Israel hires US firm to ‘combat anti-Semitism’
The Foreign Ministry has hired the US-based company Clock Tower X LLC to help shape online discourse “tailored to Generation Z audiences across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and podcasts”, news reports say.
Clock Tower was contracted to “conduct a nationwide campaign in the United States to combat anti-Semitism”, documents filed with the Foreign Agents Registration Act showed.
Artificial intelligence will be used to boost exposure on search engines such as Google and Bing. The goal is a minimum 50 million impressions per month.
The $6m contract comes during declining support for Israel among Americans, with polls showing a majority disapprove of its devastating war on Gaza that’s killed more than 67,000 Palestinians.
Israel blocking transfer of incubators in Gaza: UNICEF
Israel has repeatedly denied permission to transfer incubators from an evacuated hospital in northern Gaza, worsening conditions in overcrowded hospitals further south where newborn babies are now sharing oxygen masks, UNICEF says.
James Elder, a UNICEF spokesperson, described scenes of extreme overcrowding and exhaustion inside Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, where mothers and babies line corridor floors.
“In one of the pediatric rooms, there were three babies and three mums on a single bed, one source of oxygen, and the mothers would rotate the oxygen 20 minutes to each child,” he told Reuters news agency. “This is the level of desperation mums have now got to.”
Elder said vital medical equipment remains trapped in hospitals that have been shut in the north.
“We’ve been trying to recover incubators from a hospital that was evacuated in the north, and we’ve had four missions denied simply to get those incubators,” he said, referring to supplies stuck at the damaged by Israel at Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital in Gaza City.
