Vatican newspaper editor raps Israeli decision to invite social media influencers into Gaza

August 27, 2025

In a front-page editorial in its August 26 edition, the director of L’Osservatore Romano condemned the Israeli government’s decision to permit social media influencers to enter the Gaza Strip while continuing to bar journalists.

“The news is worrying: in addition to soldiers, tanks, bombs, and drones, other people have finally entered Gaza to observe the battlefield up close, from the inside,” said Andrea Monda. “But they are not journalists; despite the requests they have been making for months in vain, those who have entered are not journalists, but influencers. In particular, some Israeli and American influencers.”

“These are two very distinct categories, even though they both converge in the field of communication: while journalists should carry out their work with objective research and impartiality, this condition is not required of influencers, who are always ‘hired,’ somehow ‘enlisted’ in a cause, even a noble one, even when it involves self-promotion,” he continued. “Influencers are biased; they are propagandists.”

Monda added:

If in the physical world, violence between men rages, spreading with greater or lesser intensity, not only in Gaza but across every continent, in the world of communication, also “physical,” another form of violence is stirring, made up of words used as weapons by one side against the other, or rather, a “faction.”

Because, as we can observe daily, the world, real and virtual, has become a single, vast stadium, where the central stands are no longer there but have been replaced by two enormous, invasive, pervasive, suffocating stands.

The illogical logic of the fans, with its fiery soul, has finally prevailed over all mediation, moderation, and a sense of complexity and limitation. This is the time of polarization and simplification, which is always crude, brutal, and savage. Yet only from the central stands can one see the game clearly, and try to understand it in all its nuances. But these very stands are now closed off and inaccessible; only the stands remain, very dangerous stands. Dangerous above all for the most precious and fragile reality at stake in human life: the truth.

 

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Further information:

• L’altra guerra (L'Osservatore Romano, 8/26/25)
• Israel Brings U.S., Israeli Social Media Influencers to Gaza Aid Sites to Fight 'Hamas Hunger Campaign'