For many years I worked in both Israel and Gaza. Palestinian news crews would often ask me, as they did other foreign journalists, to bring things into the Strip that were difficult to get hold of. Sometimes it was cigarettes; more often, camera equipment.

On one occasion, when I wasn’t available, equipment was delivered to the home of an Israeli colleague so another foreign journalist could take it into Gaza.

The Palestinian producer who’d ordered it phoned me, delighted with himself. He’d told my colleague to open the box while they were on a video call. That way, he explained, she could see there was nothing to worry about. He thought he’d found a clever way to reassure her.

No sooner had I put down the phone with him than she called. She’d opened the box, all right, but had been convinced something was going to explode in her face. She was half expecting Mossad to come knocking on her door.

Neither realised how differently the other had understood the same conversation.

The two were developing an unlikely friendship. She was a right-wing Israeli with four children; he was a Palestinian producer in Gaza with four children of his own. They’d never met but spoke often, sometimes several times a day. He was the first person from Gaza she’d really gotten to know.

For most Israelis and Gazans, personal contact like that is rare. Much of what they learn about one another comes from the news. Many Gazans once worked in Israel, but movement restrictions tightened sharply after Hamas seized control of Gaza from rival Palestinian faction Fatah in June 2007. Egypt also restricted passage through its crossing.

What followed was years of families in southern Israel living with rocket attacks and warning sirens, sometimes with only seconds to reach shelter. Some playgrounds had bomb shelters built into them, and rockets killed and injured civilians. Gazans lived under blockade and through repeated military operations and airstrikes that killed and injured thousands, displaced families and destroyed homes. Their experiences were different, but fear and grief shaped how they understood each other across the border.

This week marks three years since the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on 7 October and the beginning of the war that followed in Gaza. The attacks exposed one of the gravest intelligence failures in Israel’s history. Military inquiries have examined what went wrong, although calls for a full independent investigation continue. A ceasefire has reduced the fighting in Gaza, but violence and the suffering caused by the war have not ended. Nor has the battle over how events are understood.

Israel’s own military inquiry, published in February 2025, found that intelligence warnings had failed to overturn a firmly held belief that Hamas was deterred from launching a major attack. Israel had obtained a detailed Hamas assault plan more than a year before 7 October, remarkably similar to what eventually happened. Yet officials continued to believe Hamas wouldn’t carry it out.

Why didn’t the warnings change their minds?

When an assessment has been repeated for years, endorsed by senior officials and used to justify decisions, it becomes difficult to question. To abandon it can mean admitting that years of decisions rested on a mistaken premise. Information that doesn’t fit is explained away. And when everyone around you shares the same understanding, agreement can start to feel like evidence. Having more intelligence can make people more confident without necessarily making them more accurate.

Hamas had stayed out of several confrontations between Israel and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza. Israel interpreted that as evidence Hamas wanted to avoid war. But the same behaviour could also have meant it was preserving its forces for something bigger.

In June this year, the Israeli Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre published documents it said had been recovered from Gaza. According to its analysis, Hamas deliberately encouraged Israel’s belief that it wanted to avoid confrontation while preparing an attack. Reuters had reported a similar deception strategy in October 2023, citing a source close to Hamas, although that account does not independently authenticate the newly published documents.

Some of Hamas’s military exercises were conducted openly, filmed, and presented as routine training. According to the institute, they included rehearsals for parts of the eventual attack. The institute also cites an instruction attributed to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar to conduct exercises openly rather than conceal them, because secrecy might raise Israeli suspicions.

The exercises were real. Israel could see them. What Hamas appears to have manipulated was the meaning Israel attached to what it saw.

On 7 October 2023, Hamas-led attackers killed around 1 200 people in Israel and took 251 hostages. As footage of the attack circulated around the world, a different struggle over how events were understood began.

Israeli social-media analysis company Cyabra examined online discussions in the first two days following the attacks. It classified more than 40 000 of approximately 162 000 profiles as fake, some of which had been created well before 7 October. That was the company’s assessment, not proof of who controlled the accounts.

Last Sunday, Israeli journalist Ayala Hasson reported on Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster, about a separate investigation into suspected fake accounts. One example concerned genuine footage of Shiri Bibas, an Israeli mother abducted with her two young sons. According to the report, accounts circulated the images alongside messages portraying the armed men taking the family away as people helping them. The footage wasn’t fabricated. What was misleading was the explanation attached to it.

Hasson also reported that some accounts active around the attacks had fallen silent before apparently resurfacing, now using Israeli names and photographs, ahead of Israel’s election later this month. They joined existing political arguments and repeated familiar opinions to make them seem more widely shared. The investigation alleged foreign involvement, although who controlled individual accounts has not been independently established. Nor does the presence of suspicious accounts supporting a politician mean that politician is involved.

A separate investigation published in September offers a more specific example.

Golden Owl, an open-source intelligence research group, identified an X account that had posted in Persian about Iranian politics until April this year. In August, it reappeared as “Alon Strauss”, with an Israeli flag on its profile, posting in Hebrew about Israeli politicians. Yet X’s transparency information placed the account in Germany and showed it connecting through the Iran-specific version of the app.

Researchers also identified copied messages, coordinated posting patterns and connections between other suspicious accounts. Golden Owl assessed the network as linked to Iran, although it could not identify the actual operators.

This does not establish any connection to the accounts Hasson discussed. But it shows how someone presenting themselves as an ordinary Israeli citizen might be operating under a different identity. The political argument itself may be genuine. What is misleading is the impression of who is expressing it and how widely that view is shared.

Similar tactics have also been used to promote pro-Israel messaging. In 2024, Meta removed a network of fake accounts it linked to an Israeli political marketing firm. The accounts posed as ordinary Americans and Canadians while promoting messages supportive of Israel's military actions in Gaza.

With our own municipal elections approaching on 4 November, Eyewitness News reported this week that researchers at the Centre for Information Integrity in Africa had identified almost identical comments from different accounts praising a mayoral candidate. They suspected coordinated activity intended to make support appear greater than it was, but did not establish that the candidate was involved.

South Africans also hold sharply different views about Israel and Gaza, shaped in part by our own history. Our government has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, which Israel contests.

But whatever our position, do we examine information that supports it as carefully as information that challenges it? The killings and hostage-taking on 7 October were real. So is the enormous suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Recognising one does not require denying the other.

My two colleagues no longer speak. Since 7 October, she wants nothing to do with Palestinians. Her youngest child continues to suffer from nightmares and is frightened to go to sleep in case she or her parents might be killed during the night.

He was abroad with his family when the attacks happened, but has since lost his home and businesses in Gaza. Among the things he misses most are his wedding photographs and his young son’s PlayStation with the high score the boy spent years achieving.

I do not think they will ever speak again. Their estrangement is not the result of a misunderstanding. What has happened since 7 October changed their lives.

But I still remember those two phone calls. He was delighted because he thought asking her to open the box would reassure her. She was terrified because she thought she might have been asked to open a bomb. What he saw as proof that he could be trusted, she saw as a reason to be afraid.

Three years after 7 October, we’ve seen how intelligence can be misinterpreted, genuine images given false explanations, and existing political divisions deliberately exploited.

It is not always the information that is wrong. Sometimes it’s the conclusions we draw from it. And the hardest part is recognising when the evidence is telling us something different from what we’ve always believed.