“The War After the War”: Nova Survivors and Survivors of Captivity Under an Iranian Bot Attack on the Internet

Nova Festival survivors are facing a huge wave of online harassment and defamation from coordinated bots, according to a comprehensive report by the Movement to Combat Online Anti-Semitism (FOA). According to the study, festival survivors and survivors of captivity in Gaza are the targets of a “continuous and multi-pronged digital campaign” that operates thousands of fake accounts and bot networks with direct ties to the Iranian regime.

The organization calls this attack “the war after the war” and emphasizes that the survivors will be hit a second time. The documented harassment is not an abstract matter: certain named individuals, including captivity survivors and their families, are subjected to protracted smear campaigns that further compound the trauma of October 7th.

The alarming statistic: an increase in post-traumatic stress among survivors

An academic study that examined 392 survivors of the Nova Festival found that one year after the trauma, 54.6% of survivors showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), defined as persistently high or worsening symptoms, compared to only about 20% in the average population exposed to a traumatic event.

The researchers said these rates were “unusually high” and pointed to repeated exposure to difficult trauma-related content on the networks, as well as the “broader sociopolitical climate” as factors that could clearly be contributing to worsening symptoms in survivors.

The methods of operation: from conspiracies to victim blaming

According to the FOA report, bot networks linked to state actors led by Iran are behind the campaign. This is a direct continuation of long-term Iranian efforts to spread disinformation, intelligence and cyber operations. Their overall goal is to deepen social divisions and undermine the sense of security of citizens in Israel, the United States and other Western countries.

The information in the report was collected between October 2023 and April 2026 on the leading networks: X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Telegram. The campaign consists of several types of offensive content:

• Denial of the massacre: Claims the event was staged using “crisis actors” and fake blood.
• Conspiracy theories (“The Apache Myth”): The IDF is blamed for the false claim that army helicopters fired on the revelers to create a pretext for war.
• Blame the victim: They portrayed the festival as a provocation, claiming that revelers “brought this on themselves” because they decided to dance on “stolen land” near the Gaza Strip.
• Targeted personal harassment: Personal smear campaigns against known survivors using harsh derogatory terms (“terrorist,” “whore”) and systematic ridicule of references to sexual violence. The victims personally attacked include Noa Argamani, Romi Gonen and Ima Merav Leshem-Gonen, Omri Sassi and Ebintan Or.

“The Eighth Front”: Social networks fail at filtering

The Movement to Combat Anti-Semitism Online is an Israeli non-profit organization founded in 2020 by Tomer Aldobi and Nir Kaplan that operates a network of more than 5,000 volunteers to monitor and report offensive content. Aldoubi said in an interview with Britain’s Telegraph: “Anti-Semitism and extreme hatred against Jews, Zionists and Israelis have spread around the world at a dizzying pace since October 7.”

According to the organization’s data, there is a dramatic difference in the effectiveness of different social networks at removing content:

• TikTok: More than 80% of content reported as anti-Semitic was removed.
• network X: Less than 50% of reported content removed.
• YouTube and Meta (Facebook and Instagram): Less than 40% removed.

In a wide-ranging discussion in the Knesset Subcommittee on Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Technology, the committee’s chairman, MK Orit Parkash-HaCohen (Blue and White), defined the online arena as the “eighth front” of the State of Israel.

Merav Bender Sepdia, director of partnerships at FOA, warned of long-term effects in the discussion: “This content is a contamination of all artificial intelligence trust stores.” According to them, AI models are fed by the information currently available on the Internet, so these lies will influence global knowledge in the coming years.

A call for strategic change and an institutionalized struggle

Although the association’s professional team manages to achieve high removal rates (about 64% of their direct reports are accepted, with about 150,000 posts removed since 2020), the scale of the challenge is enormous. The organization’s thousands of volunteers report independently, but only 27% of content is actually removed.

“It is a shame that in this region those who do the work are volunteers,” attacked MK Parkash-HaCohen, calling for government action at a strategic level. She stressed that there are hundreds of millions of shekels in foreign ministry budgets dedicated to combating anti-Semitism and that these should be used to set up a government working group on the issue.

“I invite those who think it’s not real to come and see it”

The one who feels the damage of this digital war every day is Omri Sassi, one of the producers of the Nova Festival and survivor of the massacre, who lost many family members in the event. In a painful conversation with The Telegraph, Sassi spoke of the high personal cost: “The abuse the survivors have faced since then and the amount of denial and misinformation online have dramatically worsened my trauma. I organized the festival, I lost those closest to me there. I invite anyone who thinks what happened isn’t real – to come, look me in the eyes and see how wrong they are.”

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