New York, Jan. 20 : Eager to find new ways to bypass reporters and get out their message unfiltered, Israelis and Palestinians found cyberspace fertile ground for a propaganda war.

According to the New York Daily News, frustrated by the media focus on the suffering of women and children, the Israeli Defense Forces have started their own YouTube channel, where they posted videos showing air strikes on Hamas rocket installations.

The IDF also posted videos showing schools and a zoo mined with complex booby-traps by Hamas, and film of weapons caches discovered in mosques.

One video, meant to show that Israel cares for wounded Palestinian children, showed a small body on a gurney being wheeled slowly past the barbed wire of a grim, rainy checkpoint to receive medical attention in Israel.

For a while, the IDF was posting a "vlog" - a video blog - featuring the Australian-accented spokesman Captain Benjamin Rutland staring earnestly into the camera to deliver a daily war update.

That effort fizzled, apparently after some netizens began overlaying his dry updates with bloody videos of maimed Arab babies and weeping mothers.

Such scenes didn''t air on American TV, but they went viral on the Internet, giving the Palestinians an edge in the online war that they didn''t have against Israeli real-world might. (ANI)