Three days after Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel and murdered some 1,200 people on October 7, 2023, a Wikipedia editor using the name Iskandar323 went to work on the encyclopedia’s article about Hamas. The page was drawing close to a million readers a day. The editor took the material documenting Hamas’s antisemitism, its use of human shields and child combatants, and its human rights abuses, and moved it to a separate page called “Criticism of Hamas,” which drew a few thousand views. Iskandar323 has since been banned from Wikipedia entirely. The edit is still there.

That finding anchors “Damage Done,” a report released Thursday by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Technology and Society. The report found that Wikipedia sanctioned editors who ran a coordinated anti-Israel campaign but never reviewed or corrected the content they produced, and that a new group of editors has picked up the work using quieter methods.

“Banning individual editors was never going to be enough,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said. “The pages that millions of people read, and that AI tools learn from, still bear the marks of a systematic disinformation campaign that Wikipedia itself has sanctioned but never cleaned up.”

Nineteen Months Later

The report follows the ADL’s March 2025 investigation, “Editing for Hate,” which identified roughly 30 editors who coordinated to reshape Wikipedia’s coverage of Israel, Jews and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That group revised more than 10,000 articles with more than a million edits. Many edited in unbroken six-to-eight-hour blocks resembling full-time work, which led the ADL to raise the question of whether they were paid. They voted together 90 percent of the time to keep pages such as “Nakba denial” and “Genocide against Palestinians” and to delete pages such as “Jerusalem Light Rail stabbing,” “List of Islamist terrorist attacks” and “Denial of atrocities during the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.”

At the time, Greenblatt called Wikipedia’s neutrality efforts “nothing but a Band-Aid on a problem that’s getting worse.” The Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts the site, answered through spokesperson Lauren Dickinson that its preliminary review found “troubling and flawed conclusions that are not supported by the Anti-Defamation League’s data.”

Wikipedia’s own Arbitration Committee then topic-banned six of the editors named in the report, Iskandar323, Levivich, Makeandtoss, Nableezy, Nishidani and Selfstudier, barring them from Israel-related articles. Three editors were banned from the site altogether, two of them for coordinating through a Wikipedia workgroup on the “Tech for Palestine” Discord server that targeted more than 100 articles on the conflict.

Under pressure from a House Oversight Committee investigation, a bipartisan letter from 23 members of Congress, and inquiries from the Justice Department and the Senate Commerce Committee, the group’s visible coordination collapsed. Talk-page messaging among its members fell from 501 to 23, and tandem editing on the same pages fell from 6,218 instances to 752.

The Edits That Survived

The ADL traced Iskandar323’s 485 edits across six of Wikipedia’s most-read articles on the topic: “Israel,” “Gaza war,” “October 7 attacks,” “Hamas,” “Zionism” and “Jews.” Of the 398 edits that could be checked against the live text, 362, or 91 percent, remain in place.

On November 21, 2023, the same account deleted roughly 17,000 characters from the “Gaza war” article, removing the forensic record of the massacre. The deleted material included a forensic finding of charred hands showing a victim had been bound with metal wire before being burned alive, the remains of a parent and child bound together, evidence of sexual violence, and video of an attempted decapitation. Two days later the account cut 7,400 more characters, including testimony from Israeli soldiers and ZAKA first responders. What remains is a line stating that terrorists “reportedly engaged” in such violence.

The main Hamas article still waits until the end of its lead section to identify the group as a designated terrorist organization. Everything before that, the ADL said, describes Hamas in terms suited to a governing authority.

Iskandar323 was finally site-banned in early 2026, after continuing to edit while under a topic ban. The articles that triggered the ban were “Hellenistic Palestine” and “Yahweh.” Wikipedia’s arbitrators ruled that rewriting the ancient history of the land amounted to fighting the modern conflict by proxy.

“Even in cases where the Wikipedia community took some modicum of action against editors who went against their policies, the activities of that banned editor remain, in this case activity over numerous years driving an ideological narrative in flagrant violation of the neutral point of view policy of the platform,” said Daniel Kelley, senior director of the ADL’s Center for Technology and Society. “This speaks to a systematic issue with how Wikipedia allows their platform to operate, and it is something they have the responsibility to address.”

