Google signed a $45 million contract with the Israeli prime minister’s office to run a global digital advertising campaign promoting Israeli state messaging during its ongoing genocide in Gaza. The contract, first reported by Drop Site News, includes advertisements placed on YouTube and through Google’s Display & Video 360 platform, explicitly described in government documents as part of Israel’s propaganda war.
Signed in June 2025, the contract with Google—covering YouTube and Display & Video 360, the company’s digital ad service—authorized an extensive propaganda campaign labelled explicitly as hasbara, a Hebrew term denoting state-backed propaganda, often deployed to whitewash Israeli military actions.
The campaign was launched as international condemnation grew over Israel’s decision to cut off all food, fuel and humanitarian supplies to Gaza on 2 March, triggering what UN agencies describe as a man-made famine.
One of the most widely viewed outputs of the campaign was a YouTube video by Israel’s foreign ministry, falsely claiming, “There is food in Gaza. Any other claim is a lie.” The ad was viewed over 6 million times, heavily boosted through paid promotion under the government contract.
According to internal Israeli records, the initiative was coordinated through the Israeli Government Advertising Agency (Lapam), a department reporting directly to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.
As part of the broader campaign, Israel also spent:
$3 million on advertising with X (formerly Twitter)
$2.1 million with French-Israeli platform Outbrain/Teads
An undisclosed amount promoting Israeli-aligned content across Meta’s platforms
Other ads published under the contract targeted international institutions and NGOs. Several attempted to delegitimize United Nations Relief and Works Agency, accusing the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency of “deliberate sabotage” of aid delivery.
Others aimed to smear pro-Palestine legal advocacy groups such as the Hind Rajab Foundation, portraying them as linked to “extremist ideologies”—an allegation unsupported by credible evidence.
Meanwhile, UN agencies have sounded the alarm about famine conditions throughout Gaza. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) declared a famine in northern Gaza in August, warning it would soon spread to other regions. As of this month, at least 367 Palestinians, including 131 children, have died of hunger and malnutrition, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Despite this, Google continued to run Israeli state ads denying the existence of hunger. In a March 2025 hearing in the Knesset, senior Israeli officials were pressed not on humanitarian grounds, but on their preparedness to manage the PR fallout. “We could also decide to launch a digital campaign… to explain that there is no hunger,” Avichai Edrei, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces is reported saying.
A separate campaign targeted critics of Israeli military operations in Iran, following Israel’s 12-day aerial bombardment campaign known as Operation Rising Lion, which killed at least 436 Iranian civilians. Documents show that the Netanyahu government’s hasbara campaign was designed to promote the strikes as necessary for the security of “Israel and the West”, with digital content placed across Google and X platforms.
Human rights groups, fact-checkers and UN officials have expressed alarm at the growing role of US tech companies in amplifying genocide denial and disinformation. In June, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese directly accused Google of profiting from the Gaza genocide. According to internal leaks, Google co-founder Sergey Brin responded on an employee forum by calling the UN “a transparently antisemitic organization.”
Google is already under scrutiny for its role in Project Nimbus, a cloud computing partnership with Amazon providing infrastructure to the Israeli government, including the military. Critics say the firm’s deepening entanglement with Israel’s war apparatus underscores the complicity of Silicon Valley in sustaining and legitimizing state violence.
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