A careful look at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s popular and otherwise active Facebook and Twitter accounts during the last round of fighting in Gaza gives no indication of what was actually happening on Israel’s southern front. Netanyahu effectively silenced his accounts from Aug. 8 to 10, for a total of three days. At the time, Hamas was firing rockets at Jewish localities in the western Negev; the Israeli air force was bombing targets in the Gaza Strip; the Cabinet had met for a lengthy emergency session; and the overall feeling across the country was that all-out war was just short of inevitable.

Even in the days leading up to his “net silence,” Netanyahu did not mention the tensions in the south. His posts and tweets focused on how vital the Nationality Law is to the country, and he directed readers to an article in his home paper, Israel Hayom, which reported on Aug. 6 that he chastised the Norwegian Foreign Minister Ine Marie Eriksen Soreide over allowing money from her country to fund left-wing groups, which, he claimed, attempt to delegitimize Israel.

On that same day, he released an unusually exuberant post, praising US President Donald Trump’s decision to reimpose economic sanctions against Iran. Two days later, on Aug. 4, he boasted about how the S&P credit-rating agency decided to raise Israel’s credit rating. As Netanyahu described it, the decision was made in recognition of Israel’s economic strength and his own economic policies. Not a word was said about escalating tensions in Gaza, which was the most pressing issue at the time, interrupting the lives of tens of thousands of the people living in settlements surrounding the Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu only returned to Facebook two days after the cease-fire with Hamas, and even then, he did not refer to Gaza. It was not as if the problem disappeared. It simply dropped off the agenda temporarily. When he started posting again, the prime minister stuck to his national and nationalist agenda, which inevitably includes the delegitimization of the left and Israeli Arabs. By doing this, he was able to draw attention away from the major issue on Israelis’ minds only two days earlier: the possibility that Israel was about to face another war with Hamas in Gaza. On the night of Aug. 11, he posted a video of the demonstration against the Nationality Law, which took place in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, in which Israeli Arabs were seen waving Palestinian flags. Alongside it he wrote, “There is no greater evidence of the necessity of the Nationality Law.”