Zionism, Rewritten

The Wikipedia article on Zionism previously described the movement as seeking a homeland for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel, based on the Jewish people’s long connection to that land. Its lead now states that Zionism was achieved “through colonization” and that Zionists sought a state with “as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.” Wikipedia’s own editors have flagged the characterization as disputed.

An account called DMH223344, registered in 2023, made 543 edits to the article, adding roughly 193,000 characters and removing roughly 188,000. The article’s length barely moved while its content was overhauled. The account wrote about a quarter of the surviving text and became the second most prolific contributor in the page’s 24-year history. One of its edit summaries stated the goal plainly: to “make sure transfer as euphemism for ethnic cleansing is covered.”

When other editors tried to restore the earlier wording in February 2025, an administrator froze discussion for 12 months. The moratorium expired this February. The framing survived.

The Quiet Cohort

A July 2026 review found 19 accounts actively editing Israel-related articles, eight unsanctioned members of the original group and 11 accounts new to the ADL’s research, one of them active since 2012. On 229 articles where these accounts overlap, the newcomers hold the most recent edit, effectively the page’s current text, on 144.

The ADL documented their methods. An account called Butterscotch Beluga, which devoted nearly 30 percent of its recent edits to undoing other editors’ work, removed the category “Incitement to genocide of Jews” from Wikipedia’s article on the slogan “Death to Israel,” writing, “Do not treat Jews & Israel as interchangeable groups.” An Arabic-named account rewrote the opening sentence of the October 7 article so that the terrorists “broke out from the blockade of the Gaza Strip,” labeled the change a minor copyedit, and defended it by citing Electronic Intifada describing October 7 as a “jailbreak.” The edit was reverted within hours. The article still opens on the “blockaded” Gaza Strip.

Skitash, one of the unsanctioned original editors, changed the description of Marwan Barghouti, serving five life sentences for murder, from “convicted terrorist” to “elected legislator.” Another, Vice_regent, made 64 edits to the article on Shiri Bibas and her sons Ariel and Kfir in the weeks after their bodies were returned in February 2025. The account removed a statement that the family had been murdered, wrote that “neither Israel nor Hamas have provided evidence,” and opened a talk-page section titled “Evidence of either claim?” Israeli forensic authorities concluded the three were murdered in captivity.

“Reportedly”

The fight over October 7 sexual violence came down to a single word. On the article “Sexual and gender-based violence in the October 7 attacks,” an account called Raskolnikov.Rev spent 15 months reverting at least four editors who tried to remove “reportedly” from the opening sentence, arguing that removing it “violates NPOV,” Wikipedia’s neutrality policy. In March 2025, after the European Union had sanctioned Hamas units over sexual violence and a UN team had found reasonable grounds to believe rape occurred at multiple locations, the account wrote that the article covered a debate over “whether there was any weaponized sexual violence as part of the attacks by militants at all.”

Across four articles on the subject and their discussion pages, editors named in the ADL’s research made 832 of 9,576 revisions and reverted other editors at least 89 times.

What Wikipedia Feeds

The English Wikipedia carries more than seven million articles and draws about 11 billion page views a month. A November 2025 study by Dr. Shlomit Aharoni Lir of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University found that Wikipedia is the most frequently cited source in ChatGPT, accounting for nearly half of its top-ten sources. Lir documented a broader pattern of erasure: the article on Iran’s policy to eliminate Israel was deleted as a standalone entry during the twelve-day war in June 2025, the “Nir Yitzhak Massacre” and “Holit Massacre” pages were renamed “attacks,” and editors attempted to strip content from the articles on Solomon’s Temple and Solomon’s Pools.

Lir also reported that the same circle of editors helped downgrade the ADL as a source on Israel while treating Al Jazeera and B’Tselem as reliable. In the 2025 report, Al Jazeera ranked as the group’s most-cited source after October 7, and the Palestinian Authority’s official Wafa news agency ranked fourth.

The ADL is calling on the Wikimedia Foundation, now led by former US ambassador to Chile Bernadette Meehan, to audit every article substantially edited by banned editors, beginning with the six flagship pages, along with private identity verification for editors in contentious topics and an end to anonymous editing on sensitive pages. It is also urging search engines and AI developers to disclose when Wikipedia is the source of an answer.

“The most visited online encyclopedia that claims neutrality has to be willing to repair its own record,” Greenblatt said. “The Wikimedia Foundation should audit this work, and the companies that build search and AI products should stop presenting contested framing as settled fact.”