Israel-Palestine, social networks are also divided

    It has been more than a week now since after the Hamas ultimatum to Israel, at the end of the indicated time, 6 pm, more than 30 rockets have departed from the Strip towards Jerusalem and the Israeli communities. Since then, the weapons have not yet stopped. As of May 16, according to figures reported by OCHA, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 149 Palestinians and 3 Israelis have died. And 6,472 Palestinians and 46 Israelis were injured. The last chapter of a war, still in progress, which, with greater or lesser intensity, has not ended since 1948.     

wanted to understand what is the feeling of people in this regard by analyzing

(social + online news + blog and forum) related to the two most used keywords:

and

. 

   Overall, for the word “Palestine”, there were

, by

, whose contents involved (like + comments + shares) 66.1 million people.

For the term "Gaza", on the other hand, there were

citations

, by

, whose contents involved 72.4 million people.

The peak of citations for “Palestine” was recorded between 00:00 and 01:00 on 11/05, with more than 263 thousand mentions in a single hour.

For "Gaza", on the other hand, the maximum peak was three on 01:00 and 02:00 on 14/05 with over 270 thousand citations in a single hour.

  The post that created the most engagement is a

 of May 14, by Zayn, an account with over 30 million followers, which reads: «I am with the Palestinian people. My heart aches for families who have lost loved ones. We cannot be silent witnesses of orphaned and murdered children and not claim the human rights of all Palestinians! This has to stop. Free Palestine ». It got just under 200,000 retweets and more than 632,000 likes. In fact, even from our analysis it emerges that for both keywords there is a clear prevalence of negative sentiment, of criticism of Israel's retaliation rather than Hamas's actions. In short, there seems to be no doubt that online condemnation of the actions taken by Israel is almost unanimous, as the infographic shows in detail.

If these seem to be the results, we wanted to investigate further by specifically analyzing the conversations on

Facebook and Instagram accounts.

. From 10 to 17 May the Israeli Prime Minister, who has more than 2.6 million followers on Facebook, posted 49 contents on his page, equal to an average of 6 posts per day. Of these, 81.6% were photos or videos. These contents generated a total of 1.9 million interactions, about 241 thousand per day on average, equal to an average daily engagement rate of 1.47%. 62.4% of these interactions were "like" and 11.1% "love". Only 0.60% was instead of anger and 0.52% of mockery (smiley face). An indication of the appreciation by fans, Netanyahu supporters also confirmed by the growth of followers: +53,700 (+ 2.06%) in a week. In the same time frame, on Instagram, Netanyahu (just under a million followers) produced 41 posts,equal to an average of more than 5 posts per day. These generated 2.3 million interactions. An average of about 292 thousand daily interactions. The greatest number of interactions was generated by photos, which were also the type of content most proposed (31.7% of the total). Likes were 62.1% of the total interactions, the remaining 37.9% comments. A fair amount of the latter are critical, with appeals of various kinds and intensity for the liberation of Palestine. In any case, as for Facebook, the Instagram account of the Israeli premier has gained more than 42 thousand followers, equal to a growth of 4.4%. If, as it is reasonable to do, we consider the growth of followers a sign of support, confirmed by the type of interactions on Facebook, as we have seen,it is quite evident that Netanyahu enjoys the support of a part of the population. In short, even the social networks return the image of

with, on the one hand, criticism, often harsh, of Israel and its retaliation and, on the other hand, support for the Israeli prime minister.