Jan. 1 (Bloomberg) -- The YouTube cartoon shows rockets striking France’s Eiffel Tower, Britain’s Big Ben and the German Bundestag. Then comes the tagline: “How do you like it? In Sderot, people have been living like this for eight years.”

The video was posted by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, part of a battle for world opinion being waged in parallel with Israel’s military strikes against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Besides highlighting the dangers Palestinian rockets pose to Sderot and other Israeli communities, the media blitz includes interviews with Arab-language media, almost-daily international press briefings by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and even an Israeli Army channel on YouTube, the popular video- sharing Web site.

Israel’s public-relations campaign stands in marked contrast to 2006, when spokesmen scrambled to explain the bombardment of Hezbollah targets in south Lebanon and Beirut. The goal this time is to keep international pressure at bay for as long as possible, allowing Israel’s military to operate without outside interference.

“This conflict will not be decided on the battlefield, but on the media front,” said Gabi Weimann, a professor of communications at Haifa University. “Both sides know there will be some sort of compromise imposed on them, so this is not just an exchange of fire but one of messages and images.”

Arab-Language Interviews

Ofir Gendelman, director of Arab press and public affairs at the Foreign Ministry, said he is giving 15 interviews a day to Arab-language radio and television stations, as well as answering comments posted on the YouTube site. Going a technological step further, the ministry yesterday held a press conference on Twitter, an instant-messaging community site.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has even enlisted political opponents, asking Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud candidate for prime minister in Feb. 10 elections, to speak for the government alongside Livni, the candidate of Olmert’s own Kadima party.

“When you are in the middle of such a battle against terrorists, you put politics aside and say, ‘We support the government,’” Netanyahu, 59, said in a Dec. 30 interview. He said Olmert personally asked him to give interviews to foreign media outlets, including Reuters and Al-Jazeera.

Hamas, which seized control of Gaza in 2007 and ousted the forces of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, has been trying to run its own public-relations effort. After YouTube censored its video posts -- the group is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S., the European Union and Israel -- Hamas began using an alternative video-sharing site called AqsaTube, said Weimann, who monitors Islamic militant activity on the Web.

YouTube Alternative

Users seeking the AqsaTube site yesterday were redirected to an Arabic-language site that offers video games. An English- language site run by a Hamas militant wing, the Izzadine al- Qassam Brigades, hasn’t been updated for three days, probably because many of its leaders are underground in fear for their lives, Weimann said.

Still, Hamas is benefiting from gory images broadcast by such Arabic stations as Qatar’s Al-Jazeera, Hezbollah’s Al- Manar, Lebanon’s Al-Quds and Iran’s Al-Alam, said Mukhemer Abu Sada, a political scientist at Al Azhar University in Gaza City.

“We see children in Jordan putting the green headbands of Hamas on their foreheads as the television networks work very hard and devote 24-hour broadcasting to revealing the Israeli crimes and reaching the entire world,” he said in a phone interview.

Cease-Fire End

Israel launched its strikes on Gaza on Dec. 27 after a six- month cease-fire with Hamas ended on Dec. 19, preceded a day earlier by Hamas rocket fire from Gaza. The militant group, for its part, says Israel did not do enough to ease its economic blockade of Gaza.

Israel’s air force has hit more than 450 Hamas targets in the past five days, while more than 250 rockets and mortar shells have been launched at the south, an army spokesman said, speaking anonymously by regulation.

As many as 380 Palestinians have been killed and 1,800 wounded since the start of the operation; 25 percent of the fatalities have been civilians, according to the United Nations. Three Israeli civilians and one soldier have died.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said his country has tried to adopt lessons learned from the July 2006 conflict with Hezbollah, the south Lebanon-based Shiite group associated with Iran.

Sharing Information

“One of the main lessons was that we have to share information all the time and coordinate what we are going to say,” Palmor said. The current campaign has been made possible by a new body created in the prime minister’s office that coordinates between the foreign ministry, the army spokesman’s office and the prime minister’s spokesman.

“When you relate the war on Hamas to the war on terrorism, it becomes a global war with global appeal,” said Weimann. “Israel’s public-relations campaign is much more efficient than it has been in the past.”

Still, Israeli officials say they are well aware of the limits of message control.

“‘While I speak, in the background they put images of destruction, of bleeding children,” said Gendelman, the Arabic- language spokesman. “Television is a visual medium, and when you are talking with images in the background, the audience watches the image and doesn’t listen to you.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Gwen Ackerman in Jerusalem at gackerman@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: December 31, 2008 17:01 EST