The Use of WAFA By the Palestinian Leadership to Set the Stage for Terror

The Palestinian News & Information Agency (WAFA), initially established by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), acts as the official Palestinian state-run news service.

WAFA has persistently fostered a media system that encourages and legitimizes violence and incitement against Israel. To illustrate the actions of WAFA, the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA) examined every publication of WAFA classified as “Latest news” on its English-language website during July 2025.

Each item was examined for language, content, and context. The study found that 99.9% of WAFA’s English-language coverage related to Israel was explicitly negative, spreading false and dangerous narratives. Of the 622 articles published that month, only 12 were neutral, and the majority of these did not concern Israel, instead focusing on weather conditions. None of these 12 non-Israel-related articles covered Palestinian achievements, industry, successes, coexistence efforts, or peace initiatives.

WAFA’s incessant campaign of demonization, dehumanization, and delegitimization of Israel exposes the sobering reality, not merely of bias, but of how mass media has been weaponized to poison public sentiment regarding Israel. By distorting facts and excluding context from their content, WAFA entrenches a baseless narrative rooted in falsehood. The recurring use of inflammatory words, such as “genocide,” “massacre,” and “war crimes,” is intentional and strategic incitement.

As psychologist Albert Bandura explains in his article Social Cognitive Theory of Mass Communication (2001),¹ “repeated exposure to messages that demonize or dehumanize a particular individual, type of individual, group or thing, can lead to a moral disengagement in which violence becomes legitimate.”¹ He adds that audience’s responses are intensified by content that “morally justifies injurious conduct, blames and dehumanizes victims, displaces or diffuses personal responsibility, and sanitizes destructive consequences”.¹ WAFA’s content demonstrates this framework, functioning as a vessel to desecrate Israel’s international moral standing by absolving Hamas of any blame for the conditions in Gaza.

This media strategy goes deeper than an effort to sway public opinion gently; it aims to dominate the narrative by flooding the media with nonstop false information disguised as truth. In Christopher Till’s “Propaganda through ‘reflexive control’ and the mediated construction of reality,”² he explains, “the goal is not necessarily to convince, but to dominate the information space and drown out competing narratives.” The result of this type of content is a violent culture in which societies’ grasp of reality is warped by propaganda to the extent that “actions that might otherwise be unthinkable become normalized.”

The Incitement Architecture

WAFA’s headlines like “Palestinian girl martyred by Israeli army gunfire in northern Gaza” (July 9, 2025) and “Israel continues genocide, forcibly displaces Gazans” (July 10, 2025) rely on the continual use of martyrdom ideology, twisted moral framing, and the rejection of any military context. In place of a story balanced with context and perspective, these articles are presented entirely around emotionally provocative storylines, framing Israel as the vicious murderer of children.

These strategies emulate the storytelling techniques used by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and even international organizations like UNRWA. Much like UNRWA drastically overstates refugee numbers and inserts anti-Israel narratives into school textbooks, WAFA functions as a direct mouthpiece for the PA’s smear campaign, supplying an already radicalized society with a daily dose of anti-Israel content directed not only at the Palestinian society but also at international audiences.

WAFA’s international editions in English and French are especially concerning. They are not intended for domestic Palestinian viewing, but for the Western world, specifically lawmakers, journalists, and human-rights activists who are already positioned to view Israel through the lens of “settler-colonialism,” “apartheid,” and “genocide,” agenda-driven buzzwords used in the media.

Manufacturing the Genocide Narrative

Each week, WAFA publishes an article with an updated “death toll,” with no reliable evidence for their statistics. Published by WAFA on July 24, 2025, the headline, “Gaza death toll surges to 58,895 amid ongoing Israeli genocide,” not only references unconfirmed death tolls from Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, but also repeats the blood libel of “Israeli genocide,” as though it were a universally accepted fact. They do not include an attribution to this claim, sources, or a balanced counter-argument. There is no mention of the October 7, 2023, massacre, nor the thousands of rockets fired at Israeli civilians since that day. Rather, the reader is encouraged to conclude that Israel is arbitrarily murdering tens of thousands of civilians in a deliberate act of ethnic cleansing.

The omission of nuance is not an editorial error; rather, it is deliberate. This communication style intends to oversimplify a war against a genocidal terror force into a storyline of oppressive aggressor versus powerless victim. While Israel responds to a deadly massacre with military operations against terror infrastructure, WAFA’s reports erase the existence of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and their embedded rocket launchers, tunnels, and command centers within civilian areas.

What WAFA Doesn’t Say

Although WAFA operates as an official Palestinian news agency, they do not platform any coverage that reflects the full spectrum of Palestinian society. Nowhere on its site is there reporting on Palestinian innovation, cultural achievements, or peace efforts. There is no discussion of Palestinian entrepreneurs, civil society efforts, or any initiative aimed at coexistence with Israel. WAFA never criticizes the PA, and never mentions the rampant corruption of the Palestinian leadership. WAFA’s negligence of these stories is not by chance. The refusal to feature articles about Palestinian success or aspirations for peace reflects WAFA’s goal to ensure that its readers are only exposed to an uninterrupted flow of injustice, victimhood, and rage.

July 2025 as a Microcosm of PA Messaging

The current study focused on July 2025, but an extended analysis of Palestinian leadership messaging through WAFA tells the same story: constant brainwashing.

While explicit calls for violence are rarely found on WAFA, the messaging that it does convey – dehumanization of Jews, delegitimization of Israel, and Palestinian victimhood – creates an unyielding environment of hatred and incitement.

In practice, WAFA’s constant brainwashing prepares the ground for direct calls for terror and violence. While a call for violence in a regularly law-abiding society is mostly ignored and vilified, a call for violence and terror against a specific group of people that is predicated on a constant diet of hatred of that people and their country, as Till explained, normalizes “actions that might otherwise be unthinkable.”

The main goal of the Palestinian leadership through WAFA is to present constant indoctrination, laying the groundwork for direct calls for violence.

While detractors may claim that WAFA’s influence over the hearts and minds of the Palestinian people is limited, the point misses the main focus of the study conducted by the JCFA, which did not seek to quantify WAFA’s influence over the Palestinian people or international audiences. Instead, the goal of the study was to examine positive messaging by the PA and its leadership. And the conclusion is crystal clear: In 99% of its publications, the PA decided to present a message of demonization, delegitimization, and the dehumanization of Israelis and Jews, alongside a message of perpetual victimization, absent of any, let alone substantial and necessary, context.

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