The use of offensive public relations during a conflict: Hamas's efforts to damage Israel's image during the 2010 flotilla

Crisis communication models contain strategies to rehabilitate an organization's image, but do not deal with strategies used to damage the image of another player or competitor. Using qualitative content analysis of 178 items published by Palestinian Information Center (PIC, the Hamas's leading website), the purpose of this manuscript is to examine Hamas's efforts to run offensive PR and to harm Israel's image restoration efforts at the time of the flotilla crisis in May 2010. We discover that Hamas deployed a strategy that consisted of five elements: evidence of existence of the crisis event, damages, victims, performance history and undermining the competitor's re- spons.