The War Nobody Declared Victory In

The shooting may slow down. The information war never stops.

A detailed new analysis published March 19, 2026 by Small Wars Journal — written by researcher Ashraf Aldmour and republished by the Irregular Warfare Initiative — lays out exactly how Israel and Hamas fought two parallel wars: one with bombs, one with narratives. Neither side came out clean.

Hamas Went for Speed. Israel Went for Credibility. Both Stumbled.

Aldmour's analysis identifies two competing influence strategies.

Hamas pursued what the report calls an attention-capture approach — emotionally intense content, rapid messaging, symbolic framing designed to go viral before facts could be checked. This fits social media perfectly. First impressions stick. Corrections don't trend.

Israel pursued a credibility-first approach — press briefings, legal justifications, deliberate evidence releases. Slower. More methodical. In theory, more trustworthy.

The problem: Israel's credibility-first strategy collapsed in several embarrassing moments early in the war. According to NBC News reporting from November 2023, Israel released what it claimed was a Hamas kidnapper schedule — it was an Arabic calendar. Israel pointed to curtains as evidence hostage videos were filmed in a hospital. Both claims fell apart publicly.

H.A. Hellyer, senior associate fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told NBC News at the time: "The irony is they might find something and nobody is going to believe them. At this point their credibility is shot."

That's a brutal assessment. And it wasn't entirely wrong.

Who the Bad Actor Was

Framing this as a near-symmetric information war obscures a critical distinction: it wasn't.

Hamas fabricated the al-Ahli Hospital bombing story on October 17, 2023, claiming Israel killed 500 people. That number was false. The explosion was caused by a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad — a conclusion NBC News itself confirmed through evidence analysis.

Now, in 2026, The Hill reports that fabricated anti-Israel stories are still being laundered through Western media — including claims so absurd they almost defy description. The Hill specifically calls out stories about "trained rape dogs" allegedly used by Israeli forces, asking the obvious question: is any story about Israel too outrageous for publication?

Apparently not.

The Asymmetry the Analysts Keep Glossing Over

Aldmour's Small Wars Journal piece is analytically solid. It correctly identifies that Hamas benefited from a network of "other Palestinian factions, local institutions, journalists, and activist networks" amplifying narratives from the same information space.

What the analysis underweights: Hamas is a designated terrorist organization in both the United States and European Union. As Hellyer himself acknowledged to NBC News, "We don't take seriously what a terror group says, but we do take seriously what an army says, especially one that's an ally of ours."

The standards are not equal because the actors are not equal. A liberal democracy that makes verifiable PR mistakes is categorically different from a terror organization that deliberately manufactures civilian casualty numbers as a military tactic.

The WSJ editorial board made this point directly: we must resist the natural impulse to look away from what Hamas did on October 7. The horror of documented mass rape, murder, and abduction doesn't become less real because the information environment got messy.

What Mainstream Media Is Getting Wrong Right Now

The center-left press — NBC News being a prime example — framed Israel's early PR stumbles as a fundamental credibility collapse. That framing did real damage and was only partially accurate.

The center-right and right-leaning press, meanwhile, has sometimes overcorrected — treating every piece of IDF information as gospel and dismissing legitimate scrutiny of Israeli military conduct in Gaza.

Both failures serve Hamas's actual strategic goal: chaos in the information space that paralyzes Western response and normalizes atrocity denial.

The DFRLab documented in early analyses how propaganda and platform dynamics shaped what people saw and believed first. The algorithm rewards outrage. Hamas understood that from day one.

What the Pentagon's Own Doctrine Says

Aldmour's analysis cites the U.S. Joint Concept for Operating in the Information Environment (JCOIE) and the DoD's 2023 OIE Strategy, which explicitly treat information as a foundational element of military activity.

The U.S. military already recognizes that narrative is a weapon. Whether America's allies — and America's press corps — are applying that understanding honestly remains an open question.

Right now, the answer is no.

What Comes Next

Israel made real PR mistakes early in the war. Those deserve honest criticism. A botched press release about a calendar is not morally equivalent to a terror organization systematically fabricating hospital death tolls and running rape as a military strategy.

The information war continues. Fabricated stories about Israel are still being published in 2026. Documented Hamas atrocities are still being minimized or forgotten.

The facts don't care about anyone's narrative preferences. Neither should journalists.