The man who has spent the last two and a half years answering for the Israel Defense Forces in front of the world is stepping down, and on his way out he wants the record to reflect the truth: Israel is being outshouted, but it is not being outargued. LTC Nadav Shoshani, the outgoing international spokesman for the IDF, sat down with Times of Israel deputy editor Lazar Berman the day before his final shift in the role and delivered a clear-eyed accounting of what he learned, what worked, what did not, and why a country fighting genocidal terror groups is forced to compete in a media environment that grades it on a curve no other military on earth is asked to climb. According to the Times of Israel interview, Shoshani acknowledged that Israel’s reputation is at a historic low while insisting that the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit is performing well in what he called an inherently biased environment.
That last phrase deserves to be quoted, framed, and pinned to every editor’s desk in every newsroom that has covered this war. Israel is operating against an adversary that does not investigate its own atrocities, does not correct its own falsehoods, and does not face follow-up questions when its body counts collapse under scrutiny. Israel does all of those things, in real time, in front of cameras, while running combat operations across multiple fronts. That asymmetry is the central feature of the information war Shoshani has been fighting, and pretending otherwise is the easiest mistake the press makes.
A Spokesman Who Volunteered Back Into Uniform
Shoshani is not a careerist looking for a peacetime promotion. He returned to active duty in the wake of the October 7, 2023 massacre — when more than 1,200 Israelis were murdered, mutilated, raped, and dragged into Gaza — because the country needed reservists who could speak fluently to a global press corps that was about to be flooded with Hamas talking points dressed up as news. The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit absorbed him, sent him in front of every camera that would point at Israel, and watched him become one of the most recognizable Israeli faces of the war. Anyone who has followed the history of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit knows that Israel has long invested more resources in military communications than most peer democracies — but the scale of the post-October 7 effort is a different animal entirely.
Shoshani was honest about what he walked into. He told Berman that the IDF has a large, well-oiled public communications machine and that the unit does things other militaries can only dream of, but that the speed of social media and AI has stretched even that machine. The instinct in any large bureaucracy is to slow down, to vet, to clear messaging up the chain. The instinct on TikTok and X is to publish, full stop. Reconciling those two clocks has been the defining operational challenge of his tenure.
Fill the Vacuum or Lose It
The single most important lesson Shoshani drew from the job is one that crisis communicators in every industry should write into their playbooks: information vacuums get filled, and if you are not filling them, your enemy is. He told Berman that Israel has to put something into the public square even when the only honest message available is that the country is still investigating an incident. Saying nothing while you wait for a board of inquiry to wrap up is a strategic loss, because by the time the official version drops, the false version has already gone viral, been embedded in international outlets, and been cited in U.N. statements.
That is not a theoretical concern. It is the specific mechanism by which Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Republic of Iran have manufactured global outrage out of every contested incident since 2023. The Al-Ahli hospital strike of October 17, 2023, was the textbook case — a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that fell short, hit the hospital parking lot, and was immediately blamed on the IDF by Hamas, by major Western outlets, and by leaders across the Muslim world. By the time forensic evidence and intercepted communications confirmed the projectile was not Israeli, the false narrative was already cemented. Shoshani’s response, refined over the months that followed, was to push Israeli intelligence releases, satellite imagery, and Arabic-language audio into the public domain at a tempo that left less and less oxygen for fabrication.
He paired that with a deliberate expansion of channels. The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit opened a wave of new social media accounts in additional languages to be everywhere and active everywhere, in his words, on the theory that legacy media will not always carry your message and you cannot afford to be dependent on gatekeepers who have ideological reasons to filter you out.
The Soldier Selfie Problem — and the Honest Answer
One of the toughest parts of the interview was Berman pressing Shoshani on the persistent issue of IDF soldiers posting questionable content from inside the war zone. Anti-Israel activists have weaponized those clips to argue that the IDF is brutal or contemptuous, even when the underlying reality is that 19-year-old conscripts in any military, anywhere, occasionally make bad choices on their phones. Shoshani did not duck the question. He acknowledged the problem and said he has invested significant effort into addressing it. The results, he said, have been tangible. “They understand what’s happening,” Shoshani said of the soldiers under the unit’s media-discipline guidance. “They’re more sensitive. It’s still not where we want it to be, but it is much better.”
The candor matters. The U.S. military, the British military, and every NATO partner have wrestled with versions of the same problem since the smartphone became standard infantry kit. Israel is the only country whose every individual soldier’s posts are scraped, translated, decontextualized, and presented in international forums as evidence of policy. Shoshani’s team has had to build an entire workstream around behavioral guidance and rapid response, not because the IDF as an institution endorses bad posts but because the global gradebook does not give Israel partial credit.
