On February 28, as Israel carried out strikes targeting sites inside Iran, the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad posted a message on its official Persian‑language Telegram channel urging Iranian citizens to assist its operations. The channel addressed “Iranian brothers and sisters,” assured them of a “highly secure” dedicated line, and asked for photographs and videos documenting their ‘‘just struggle’’ against the Iranian regime. The appeal framed assistance as part of a joint effort to bring Iran back to its “glorious days.”
The public solicitation marks a notable use of social and messaging platforms by a foreign intelligence service to reach the domestic population of a rival state. Telegram has long been a primary means of communication for many Iranians inside and outside the country, making it an attractive conduit for both activists and foreign actors seeking information or sympathy. Mossad’s open call blends traditional intelligence collection with overt information operations designed to delegitimise Tehran and amplify dissent.
Requesting photographs and videos amounts to soliciting open‑source intelligence (OSINT) that can be exploited for targeting, verification and narrative building. Such material can aid analysts and planners in mapping protests, security deployments and infrastructure damage, but it also places contributors at acute risk. Iranian security services have a record of identifying, detaining and prosecuting sources, and even metadata from innocuous posts can expose individuals to reprisals.
Strategically, the outreach serves multiple purposes for Israel: it casts Tehran as isolated, seeks to widen cracks in domestic support for the regime, and supplements covert human intelligence with a volume of citizen‑generated documentation. For Tehran, the message provides justification for an intensified domestic security posture and a propaganda line that foreign powers are meddling to destabilise the country. The net effect is to deepen the information‑age front of the Iran‑Israel rivalry, where social platforms become battlegrounds as much as missiles and cyber tools.
In the near term, expect Tehran to respond with a mixture of defensive measures—tighter internet controls, arrests, and counter‑disinformation efforts—and possibly asymmetric retaliation against Israeli targets or interests. The episode highlights a fraught trade‑off: foreign intelligence services can leverage mass communication to gather intelligence and foment dissent, but doing so risks exposing civilians, escalating tensions, and hardening domestic repression in the very societies they seek to influence.