At 10:30am local time yesterday, the official Twitter account for the Israeli Defense Force posted a captionless mirror selfie of a young woman that currently holds 31,000 likes and over 6,000 retweets.
Reactions to the image included pointing out how surreal it is that a military body was tweeting a thirst trap with no caption, as well as the theory that the image had been accidentally posted and that any rationale behind it was just the account trying to save face.
The IDF did not immediately reply to the Daily Dot’s request for comment.
It wasn’t until 30 minutes later that some form of context was attempted to be made through a reply to the original tweet. In their reply, the IDF claimed the original image was a honeypot used by Hamas, the Palestinian Sunni-Islamic military organization, to attempt to hack the phones of IDF soldiers.
“Israeli intelligence caught onto their plot, tracked the malware & downed Hamas’ hacking system. #CatfishCaught,” wrote the account.
Regardless of if you believe this defense, the verified Twitter account for the Israeli Defense Force is truly one of the most baffling entities online.
Although an official online avenue for the country’s military, the content on the IDF’s timeline sometimes feels more like that of a brand trying excessively hard to be relatable.
Given that conscription to the Israeli military is required for at least two years for all Israeli citizens, it becomes clear that the IDF is purposely trying to cultivate a casual, lighthearted public perception.
Previously, the IDF’s tweets have ranged from using ASCII art joke formats to distribute bigoted propaganda, proudly claiming to be the most vegan military in the world, and recreating the intro sequence to the show Friends with its soldiers.
And now this.
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