TEL AVIV, Israel — In the nighttime hours before launching the Iran war, Israeli military generals made sure their cars were not in their usual parking spots at military headquarters in Tel Aviv, in case Iranian spotters were looking for clues that war was near.
In the days before the war, U.S. warplanes were deliberately parked in southern Israel to distract Iran — which was perhaps keeping a close eye with Chinese satellite imagery — as Israel prepared its own fighter jets to take off from an entirely different location, the Ramat David base in northern Israel.
These were some of the "white noise" tactics deployed as Israel and the U.S. launched the war against Iran, a senior Israeli defense official from the military's operations directorate told NPR. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to divulge some of Israel's shadowy tactics.
"What usually you are doing is try to influence the thinking of the rival entity to let them think that the moment is not coming soon," said Col. (Res) Doron Hadar, who helped lead influence operations and psychological warfare for the Israeli military until recently.
The Iran war is being fought on a hybrid digital-physical battlefield, with old-school deception tactics and cutting-edge AI technology, officials and analysts say.
U.S. and Israeli cyber operations against Iran
The U.S. military's very first move in the Iran war was in cyberspace.
"Coordinated space and cyber operations effectively disrupted communications and sensor networks across the area of responsibility, leaving the adversary without the ability to see, coordinate, or respond effectively," Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine told reporters.
Israel's warplanes, sent to target Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, located him thanks to Israel's hacking of traffic cameras in the Iranian capital, the senior Israeli defense official said.
As the Financial Times reported, Israel synthesized that traffic footage and billions of data points to create a bank of targets in Iran. NPR has not independently confirmed that reporting.
"Israel used, or very likely used, very cutting edge kind of data processing or big data fusion techniques that from a kind of layman or citizen perspective you would call AI," said Omer Benjakob, a cybersecurity reporter for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Israel is likely much farther along than the U.S. is in developing its own independent AI systems for military use, he said, to avoid the kind of clash the Trump administration has had with the AI company Anthropic over military use of the company's AI model Claude.
"We need to at least at some level to be able to do some of this stuff independently," Benjakob said, referring to Israel's military. "One day someone will discover we also use Claude, and then there'll be a protest in San Francisco, and then they'll take Claude away from us. So we might as well just have our own version of Claude."
Iran's psychological cyberwarfare
Iran has recruited dozens of Israeli nationals through the Telegram messaging app in the last couple years, most of whom were paid to stir up strife in Israeli society, like to start random fires or write antigovernment graffiti, Israeli authorities say.
Benjakob believes Iran also recruited Israelis to threaten him and his wife, after he reported on fake social media accounts in Israel that were suspected to be an Iranian campaign.
"My wife got to her office a package with, like, a Jewish memorial candle, and I got some message, like, via WhatsApp, telling me that if I don't stop what I'm doing, my wife will have to use this candle," Benjakob said. "So what we're seeing in Israel a lot is just people being tapped to kind of continue Iran's digital war against Israel in physical means."
Former FBI cyber deputy director Cynthia Kaiser, now with the Halcyon Ransomware Research Center, warns Iran may seek to retaliate against the U.S. by targeting U.S. hospitals' systems with ransomware, as it has done in the past. She has also detected what appears to be Iranian-sponsored efforts to gather data on Iranian nationals.
"We have seen some activity that's consistent with espionage type activities at organizations that might have rich data on people in the region. We assess that's likely for targeting of people that the regime believes are dissidents," Kaiser said.
Israeli hacking and trolling in Iran
Israel conducts psychological cyberwarfare too.
At the start of the war, Israel hacked a popular Muslim prayer app in Iran to send messages to Iranian soldiers urging them to defect, the senior Israeli official said. The Wall Street Journal first reported on the hacking.
Last year, after Israel bombed Iran's notorious Evin prison in Tehran, Israel sent videos of that bombing to Iranian officials to intimidate them, the Israeli official said.
"The message was, you aren't as strong as you think," the official said.
In a report published by digital rights group Citizen Lab, researchers say they found evidence suggesting Israel ran a disinformation campaign seeking to foment an Iranian revolt against the regime, by using AI-generated images of the prison bombing spread by false Twitter accounts. The Israeli official denied the allegation.
" This is exactly the sort of thing that Israel does," said Darren Linvill, a disinformation researcher at Clemson University who co-authored the report. "They integrate psychological operations with their military operations in one clean campaign with a single goal, which is toppling the Iranian regime."
Copyright 2026 NPR
