Israel Is Buying Google Ads to Discredit the UN’s Top Gaza Aid Agency

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The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) calls Israel’s strategy of promoting alleged misinformation “destructive.”

By buying ads for searches for “UNRWA” and “UNRWA USA,” the Israeli government now appeared to be aiming to draw potential donors to a webpage full of allegations about why the UNRWA couldn’t be trusted. The page claims the UN agency has not declared whether employing members of Hamas would violate its neutrality and that the agency doesn’t investigate its facilities for abuse by extremists. In fact, UNRWA does require independence from military interests, and an outside review found evidence of facility inspections, though it suggested the checkups happen more frequently.

After seeing the ads—paid for by the Israeli Government Advertising Agency, according to details shown when clicking on the menu button beside them—Mara Kronenfeld, the head of UNRWA USA, and her staff of seven quickly appealed to Google for help fighting what they viewed as a misinformation campaign.

What has happened since shows the delicate relationship Google has kept with its advertising client, Israel, and the limits of the company’s policing of alleged misinformation in ads. Several current and former Google employees tell WIRED the anti-UNRWA campaign is just one volley of ads that Israel has orchestrated in recent months that have drawn complaints both inside and outside of the company. The ads about UNRWA and another campaign targeting the Middle East have not been previously reported.

From May through July when users queried over 300 terms related to UNRWA, the Israeli ads came up 44 percent of the time that both they and UNRWA USA ads were eligible to appear, according to analytics from UNRWA USA’s Google Ads account. Meanwhile, UNRWA USA ads showed up in just 34 percent of eligible circumstances. Most Popular

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What Kronenfeld says truly worries her is that Americans are being exposed to Israel’s propaganda while trying to understand UNRWA’s role in the ongoing crisis. Beside the search ads, Israel has aired video ads in the US through Google that say “UNRWA is inseparable from Hamas” and that it “keeps employing terrorists.” Public misunderstanding could further jeopardize support from the US government, which until the war had been the largest donor to UNRWA.

“There is an incredibly powerful campaign to dismantle UNRWA,” Kronenfeld says. “I want the public to know what’s happening and the insidious nature of it, especially at a time when civilian lives are under attack in Gaza.”