Over the past two years, more than 60 Israeli citizens have been arrested and charged with working for the state’s arch-enemy, Iran, some two dozen of them indicted in 2025 alone. These are not, for the most part, trained saboteurs.
They are ordinary people – from teenagers and pensioners to immigrants and military personnel – many of whom answered an unsolicited message on Telegram or a social network that offered easy cash for a “simple task.”
The trend is accelerating sharply: Israel’s security services say the number of Iranian plots using Israeli citizens roughly quadrupled in 2025 over the year before, with some 120 recruitment attempts thwarted last year.
Israeli officials estimate that millions of citizens have received such approaches; in one high school, a double-digit number of students admitted to having been contacted. The tasks begin small – instructions to spray anti-government graffiti, photograph a local landmark, or to leave an object in a designated spot – then quickly escalate into more nefarious actions like surveilling public figures or inciting violence. Payments have ranged from a few thousand shekels to tens of thousands of dollars, usually in cryptocurrency.
This is more than a national-security threat; it is a public-health-shaped problem. A hostile actor is casting the widest possible net, betting that even a 1% success rate justifies their investment in a myriad of messages. And like any such threat, it concentrates on people who are most exposed: those under financial pressure who simultaneously feel alienated from the state.
All of this raises an uncomfortable but necessary question.
Is the haredi community at elevated risk?
The majority of haredim (ultra-Orthodox) are loyal citizens who would never dream of aiding an enemy of the Jewish people. In spite of this, the community is one of several groups specifically targeted by a hostile recruitment campaign alongside Arab citizens, disaffected soldiers, struggling immigrants, and those seeking fast cash. To single out haredim as suspects would be both morally wrong and counterproductive for national security.
Yet the facts already tell us this community may be disproportionately at risk: at least nine of the more than 60 publicly known cases have involved members of the haredi community. And while this is not definitive proof of specific campaigns targeting haredim – no such base-rate study yet exists – it is more than enough to retire any assumption that the community is out of reach.
To ignore that Iranian handlers exploit specific, documented vulnerabilities would be to leave an entire demographic undefended against a well-funded effort to damage the State of Israel.
Recruitment travels by smartphone and open social media, and many haredim are, by choice, off these grids. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics finds that roughly 70% of haredim have no internet-enabled phone and about 85% stay off social networks entirely; only around one in seven uses open social media outside rabbinic guidelines.
Those figures are from the last comprehensive survey and describe a small but steadily growing edge: haredi internet use has climbed from 28% in 2008 to roughly two-thirds today. The people a Telegram recruiter can actually reach, then, are not the insulated yeshiva core but the community’s modernizing edge, those who utilize a smartphone and, with it, have a loosely defined footprint in Israeli society.
They are also the ones most caught between worlds: loosening their anchor in the haredi mainstream without yet being firmly settled in the mainstream Israeli one. That in-between position, not haredi identity as such, is what a recruiter could exploit.
Again, we should consider what a recruiter is trained to look for in their potential agent. First, financial pressure, the single most common motive in the documented cases. Among haredi families, 34% live below the poverty line – compared to 14% of other Jewish Israelis – and nearly half of haredi children live in a household under financial stress.
Employment among haredi men has stalled at roughly 54%, and those who do work earn about half as much as other Jewish men. With an average of nearly seven children per family, an offer of quick, quiet money lands very differently on a stretched household budget.
Weak national tethering is another important factor. The people these plot targets are, by definition, those already wavering in their connection to the haredi mainstream. Our own research on how the community coped with the recent COVID pandemic finds that the individuals who did not channel their collective stress into post-traumatic growth were precisely the more-integrated and less-haredi, the less communally-anchored and relationally-open.
A broader climate of mistrust between many haredim and the state – sharpened by the ongoing draft crisis, Supreme Court rulings, and subsidy cuts – gives a recruiter’s offer of easy money something tangible to hold onto.
Lastly, an information gap within the demographic represents a major additional risk factor. Too few people in the haredi community are educated on how to address the risks of technology in a culturally sensitive way.
In short, the absence of a precise statistic detailing the specific risk of the haredi public is not the absence of a crisis. Financial strain is measurable and significant. Alienation is real and documented throughout research, including in our own work.
The information vacuum can be easily addressed and modified. These facts are enough to justify immediate action, which may very likely save the lives of Israeli citizens from all demographics.
So what should be done?
First, research: identify who, specifically, is most at risk and how to reach them before an enemy recruiter does. Turning our intuition into targeted prevention prevents a blunt public scare that would only deepen mistrust within the haredi public.
Second, communication that meets the community where it is: neighborhood posters, notices in synagogues, trusted social-media voices, and, above all, the backing of rabbis and respected communal figures.
A warning from within carries a hundred times the weight of a government spokesman’s. This is already beginning; senior rabbis have recorded warnings, some in Yiddish, telling their communities there is “no greater desecration” than a Torah-observant Jew betraying his people. We commend these efforts and hope to see them made increasingly systematic within various sub-groups of the population.
Third, the state should treat this not as a policing problem but as an opportunity to build trust. An honest message such as “we are looking out for you” can do more than foil individual recruitment. It can open the door to initiatives the haredi community badly needs, from financial-literacy to vocational-training programs. Success here could further serve as a model for critical public-health efforts such as reducing smoking, which affects roughly half of haredi adults, double the national rate.
The recruitment threat is as solvable as it is serious, and how we address it will either widen the rift between the haredi community and the state or begin to heal it. Our research on post-traumatic growth in Israeli communities, across multiple studies, shows that a population under stress can emerge stronger, in ways that benefit society as a whole.
Iran is betting on our divisions. The smartest answer is to prove it wrong by investing in the shared resilience that is itself a pillar of national security and age-old Jewish values.
Dr. Jacob L. Freedman is a clinical psychiatrist. Dr. Shlomo Black is an educational psychologist specializing in the haredi community. Together they work at Arvutera, a research and consulting institute offering data analysis, policy advising, and media services. Arvutera can be reached at arvutera.com/contact.