops invaded the enclave following the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks on Israel, many took their phones with them.
What ensued was a surge of photos and videos uploaded by soldiers to social media platforms, offering a constant stream of material to critics of Israel. While the acts caught on photo or video largely fell below the threshold of war crimes, they still provided evidence of soldiers defying the army’s ethical code and acting with callous disregard toward civilians and their property, blackening the reputation of a military already perceived poorly by much of the world.
In addition, material showing soldiers’ faces has been used by those looking to expose individual troops and seek their prosecutions when they travel abroad.
Among the actions captured and shared by troops in Gaza were soldiers burning a Quran and other books, crushing an “I love Gaza” sign with a tank, vandalizing property, firing indiscriminately and multiple photos uncovered by Tirawi of service members posing with lingerie found in Palestinians’ homes.
“What we’ve seen in the current conflict is it’s not just the volume [of the posts], but it’s also the fact that soldiers don’t shy away from uploading videos, sometimes with their face,” or other identifying features, said Eran Shamir-Borer, director of the Center for Security and Democracy at the Israel Democracy Institute. “They’re not even ashamed of what they’re doing.”
In January, the Israel Defense Forces disciplined a soldier who posted a video of himself firing multiple shots toward the Gaza Strip, sentencing him to 20 days in military prison.
As in the Lebanon incident, the army moved to condemn the behavior after the footage emerged, calling it “a grave incident that does not accord with the values of the IDF and with the standards expected of combat soldiers and their commanders.”
Surge in social media use
Shamir-Borer noted that the rise in soldiers posting their own unethical conduct online is likely a product of the prevalence of social media.
The army has wrestled with social media since the rise of Facebook and Twitter nearly two decades ago, instituting various bans and guidelines over the years meant to keep soldiers from posting bad behavior online, though enforcement has always been uneven at best.
The fact that many of the soldiers posting offending content are reservists, who are often less disciplined than conscripted soldiers, also contributes to the phenomenon, the IDI expert said.
But he argued that broader shifts in norms and behavior within both the military and Israeli society were at play as well.
According to IDI survey data, there has been a concerning uptick in recent years of respondents who believe that the IDF is held back from fulfilling its mission by upholding the principle of avoiding unnecessary killing and minimizing harm to innocent people. In October 2025, 65 percent of Jewish Israelis polled held that notion, up five percentage points from the year prior.
“We expect all our soldiers to act according to the IDF code of ethics,” an army representative told The Times of Israel, though they added that no new formal guidelines had been introduced in light of recent incidents.
The army’s code of ethics, entitled “The Spirit of the IDF,” consists of a series of values, including the preservation of human dignity, and practical rules meant to ensure professionalism and discipline. Among its core precepts is the concept of “purity of arms,” which is intended to limit the use of force to only what is necessary to fulfill a mission.
Alongside trying to ensure soldiers conduct themselves as expected, the army is keen to keep troops’ social media feeds free of sensitive material.
The concern goes beyond documentation of misconduct and troops’ identities, extending to footage liable to risk operational security by exposing classified information that could compromise personnel and provide hostile actors with intelligence.
The IDF said that it “operates at all times to safeguard information security and the security of its personnel,” stressing that directives governing “documentation and online publication that could be used by hostile actors” apply to both conscripted and reservist troops.
Violations, it said, are addressed through command and disciplinary action “as required.”
The IDF has begun introducing new technological tools to monitor what soldiers put online — including an AI-powered system, dubbed Morpheus, designed to track the public online accounts of standing army soldiers.
IDF international media spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani recently told The Times of Israel that while the issue of soldier misconduct and visual documentation of such incidents remains a persistent problem, the scope of the phenomenon has declined over the course of the war, which he attributed to the military’s intensified emphasis on both ethical conduct and social media discipline.
“It’s still an issue; it’s still something we’re dealing with,” Shoshani said, noting that the army must continuously reinforce its messaging about proper conduct and the dangers of posting problematic content online with each new cohort of soldiers. “It’s still not where we want it to be, but it is much better,” he added, explaining that while, at the onset of the war, objectionable posts were being uploaded by soldiers on a near-daily basis, incidents today are far less frequent.
