Former IDF Spokesperson's Unit Staffer Says Army Labeled Innocent Palestinians 'Terrorists' in Media Statements

A former staffer in the Israeli army's spokesperson unit says she watched the military attach the word "terrorist" to Palestinians who had done nothing to earn it, then helped write the statements that made it stick.

Ayelet Kroizer made the admission in a post on X announcing her new role as spokesperson for Breaking the Silence, the Israeli organization that collects testimony from former soldiers about conduct in the occupied territories. She served in the spokesperson's unit for three years, enlisting during the war after waiving an exemption available to her as a member of the ultra-Orthodox community.

"During my service, I manipulated the details released to the media. I saw how the word 'terrorist' was attached even to innocent Palestinians and how statements were tailored to the target audience and the objective set for it."

According to Kroizer, the unit operated less like a military press office answerable to the public than a public relations shop answerable to an outcome. She said the stated goal for Israeli audiences was to build confidence in the army, with the public's right to know treated as, in her words, secondary at best. For international audiences, she said, the goal was to protect the legitimacy of military operations, and that too came at the expense of accuracy.

She described a specific, repeated practice from her time handling casualty reporting after strikes.

"I learned how to report dozens of deaths in a single strike and automatically add that we regret any harm to uninvolved people. That was the routine of my service."

Kroizer said she had not expected to end up here. She enlisted, she wrote, believing she was defending the country, and had planned to travel or begin her studies once her service ended. Instead she is now delivering testimony against the institution she worked inside.

"I had never been good at staying silent in the face of injustice, but here I was being asked to do PR for it," she wrote, closing her post with a call to other veterans of the war: "If you served during the war, don't stay silent either."

Breaking the Silence welcomed her appointment publicly, saying it was time to bring the truth about the occupation to the public. Kroizer's account has not been independently verified beyond her own statement, and the Israeli military has not issued a public response to her claims as of this report. The war in Gaza she describes reporting on has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians and wounded over 175,000, according to Gaza's Health Ministry, with roughly 90 percent of the territory's civilian infrastructure destroyed.