LONDON (Dispatches) -- A covert anti-Muslim propaganda campaign that reached more than 154 million exposures in Britain and spent over £500,000 on Facebook advertising has been traced to Israel, according to an investigation published Tuesday, as a separate survey found nearly four in five Britons now regard Israel as a serious threat to world peace.
The campaign, documented by academics Marc Owen Jones and Sohan Dsouza in The Nerve, ran advertisements warning of an “Islamic takeover” of Britain orchestrated by Qatar, and was at its peak before the 2024 general election and the anti-Muslim riots that followed the Southport murders. The ads promoted the false claim that Southport attacker Axel Rudakubana was a Muslim.
The investigation traced editing work to a fixed-line internet address in Israeli occupied territories, and embedded metadata in 78 video files recovered from the campaign’s Telegram channels revealed Hebrew names, folders and editing projects.
A Windows account’s time-zone shift from UTC+3 to UTC+2 in late October was consistent with Israel’s return to winter time. The authors found no evidence the Israeli government was involved.
The campaign used AI-generated images of a giant mosque beside Parliament and a Qatari flag in front of Big Ben, alongside mini-documentaries describing Bradford as “occupied by Muslim immigrants”. 
Buying in Britain stopped on May 17, 2024, days before the election was called, and resumed through 2025 and 2026 on Facebook, YouTube and TikTok.
The revelations come as the National Centre for Social Research’s British Social Attitudes survey found 78 percent of Britons see Israel as a serious threat to world peace, up from 48 percent in 2005. 
Some 74 percent now regard the United States as a threat, a record high, following disputes with NATO allies over Greenland and the February 2026 terrorist bombing of Iran conducted alongside Israel.
A July YouGov poll commissioned by the Council for British-Arab Understanding found only 17 percent of Britons believe Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. 
Israel has killed at least 74,643 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023, including more than 22,000 children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Since the October 2025 ceasefire, 1,613 Palestinians have been killed.
The war on Iran has also hit British households, with the Bank of England raising its base rate from 3.75 percent to 4 percent last week, its first increase in over three years, pushing up mortgage costs.
Israeli ministers have publicly amplified anti-Muslim narratives about Britain. Diaspora minister Amichai Chikli promoted far-right activist Tommy Robinson and said in a podcast that “radical Islam interests” Europeans “very, very much. And therefore we need to take advantage of this.” 
Terrorist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu branded Britain the “Islamic Republic of Britain” in August, and his terrorist finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said it was “a country conquered by radical Islam” in September.