In recent months, Israeli Facebook users began stumbling across a new group with a familiar name: “Mothers Cook Together.”

With thousands of members and recipes filling its feed, the group looked indistinguishable from the wildly popular Israeli cooking forum of the same name. But this was no kitchen-table community. It was bait.

According to a recent Haaretz investigation, the group was part of a sophisticated foreign influence operation using AI-generated content to infiltrate Israeli social media communities. Pages with titles like “A Blessing a Day” and “Psalms – A Daily Chapter” were designed to draw in conservative and religious Israelis.

Once followers engaged, operators funneled them into WhatsApp groups that harvested personal data and could later pivot into political messaging.

The source of the campaign has yet to be definitively identified, though researchers point to possible involvement by China, Russia, or Iran, based on patterns seen in similar operations elsewhere.

Researchers have drawn comparisons to a similar campaign that took place in Romania last year, in which a nearly identical network began with prayer groups and inspirational content before abruptly transforming into a pro-Russian political campaign on the eve of elections.

An internal investigation into the alleged TikTok campaign led Romania’s Constitutional Court to annul election results that had put a far-right candidate running as an independent in the lead ahead of a runoff.

Analysts fear Israel could be headed down a similar path ahead of its 2026 national elections.

Meta removed the groups shortly after Haaretz published its findings. But the takedowns highlight a recurring problem: by the time campaigns are exposed, much of the damage may already have been done. Thousands of Israelis had already joined or engaged with the pages, their data collected and their feeds influenced.

Launched between April and May, the pages included in the campaign churned out an endless stream of posts tailored to conservative, traditional, and nationalist Israelis — from cliché Shabbat greetings to uncanny AI-generated images of IDF soldiers, Israeli farmers, and supposed war casualties. Some even depicted fake funerals of fallen troops, exploiting the Gaza war to stir emotion and engagement.

Private investigators traced the accounts behind these pages to fake profiles linked to foreign numbers and previous influence operations, including several that appeared to have migrated from campaigns in Eastern Europe.

According to Lt. Col. (res.) David Siman-Tov, deputy head of the Institute for the Research of the Methodology of Intelligence at the Israeli Intelligence Community Commemoration and Heritage........

© The Times of Israel