Wars are won on battlefields. But in modern democracies, they are also won or lost in living rooms. Israel’s military has long understood this, investing heavily in the art of strategic communication. The Iran war offered the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit a rare gift — a distant, technically complex campaign with clean visuals, polished graphics, and no inconvenient footage of dead children. That era is now over, and the gap between the IDF’s communication apparatus and the realities it refuses to address is growing impossible to ignore.
Brigadier General Effie Defrin took over as military spokesperson in March 2025, replacing Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, who had served in the role for two years. From the outset, the mission was framed in urgent terms. In their handover speeches, both Hagari and Defrin emphasized the importance of truthfulness and the need to restore public trust in the IDF, especially in light of the army’s failures before and during the October 7 attack. Defrin himself declared that his primary purpose was “to do whatever is necessary to strengthen public trust in the IDF.” Fourteen months later, that mission is visibly faltering.
The Illusion of Transparency
During the Iran campaign, Defrin appeared on Israeli screens with near-nightly regularity. The format was consistent: controlled imagery of Israeli airstrikes, self-congratulatory language about “operational supremacy,” and confident projections of imminent success. At the start of the operation, the IDF claimed it had destroyed 70 percent of Iran’s missile launchers — a figure that journalists who checked quickly found inaccurate, discovering that in some cases hits had targeted tunnel entrances rather than the launchers themselves, or that the launchers had continued firing despite being declared destroyed.
This is not an isolated incident. An investigation by +972 Magazine revealed that the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit operated covert media channels posing as independent outlets while working to shape coverage, manage public discourse, and push Israel’s narrative at home and abroad. Testimonies from reservists and military correspondents pointed to a systematic effort to reward compliant reporting and sideline critical journalists. That pattern of control works well when the war is going well. It collapses when the narrative no longer matches what people see around them.
Israel maintains a military censor, a unit of the Intelligence Corps, that controls what journalists working in the country can and cannot report. The unit has intensified its actions during coverage of Iran, and while it is traditionally limited to national security, it holds powers that, by citing potential damage to the state, allow it to “censor almost everything.” The problem is that censorship of external reporters does nothing to repair trust with an Israeli public that is increasingly skeptical of what it is being told from within.
When Silence Becomes Its Own Statement
With Gaza and Lebanon back at the center of daily security concerns, the frequency of Defrin’s public statements has dropped sharply. Israelis in the north are once again running to shelters, soldiers are dying in Lebanese villages, and the cease-fire with Iran remains brittle. Yet the face of the IDF’s communications has retreated from prime time almost entirely.
The contrast with his predecessor is instructive. Hagari was not a neutral actor — he packaged difficult realities into digestible narratives like any military spokesperson would. But he consistently showed up when the news was bad. After nearly two and a half years of continuous war, the Israeli public’s trust in the army’s narrative appears to be eroding, with more Israelis asking between sirens whether the country is really achieving what it is being told. Defrin’s selective absence from the difficult stories only deepens that suspicion.
The broader strategic communication environment is also deteriorating internationally. A Pew survey published in April found that 60 percent of American adults now hold an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 53 percent the previous year, with only 37 percent viewing the country favorably. A New York Times and Siena College poll found that just 30 percent of respondents believe Trump made the right decision to go to war with Iran, with 64 percent saying it was wrong. Israel’s communication strategy at home and abroad is failing to hold the line simultaneously.
Military credibility, once lost, does not return easily. The IDF built its public authority over decades of difficult moments addressed directly and honestly — or at least with the appearance of honesty. A spokesperson who vanishes when the operational picture turns messy is not communicating strategically. He is confirming what skeptics already believe.
Original analysis inspired by Yaniv Kubovich from Haaretz. Additional research and verification conducted through multiple sources.
By ThinkTanksMonitor
