Yossi Bartal and Amin al-Magrebi
+972 Magazine / July 13, 2026
Jusoor News says it reflects the pulse of the Arab street. But leaked files suggest links to Israeli intelligence and a pro-Israel agenda with deep roots.
By May 2024, Israel’s onslaught on Gaza had engineered a severe hunger crisis. In the south of the enclave, the Israeli army had shut down critical aid access routes. In the north, 30 percent of infants were suffering from acute malnutrition, a rate that had doubled in a matter of weeks.
With hundreds of thousands of Palestinians already displaced, the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) reported that Gaza’s food and fuel supplies would run out within days. “The threat of famine in Gaza never loomed larger,” it warned.
It was in the same month that a senior editor at the Arabic-language outlet Jusoor News [hereafter Jusoor] reached out to an anti-Hamas activist from Gaza, requesting video shots of specific scenes from the streets.
The outlet wanted footage of “markets in Gaza” showing “fruit, vegetables, and other foods,” as well as “people shopping for food (including mothers with young babies shopping for formula or other baby food).” The representative also asked for videos of people “cooking,” “eating,” “filling up buckets of water,” and “kids playing with water,” according to messages seen by +972 Magazine.
Despite mounting international concern over the increasingly desperate humanitarian situation in Gaza, Jusoor appeared to be seeking footage portraying the exact opposite, which could then be used to fend off allegations of impending famine. (The source did not provide Jusoor with the requested material, and +972 Magazine could not find any such footage from this period on the outlet’s channels.)
On its website, Jusoor describes itself as an “independent media platform” that is “not affiliated with any political entity” and seeks out stories that “reflect the pulse of all societies and peoples” in the Middle East and North Africa. The publication’s main output consists of short video segments circulated largely through social media, where its audience has grown rapidly: On Facebook alone, it recently surpassed 1 million followers.
But there is more to Jusoor than meets the eye. Recently leaked communications from an Israeli security think tank suggest that the outlet has been connected with intelligence services in Israel. And an examination of the organization and individual behind the outlet points to Jusoor’s role within a vast and long-term covert operation designed to engineer public opinion in the Arab world in favour of Israel and its allies.
Whose voice ?
Launched in March 2024, Jusoor (Arabic for “Bridges”) covers stories across the Arab world, reporting on politics, social issues, culture, and sport. Its early content spanned everything from women’s self-defense courses in Egypt, to the recruitment of children by the Houthis in Yemen, to the hardships facing Syrian refugees in Lebanon. In a little over two years, the outlet has published close to 6,000 videos on YouTube, amassing over 80 million views and 150,000 subscribers on the platform.
In a recent interview with Haaretz, Jusoor’s editor-in-chief attributed the outlet’s success to its focus on showcasing “the voice of the public,” explaining: “A video of a young woman [speaking] on an Arab street sometimes receives more views and more attention than a political program produced in the most advanced television studios.” Indeed, many of Jusoor’s videos are just that, featuring the opinions of seemingly random people in Arab cities — many of whom voice support for negotiations with Israel or frustration with actors hostile to it, like Hamas or Hezbollah.
A significant source of Jusoor’s early virality was its coverage of Syria during and after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. The outlet was able to conduct interviews not only with prominent Syrian celebrities, but also with newly appointed ministers, governors, and other leading political figures, as well as detainees released from Assad’s notorious prisons. It reported from areas all over the country — whether under the control of the emerging power structure in Damascus, or of Kurdish or Druze militias in the south and east of the country. (The outlet appears to be unconnected to several other NGOs in Syria, including another news site, that use the same name.)
Much of Jusoor’s rise in visibility, however, came toward the end of 2025 as it began regularly reporting from inside parts of Gaza that the Israeli army had cleansed of their Palestinian population — except for anti-Hamas militia groups that it arms and supports.
It is curious that an Arab network would be allowed to operate freely in an area that is under the full control of the Israeli military and out of bounds to Palestinian, international, and even most Israeli media. Yet over the past year, the outlet has regularly streamed exclusive footage from what has become known as Eastern Rafah, home to the Popular Forces militia (more commonly referred to as the Abu Shabab group, after its leader who was killed last year). Jusoor’s most-viewed video on YouTube features a tour conducted in the area by the group’s current leader, Ghassan Duhine, last December.
