Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu reached out to Israeli public diplomacy activists Monday in a video conference, as he paid tribute to their “focus on refuting the industry of lies” as “a significant addition for the State of Israel”.

Since the beginning of the Pillar of Defense counter-terror operation, the Ministry of Public Diplomacy has been working hard to get the facts out in face of Hamas’ false reports. The PR effort, which includes a media center, has been dubbed, “Israel Under Fire.” The diplomacy efforts are focused not only on the Western world, but on Israel’s Arabic-speaking neighbors.

Daniel Zajfman, the President of the Weizmann Institute for Science, sees science as a critical bulwark against Israel’s challenging circumstances. “We’re in a noisy neighborhood,” he says understatedly, “so using technology to help solve some of our problems is important.” Zajfman has become a leading voice in the attempt to connect science and society, and he made his case recently at the Falling Walls Conference in Berlin.

Israel said the expanding Hamas media empire is part of the Islamists’ “terrorist operations,” although it stopped short of branding everyone working for it as a potential target in its offensive against Gaza’s Hamas rulers. Al-Aqsa TV, which employed the two journalists , said they were killed on the job, and it accused Israel of trying to silence those documenting the suffering of Gaza’s civilians.

“The bottom line is that Hamas is more relevant,” said Yoram Meital of Ben-Gurion University’s Chaim Herzog Center for Middle East Studies and Diplomacy. “Israel’s image is as the side that refused to pay the price for peace, and most Palestinians see Hamas’s ‘resistance’ as more attractive and up to date, and the Palestinian authority as somewhat not relevant.”

The Israeli government is trying to pre-empt a publicity pounding over its Gaza offensive by aggressively pushing out its version of events, furiously tweeting and Facebook posting updates from a "media bunker." The instant they heard about a bus bombing in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, scores of tech-savvy youth in Israel's government media command center in Jerusalem sprang into action.

About 500 foreign journalists arrived in Israel over the weekend to cover Operation Pillar of Defense, the Government Press Office reported on Monday. The GPO said the new arrivals are joining some 1,400 members of the media in the region to cover Israel and the Middle East.

The primary short-term goal set for Operation Pillar of Defense is to hit Gaza-based terrorism hard. In order to get the most out of this military operation, Israel needs to try to make sure the damage it causes will weaken the Hamas military wing for the long term.