NATO Contact Point Embassy Hosts Event on Disinformation in Military Operations

The Czech Republic’s Embassy, in collaboration with the American Jewish Committee (AJC), convened a critical seminar on December 1, 2025, examining the growing threat of disinformation in modern warfare. The event brought together cybersecurity experts, military officials, and policy specialists to dissect how false narratives are weaponized during military operations.

Participants highlighted how disinformation has evolved into a sophisticated tool of warfare, systematically eroding public trust in institutions, manipulating civilian populations to weaken resistance efforts, and undermining crucial international support for military interventions. These tactics have become increasingly central to modern conflict, with hostile actors strategically deploying fabricated narratives across social media platforms and traditional media channels to gain tactical and strategic advantages.

The seminar placed particular focus on the Israel-Iran war that erupted in June 2025, which experts characterized as triggering an unprecedented surge in digital disinformation across global networks. Nitsan Yasur, who leads Digital Investigations and Disinformation at the Israel Internet Association (ISOC-IL), presented findings from the comprehensive study “Ballistic Fakes: Disinformation and Fact-Checking Efforts during the Israel–Iran War.”

The research analyzed false content spread in 17 different languages throughout the conflict and evaluated fact-checking responses worldwide. One significant pattern identified was how disinformation deliberately amplified destruction reports and exaggerated actual damage assessments to project images of overwhelming military power, influencing both civilian morale and international perception.

“What we’re seeing represents a fundamental shift in warfare,” said Rachael Levy, Vice President of Geopolitical Risk at ActiveFence, during the NATO CPE event panel discussion. “Digital battlefields now develop alongside physical ones, and sometimes precede them.”

The expert panel, which included Jonathan Fischbein, Chief Information Security Officer at Check Point Software Technologies, addressed the accelerating role of artificial intelligence in generating increasingly sophisticated and difficult-to-detect false content. Roy Friedman, Executive Director for Strategy & Policy at the Israeli National Cyber Directorate, emphasized how AI has dramatically lowered the barriers to entry for creating convincing fake videos, images, and texts that can rapidly spread across global networks.

Yael Ram, who heads Cyber Policy and Academic Relations at ISOC-IL, outlined emerging strategies to counter organized disinformation campaigns, stressing the importance of international cooperation. “These are not isolated incidents but coordinated efforts that require equally coordinated responses across national boundaries,” Ram noted.

Lieutenant Colonel (res.) Avital Leibovich, AJC Jerusalem Director, brought military perspective to the discussion, explaining how battlefield decisions are increasingly complicated by the need to consider how actions will be portrayed—accurately or not—in global information channels.

The timing of this seminar is particularly significant as nations worldwide grapple with the evolving landscape of information warfare. The Czech Republic, with its strategic position in Central Europe and NATO membership, has increasingly positioned itself as a hub for addressing hybrid threats, including disinformation campaigns targeting democratic institutions.

Experts at the event agreed that traditional military doctrine must evolve to incorporate robust information defense systems. They advocated for enhanced international frameworks to detect and respond to malicious information operations, particularly during active conflicts when their impact can directly affect military outcomes and civilian safety.

The seminar underscores growing recognition among security and defense establishments that information integrity has become as strategically vital as physical security in modern conflicts—a reality that demands new approaches to national defense planning, international cooperation, and public resilience against manipulation.