Jusoor also published a video report last year that drew a direct comparison between detention and torture practices in Hamas-run prisons in Gaza and Assad’s Syria. It featured testimonies from three anti-Hamas activists under the headline “No Different from Saydnaya” — referring to Assad’s prison that Amnesty International once described as a “human slaughterhouse.”
The outlet has never reported on the widespread torture and abuse that Palestinians and Syrians both face in Israeli prisons and military detention centers. And that, too, is no coincidence.
Partnerships sought — and acquired
Over the past two years, hackers presumed to be associated with Iranian intelligence have publicly leaked millions of files and communications from the inboxes of Israeli politicians, ministries, and other prominent institutions and organizations.
One such recent hack, which was made accessible to journalists via the nonprofit whistleblower group Distributed Denial of Secrets, targeted Israel’s foremost security think tank, the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), which collaborates closely with Israel’s intelligence community — comprising the Mossad, the Shin Bet, and the Military Intelligence Directorate — and whose fellows often come directly from its ranks.
The institute runs a research program on what it describes as the “Shia axis,” encompassing Iran and its allies including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and, prior to its collapse, the Assad regime in Syria. Among the thousands of leaked files and messages from this program, clues have emerged regarding who is actually behind Jusoor and what its real mission is.
In October 2024, an email sent to the program’s team invited members to a Zoom meeting with Joseph Braude. The email introduces Braude as the founder of the Center for Peace Communications (CPC), whose work, it says, “combats extremist narratives in the Middle East.”
To do this, the email states, CPC “uses media platforms to challenge these narratives and operates broadcast stations in sensitive regions such as Syria, with the aim of influencing local populations,” adding that Braude “seeks partnerships with security and political entities in Israel to support CPC’s activities.” Another leaked message claims that the organization aims “to manage creative consciousness campaigns against Israel’s enemies, with a recent emphasis on Hamas and Hezbollah.”
While no protocol from the meeting surfaced in the leak, a separate document detailing the program’s activities describes the outcome as follows: “Connected Joseph Braude to the relevant sources in the intelligence establishment” in order to support CPC’s work “to promote pro-Western and pro-Israel thought in [Shia] Axis countries.”
The name of the platforms used by CPC to promote “pro-Israel thought” are not specified. However, another leaked document from the INSS hack indicates that Jusoor is a primary vehicle for this project.
A secret meeting
In September 2025, a secret meeting took place in Cyprus involving an INSS fellow and several journalists, researchers, and influencers from Israel and Jordan. Israel’s deputy ambassador to Jordan was also present.
According to an INSS member’s summary of the meeting that was leaked, the focus was on “actions needed in the media to improve relations between Israel and Jordan.” The workshop, it further states, “was organized by the Center for Peace Communications and the Jusoor News channel, led by Joseph Braude and his team.”
The summary goes on to state that a majority of the Jordanian participants “take part, openly or covertly, in the activities of Jusoor.” It added that the group agreed to establish teams for future projects, specifically to support “videos that will be produced by CPC and shown on the Jusoor channel” that would “disprove anti-Israeli conspiracy theories” or feature Israeli speakers “expressing appreciation for the Jordanian royal house.”
It was around this time that Jusoor began publishing videos featuring pro-Israel militias inside Israeli-controlled areas of the Gaza Strip. And soon after, the Israeli journalists who participated in the Cyprus meeting published segments on their own news channels praising the work of Jusoor and defending it from attacks.
Last December, Lior Ben Ari, Arab world correspondent at Ynet, interviewed Jusoor’s editor-in-chief, Hadeel Oueis, for a story about Hamas threatening Jusoor journalists in Gaza. “Every time they see someone being interviewed for Jusoor against Hamas, they chase him and send the Al-Qassam Brigades to ask who conducted the interview with him,” Oueis explained. “Some of our reporters are hiding, moving from tent to tent.”
And after Jusoor was temporarily banned by the Syrian government in March of this year (on the grounds that it was operating without the necessary license), Roi Kais, Arab world correspondent at Israel’s public broadcaster, Kan, presented a segment defending the network, describing it as “a media outlet that is essentially in Washington, but its goal is to fight all manifestations of extremism in the region, such as the pro-Iranian axis, and the Muslim Brotherhood axis … and also tries to promote … the militias that counter Hamas.”
