A groundbreaking independent academic inquiry led by researchers Marc Owen Jones and Sohan Dsouza has uncovered a sprawling, covert anti-Muslim propaganda operation aimed primarily at British audiences, with verified digital forensics tracing the entire network’s operational roots to Israel. The campaign reached its peak activity in the critical months leading up to the UK’s 2024 general election, and continued its high-volume output through the period preceding the summer 2024 anti-Muslim civil unrest that swept towns and cities across the country.
Published via independent investigative outlet The Nerve, the two-year research project documented over 154 million total exposures to campaign content targeted exclusively at British internet users between 2024 and 2026. The operation spent more than £500,000 (approximately $670,000) on paid social media ad placements across Facebook, YouTube and TikTok, making it the largest documented covert foreign influence operation ever measured targeting the United Kingdom by both reach and advertising expenditure. Its output ranged from paid ads peddling unsubstantiated claims of a secret Qatari plot to orchestrate an “Islamic takeover” of Britain, to AI-generated fabricated imagery depicting a massive new mosque constructed adjacent to the UK Houses of Parliament and a Qatari flag flying over a damaged Big Ben. The network also produced a series of misleading mini-documentaries, including one that falsely labelled the West Yorkshire city of Bradford as “occupied by Muslim immigrants”.
In the immediate aftermath of the July 2024 Southport murders, where 17-year-old Axel Rudakubana killed three young girls, the campaign accelerated its output to spread deliberate disinformation falsely branding Rudakubana as a Muslim, a narrative that directly amplified widespread community anger and helped fuel the subsequent wave of violent disorder targeting Muslim and other ethnic minority communities across the UK. The scale of hate speech spread via social platforms during that period was deemed severe enough that then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer issued a formal public warning to major tech firms, demanding they crack down on harmful content hosted on their services.
Forensic analysis of recovered campaign assets confirmed the Israeli origin of the operation: a fixed-line IP address linked to editing work on the project was registered in Israel, while embedded metadata across 78 video files recovered from the network’s Telegram channels contained Hebrew names, nicknames and file folder labels, alongside Mac device identifiers. Additional timestamp data from a Windows user account linked to the operation showed a time zone shift from UTC+3 Arabia Time to UTC+2 between 22 and 27 October 2024, a clock change that matches Israel’s annual transition to winter standard time. While no conclusive evidence has confirmed direct official Israeli government oversight of the covert campaign, the researchers noted clear alignment between the operation’s core narrative and public statements from senior Israeli political figures. Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli has openly endorsed and hosted controversial far-right British activist Tommy Robinson (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) in Israel, and stated publicly in a 2026 podcast that “Antisemitism doesn’t interest the average European or the average American. Radical Islam interests them very, very much. And therefore we need to take advantage of this.” A 2024 New York Times investigation previously documented that Chikli’s ministry had allocated $2 million for a separate pro-Israel influence campaign targeting U.S. audiences. Senior Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have also publicly made incendiary remarks branding the UK as an “Islamic Republic of Britain” and falsely claiming the country had been “conquered by radical Islam” in 2026.
The research also confirmed the same operational network extended its disinformation activities to other European Union states ahead of the 2024 European Parliament elections, as well as targeting U.S. audiences with identical anti-Muslim, anti-migrant and anti-Qatar messaging. The researchers noted that the campaign frames Qatar as a shadowy, Soros-style hidden puppet master orchestrating mass Muslim immigration to deliberately “Islamise” Western nations, a narrative structure designed to exploit existing far-right and anti-immigration anxieties across the Western world.