Hundreds of fabricated accounts on X masquerading as ordinary Israelis have been uncovered by Golden Owl, a Spanish intelligence research company, with less than a week remaining before Israel's election on Tuesday, October 27, according to a report by the Israeli newspaper Calcalist. The researchers assessed the network as linked to Iran — an assessment, not an Israeli government finding.

Source: Calcalist via Archyde

The profiles used Hebrew names, Israeli flags and invented personal histories to blend into online debates surrounding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the ongoing war and the country's political trajectory, the researchers said.

Golden Owl assessed 445 of the profiles as connected to an Iranian influence operation with high or medium-high confidence. Between August 11 and October 11, posts from the network accumulated at least 4.7 million views.

Source: Golden Owl research report

Amplify anger, not new arguments

The researchers noted that the accounts avoided introducing novel arguments. Instead, they waded into topics already fiercely contested by real Israelis — responsibility for the events of October 7, military service exemptions for the ultra-Orthodox, and the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu — repeatedly injecting contentious debates into feeds in a way the researchers say sought to amplify public anger, deepen mutual distrust and foster a sense that nobody can be believed.

Golden Owl's monitoring also found manipulation aimed directly at the integrity of the vote itself: accounts posted claims about electoral fraud and suggested the election might be postponed. In an earlier Golden Owl investigation, one account named Alon Strauss was presented as an Israeli political commentator posting Hebrew criticisms of Netanyahu — but until April, the exact same profile had posted exclusively in Persian about Iranian politics.

Separately, TikTok reported earlier this month that it had removed more than 45,000 videos in Israel for violating rules against election integrity violations, misinformation and misleading AI-generated content, and that it had uncovered a coordinated network of 306 accounts operating from inside Israel to amplify political messages. View counts alone do not show whether any voter changed their mind, and none of the reporting confirms the full extent of automated interference in the campaign.