More: Established after October 7, the unit sought information on Hamas' use of schools and hospitals for military purposes, and on failed rocket launches by armed Palestinian groups that harmed civilians in the enclave. It has also been assigned to identify Gaza-based journalists it could portray as undercover Hamas operatives, in an effort to blunt growing global outrage over Israel's killing of reporters " the latest of whom was Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif, killed in an Israeli airstrike this past week.

According to the sources, the Legitimization Cell's motivation was not security, but public relations. Driven by anger that Gaza-based reporters were "smearing [Israel's] name in front of the world," its members were eager to find a journalist they could link to Hamas and mark as a target, one source said.

The source described a recurring pattern in the unit's work: whenever criticism of Israel in the media intensified on a particular issue, the Legitimization Cell was told to find intelligence that could be declassified and employed publicly to counter the narrative.

"If the global media is talking about Israel killing innocent journalists, then immediately there's a push to find one journalist who might not be so innocent " as if that somehow makes killing the other 20 acceptable," the intelligence source said.

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Two of the intelligence sources recounted that, in at least one case since the war began, the Legitimization Cell misrepresented intelligence in a way that allowed for the false portrayal of a journalist as a member of Hamas's military wing. "They were eager to label him as a target, as a terrorist " to say it's okay to attack him," one source recalled. "They said: during the day he's a journalist, at night he's a platoon commander. Everyone was excited. But there was a chain of errors and corner-cutting.

"In the end, they realized he really was a journalist," the source continued, and the journalist wasn't targeted.

A similar pattern of manipulation is evident in the intelligence presented on Al-Sharif. According to the documents released by the army, which have not been independently verified, he was recruited to Hamas in 2013 and remained active until he was injured in 2017 " meaning that, even if the documents were accurate, they suggest he played no role in the current war.

The same applies to the case of journalist Ismail Al-Ghoul, who was killed in a July 2024 Israeli airstrike along with his cameraman in Gaza City. A month later, the army claimed he was a "military wing operative and Nukhba terrorist," citing a 2021 document allegedly retrieved from a "Hamas computer." Yet that document stated he received his military rank in 2007 " when he was just 10 years old, and seven years before he was supposedly recruited to Hamas.