On Nov. 5, 2025, barely 24 hours after the results of the New York mayoral race were announced, Jaber Al-Harmi, editor of the Qatari state daily Al Sharq, wrote: “Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani has been elected mayor of New York—the capital of the Zionist lobby … [He] is the first Muslim to hold this position. He has described the events in Gaza as barbaric crimes and a genocide, and he supports the BDS movement. Two years ago, no one could have imagined such a major shift against the Zionist narrative. The steadfastness and resistance of our people in Gaza have turned the tables on the Zionists.” This reading of the election was by no means unusual. Al-Qaida journalists in Qatar, and, in Iran, authorized voices from the vice presidency to university lecturers to the Quds Force Telegram channel all framed Mamdani’s victory as a result of the Oct. 7 pogrom in Israel and Israel’s military response.
One must be wary of monocausal explanations, particularly when they take the form of wishful thinking. And yet: The feeling that everything has changed everywhere since Oct. 7 is undeniable. It is the nature of this change that is difficult to grasp.
In a worldwide study of more than 10 million tweets and posts published between Oct. 7, 2023, and Oct. 7, 2024, the French researcher Hugo Micheron found that the number of shares and comments on the massacre swiftly reached a historic peak, higher than even the war in Ukraine, and remained abnormally high. All discussion groups across the globe were affected, even those having nothing to do with the Middle East, such as anti-vaxxers and climate skeptics. This is a new and unprecedented phenomenon, he told me. “With Oct.7, the very concept of war adds to its physical nature an informational component that touches everybody. We have entered the era of the First World War on information.” What follows is an attempt to describe the effects of this information war launched by Hamas in Europe.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member