But Shamir-Borer said the limited measures implemented by the IDF to address such incidents were “too little and way, way too late,” warning that a significant erosion of IDF values and ethical norms has already taken place, and that considerable reputational damage has already been done.
From accountability to doxxing
The proliferation of such videos has fueled a broader debate over accountability, with some arguing that the social media posts have exposed conduct the military has been unwilling or unable to properly police on its own.
“One day, when the people of Gaza begin to mourn, they will want to know who the criminals are who killed their loved ones,” Tirawi told Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency, adding that “these documents will be a tool for justice when that day comes.”
The IDF has long been accused of failing to hold soldiers suspected of criminal conduct to account. In 2024, the Yesh Din human rights advocacy organization published a report slamming the military’s General Staff Mechanism for Fact-Finding Assessments, responsible for carrying out preliminary probes into suspected breaches of the laws of war and advising the Military Advocate General on whether to open criminal investigations into such incidents.
The report claimed that the body “is not interested in investigating suspicions of war crimes properly,” claiming that “several incidents transferred to the [fact-finding assessment] Mechanism for review in 2014 were still under the Mechanism’s review in 2022.”
Similarly, the UK-based NGO Action on Armed Violence reported in August that 88% of IDF investigations from October 2023 and June 2025 into alleged war crimes commited by soldiers in Gaza and the West Bank were “either still under review with no public data on progress, or had been closed without any finding of wrongdoing,” adding that most of the investigations were only triggered “for the most severe or public accusations of wrongdoing by their forces.”
Meanwhile, the sheer volume of footage has fueled the creation of online databases dedicated to collecting and cataloguing material that critics believe could be evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
One such project, launched by Al Jazeera’s investigative unit, has amassed some 250 images and videos, mostly posted by Israeli soldiers, that it says may document potential “Israeli crimes.”
The collection includes videos and pictures of soldiers posing with the property of Palestinians who fled, mocking Gazans, or standing next to blindfolded detainees. Many of the videos appear to document routine activity, such as empty buildings being blown up or bulldozed, or a commander giving a speech to troops. One video flagged by the network shows troops in Ofakim, outside Gaza, dancing the hora with former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Circulating video footage shows former CIA Director and former United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo dancing with Israeli soldiers during his recent visit to Israeli settlements near Gaza. pic.twitter.com/b4gCqL3BBN
— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) March 19, 2024
In some cases, the soldiers shown are identified by full name and personal details — a development that could leave troops vulnerable to “doxxing” — a term for publishing someone’s personal details, allowing anti-Israel activists to track and harass them, or to pursue legal action abroad.
At the vanguard of the doxxing effort has been the Hind Rajab Foundation, a Belgium-based anti-Israel legal group named after a six-year-old girl allegedly killed by Israeli forces in Gaza in January 2024.
The group, founded by Belgian activists linked to the Hezbollah terror group, uses social media to identify Israeli soldiers and then track their travel outside the country, filing criminal complaints and prosecution requests in whatever country they travel to in a bid to have them tried for alleged war crimes.
While the HRF has pushed some European authorities to briefly detain soldiers and prompted one Israeli visiting Brazil to flee fearing arrest, it has so far failed to secure any prosecutions.
No soldier targeted by the foundation has been convicted — or even formally tried — for alleged offenses committed in Gaza. But its activities, and those of groups like it, have led the IDF to take strictly forbid the publication of photos showing soldiers’ faces, a measure it once only reserved for senior officers.
Earlier this year, the organization targeted Israeli comedian Guy Hochman, submitting a complaint to Canadian authorities accusing him of “military propaganda and incitement linked to Israel’s war on Gaza.”
The move led to Hochman being detained and questioned for six hours upon landing in Toronto before ultimately being released.
The HRF also requested prosecution in the United States, but the US government did not take legal action.
HRF’s complaints against Hochman and others are usually not based on specific allegations of war crimes. Rather, they seek prosecution based on the fact that an individual served in the IDF, regardless of their individual conduct.
But while being identified as a soldier may open up individuals to abuse and harassment, only those documented carrying out identifiable alleged crimes are in actual legal danger, according to Shamir-Borer.
“Just serving in the IDF… is not a violation in and of itself in most countries, ” he said. “You also need to tie a specific individual to a specific incident where the law was allegedly violated.”