Neither INSS, Ben Ari, or Kais responded to +972 Magazine’s requests for comment.
The not-so-hidden hand
According to U.S. tax documents, CPC is a relatively small organization based in Long Island, New York, with an official annual budget of roughly $1.5 million. All of its publicly listed donors support Jewish and pro-Israel initiatives.
Founded in 2019, the organization is led by Braude, a Middle East scholar and author of Iraqi-Jewish origin who describes himself as having “work[ed] in the realm of fostering ties [between Israel and the Arab world] for 30 years.” Braude planned a career at the Pentagon before being convicted in 2004 for the theft of Iraqi antiquities. He later worked for think tanks such as the neoconservative Foreign Policy Research Institute and the Emirati Al-Mesbar Studies and Research Center, and closely collaborated with the AIPAC-affiliated Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP).
In 2019, Braude published a book with WINEP titled Reclamation: A Cultural Policy for Arab-Israeli Partnership, which is described on its back cover as the “first step in establishing the Center for Peace Communications.” In it, he proposes “a sustained campaign to take back the region’s cultural space for supporters of Arab-Israeli partnership” through an “action tank.”
Across 160 pages, the book lays out a plan for a wide-ranging propaganda campaign, inspired by the now-defunct U.S. Information Agency, to be carried out in cooperation with autocratic regimes and their security establishments. Braude suggests that the U.S. and Israeli governments can systematically pursue this strategy while also “assist[ing] and connect[ing] nonstate actors who are working in the field already.”
In 2023, CPC began collaborating with The Free Press, a right-wing American outlet seen as sympathetic to President Donald Trump. Since then, CPC has co-produced dozens of articles for the outlet relating to Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon — including a largely sympathetic video profile of Yasser Abu Shabab, the then-leader of the pro-Israel Popular Forces militia in Gaza, a little over a year ago.
In that video, occupying a role somewhere between expert and spokesperson for Abu Shabab, Braude himself explains how “the presence of a forthrightly anti-Hamas militia within Gaza is a direct threat to Hamas’ claim of being the only governing body in the Strip,” and presents the group as “a serious political experiment in post-Hamas Gaza self-rule.”
CPC even attempted — albeit unsuccessfully — to establish contact between Abu Shabab and German parliamentarians last year, underscoring Braude’s role as an unofficial PR agent for the militia. And while Braude and CPC work to amplify the profile of Gaza’s pro-Israel, anti-Hamas militias in the West, Jusoor has been doing similar PR in the Arab world.
In recent months, the outlet has published exclusive interviews and video footage featuring other militia leaders in Gaza whose gangs receive aid and military support from Israel, including Shawqi Abu Nusaira and Hussam al-Astal. (Jusoor has at times described the latter as a “humanitarian zone coordinator” or a “safe area coordinator,” adopting Israel’s framing for the areas under the militias’ control.)
While much of what Braude and CPC share on social media is footage gathered by Jusoor, the depth of the relationship hides in plain sight. Transparency records on Jusoor’s Facebook page show that the account was originally created in 2019 under the name Arab Council for Regional Integration, which was CPC’s first major initiative. (The account changed its name to Jusoor News only in March 2024.)
No longer active and since largely forgotten, the Arab Council — made up of 35 public figures — voiced criticism of BDS efforts while helping to lay the groundwork for the Abraham Accords. Despite its modest size, it enjoyed access to influential political circles: In late 2019, then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo publicly praised the council for promoting “a regional vision of peace and coexistence”; in a video message released the following August on CPC’s YouTube account, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair congratulated the council on its inaugural meeting.
Jusoor’s editor-in-chief, Hadeel Oueis, is employed directly by CPC, which describes her on its website as “lead[ing] Arabic communications on behalf of the center.” Originally from Syria and now based in the United States, she rose into the public sphere under the name Hadeel Kouki around the beginning of the Syrian uprising in 2011; then a 19-year-old student, she appeared on Arab and international media outlets speaking out against the Assad regime.
In 2012, still using the name Kouki, she was invited by the Geneva-based pro-Israel advocacy group UN Watch to a conference it co-organized, as well as a meeting of the Human Rights Council. From there, according to Oueis’ biography on WINEP’s website, she met a U.S. delegation that helped facilitate her relocation to the United States.