Sde Teiman, Detention, and the Question Israel Keeps Answering
Shoshani used the interview to address the detention of Hamas terrorists captured during operations in Gaza, including the high-profile Sde Teiman base. He told Berman he visited the facility personally and reported that Hamas detainees are receiving food and medical care and that lawyers are present on site to ensure guards adhere to Israeli law. That description is consistent with what international observers who have actually inspected the facility have reported, and it is dramatically different from the cartoon version that has bounced through partisan media outlets.
The contrast worth keeping in mind: Hamas is still holding Israeli civilian hostages two and a half years after October 7, has refused Red Cross access for the entire duration of their captivity, has tortured many of them, executed some, and used their families as propaganda chips. Israel investigates its own treatment of detainees, prosecutes when warranted, and lets the press inside. There is no equivalent on the other side. The reason this is rarely framed that way in Western coverage is exactly the structural bias Shoshani identified.
West Bank Stability Is a Mission, Not a Slogan
Asked about settler violence in Judea and Samaria, Shoshani did not deflect. He said the IDF sees stopping it as a core mission. “Our mission in Judea and Samaria is to keep stability and to keep safety for all the people living in that area, to make sure there is no violence,” he told Berman, and added that the military recognizes the problem and is working on it but that progress takes time. That is the honest answer from a uniformed officer who has watched the issue distort international coverage of an army that, in any given week, conducts hundreds of counter-terror operations across the West Bank against armed cells linked to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Iranian-funded networks. Settler-on-Palestinian violence, where it occurs, is a criminal matter the IDF and the Israel Police have authority over and accountability for. Pretending it is a strategic choice rather than a discipline problem misreads the institution.
The Bias Is Structural, Not Imagined
The hardest message in Shoshani’s exit interview is one that polite Western audiences do not want to hear: the playing field is not level, and complaining about it is not whining. Hamas is not asked to source a casualty figure. Hezbollah is not asked who fired a particular rocket. The Islamic Republic of Iran is not asked to verify its own propaganda. Israel is asked all of those questions, in real time, by reporters who are typing fast against a deadline and who have every professional incentive to file and move on.
Shoshani’s framing — that Israel faces structural disadvantages because much of the world simply does not like war and Israel’s enemies are not held to the same standard of truth and accuracy — is not a complaint. It is a job description. Every honest media analyst knows that war coverage privileges the side that is willing to lie, because that side can publish first and never correct. Democracies, which can be sued, voted out, and prosecuted, take longer. Israel’s burden is heavier than any other military’s because it is the only Jewish state on earth, surrounded by adversaries who openly call for its destruction, and held to a standard the U.N. has never applied to anyone else.
This is the same dynamic playing out around the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid distribution sites, where Hamas has repeatedly fired on or among civilians waiting for food and Israel has been blamed for the resulting deaths. The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit’s job in those moments is to publish drone footage, intercepted Hamas communications, and forensic evidence faster than the lie can metastasize.
What Shoshani Is Handing Off
The successor stepping into the international spokesman role inherits a unit that has been operationally transformed. According to Shoshani’s own assessment, the Spokesperson’s Unit has built deeper Arabic-language reach, faster intelligence-release pipelines, more direct social media presence, and tighter coordination with combat units to capture footage in the field. It also inherits a global media environment that is more polarized, more algorithm-driven, and more flooded with AI-generated content than at any point since the unit was founded.
The strategic posture Shoshani has bequeathed to whoever takes the chair is straightforward: Israel will continue to fill information vacuums, will continue to investigate itself in public, will continue to release intelligence at a pace that lets the truth catch up to the lie, and will continue to do all of that while fighting a multi-front war that the IDF chief of staff has described in his recent comments to soldiers as the most demanding moment in Israel’s history.
The Bottom Line for Allies and Critics Alike
The single most important takeaway from Shoshani’s exit interview is that Israel is doing far better in the information war than its critics admit and far better than its supporters fear. The country has built the world’s most sophisticated military communications operation, run it under fire, told the truth even when the truth is uncomfortable, and produced a steady flow of evidence that has held up under independent scrutiny. The reason Israel’s reputation has nonetheless suffered is not that the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit failed. It is that a substantial slice of the global audience has decided in advance which side it believes, and no amount of evidence will move it.
For everyone else — the persuadable middle, the policymakers who actually need accurate information, the diaspora communities who depend on facts to defend themselves on campus and online — Shoshani’s tenure has been a quiet success. He took an institution and made it faster, broader, and more credible at exactly the moment Israel needed all three. If his successor maintains the tempo, the structural bias Shoshani named will remain real, but it will not be decisive.