One of Oueis’ latest ventures is a weekly program on the recently launched media platform Al-Janoub al-Youm (The South Today). The online platform is dedicated to covering southern Yemen, a strategically important area where separatist movements — backed by the UAE, and willing to join the Abraham Accords — have recently risen to prominence. The first edition of “The American Window,” which Oueis hosts, featured an interview with a former director from the U.S. Defense Department about “Iran’s proxies.” (Braude and Oueis did not respond to inquiries regarding whether the new Yemeni outlet is connected to Jusoor and CPC.)
Dissent of one kind only
Jusoor’s on-the-ground reporting in the region relies on locals who conduct interviews and record video footage. Yet individuals who collaborated with the outlet in both Syria and Gaza told +972 Magazine that they had no knowledge of Jusoor’s ties to CPC, pro-Israel lobby groups, or Israeli intelligence — and operated under the belief that they were contributing to an independent outlet that shared their values of peace and democracy.
Sources in Syria told +972 Magazine that monthly salaries of $600 and freelance payments of $100 per piece were the norm for Jusoor collaborators. In Gaza, rates ranged from $200 to $400 per video report.
One individual who carried out work for Jusoor in Syria told +972 Magazine that the outlet “published content that risked intensifying divisions within a society already fractured by years of war.” For example, the individual pointed to a street interview in which a man criticizes the presence of people from outside Damascus in the capital. “Such content occasionally goes viral, but it tends to make existing social tensions worse,” the source explained.
A source in Gaza who collaborated with the outlet also voiced objections to Jusoor’s editorial choices, which, the source said, amounted to a strict suppression of dissent against Israel and its allies. “Speaking out through Jusoor against the conduct of both Israel and Hamas in Gaza could very well mean that your words will be filtered, leaving only one side of the criticism intact,” the source explained.
Unlike in Syria, where Jusoor reporters frequently carry microphones displaying the outlet’s logo, reporters working for the outlet in Gaza do not. As a result, a source who worked with Jusoor in the Strip explained, individuals they interview are not always aware that they are speaking to Jusoor, which has been repeatedly targeted by Hamas. Accordingly, interviewees are unknowingly put at risk when Hamas gunmen seek out individuals who have appeared in Jusoor’s coverage, questioning them in order to identify reporters who work for the outlet.
In the recent interview with Haaretz, Oueis refused to answer a question about Jusoor’s sources of funding, and dismissed criticism of her “unconventional media initiative” as originating from news sites affiliated with Hamas. “A large part of the attacks are of a personal nature, directed at me as a woman and not as a journalist or as the editor-in-chief of a news platform,” she claimed. “Any position that deviates from the accepted Arab ‘line of resistance’ is accused of being essentially a ‘tool’ [of the Israelis].”
Jusoor’s refusal to disclose its funding and its insistence on being seen as an independent media outlet committed to press freedom clashes with the approach of its apparent founder and leader toward other outlets critical of Israel. Braude’s 2019 book, which sketched out a blueprint for what became Jusoor News, spoke of the importance of “degrading communications by hostile actors.” This, he continued, “would entail the preparation of dossiers on each targeted channel, including not only a representation of its content but also an investigation into its ownership, management structure, and personnel.”
This approach is also reflected in CPC’s partnership with The Free Press, which incorporated material from the organization in a video report against Al-Jazeera published in September 2025, shared by Oueis on X along with Israel’s U.S. Embassy. The video, drawing on anonymous testimonies, advances the claim that journalists working for Al-Jazeera in Gaza misuse their supposed protected status and are in fact active Hamas operatives.
It goes on to defend the assassination of Al-Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif and three of his colleagues in an Israeli attack on a media tent outside the main gate of Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital, stating without proof that “such tents often double as Hamas command centers.”
Joseph Braude and Hadeel Oueis did not respond to any of +972 Magazine’s detailed questions regarding the leaked INSS documents or the nature of Jusoor and CPC’s relationship with The Free Press and pro-Israel militias in Gaza.
Oueis sent a one-sentence email: “Jusoor News is proud to amplify silenced voices throughout the Arab world and we stand by all our reporting.” Braude followed minutes later with a similarly curt reply: “While you spout conspiracy theories, CPC works tirelessly to advance human development and peace between peoples across the Middle East and North Africa.”
Yossi Bartal is an investigative reporter based in Berlin
