How a 20-Year-Old Built a Fast-Growing News Channel on the Iran War

As Iran returned to the headlines this week and fears of regional escalation grew, many Israelis turned repeatedly to Telegram and similar independent news channels for fast updates. Among the most prominent is Aaron Yediot, run by 20-year-old Aaron Cohen, who says he has built a one-man news operation with about 200,000 followers across social media by moving faster than larger outlets.

Cohen told Globes that the project began on October 7, when he opened a small WhatsApp group just to share videos and updates with friends. Within days, he noticed he was the only active participant and others were only watching. A week later, he was already running a channel with several hundred followers. A football injury that tore his ACL, shortly before he was due to enlist in combat service, delayed his army draft by six months and left him with time to monitor alerts and online reports. By the time he enlisted, the channel had about 3,000 followers, and he kept running it during his service.

The biggest surge came during Operation With All Your Might, when the channel jumped from about 5,000 followers to roughly 40,000. Shortly after the operation ended, WhatsApp shut it down after seeing images of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah with Cohen’s captions, which the platform treated as support for terrorism. Cohen then opened a Telegram channel. He says it had 15,000 to 16,000 followers at the start of the current war, and quickly grew to more than 100,000.

Cohen says some of his appeal comes from posting early alerts and battlefield updates, including, according to him, the first report this Monday that Iran had agreed to stop firing in the current campaign. He rejects accusations that he has access to classified systems or unlawful information, saying, “I am not connected to any military system, and I did not steal information from anywhere.” He says his information comes from a network of reliable sources and people “in the right places,” and that everything he publishes has passed military censorship.

He says the work is entirely his own, with no staff and sometimes only three hours of sleep a night. For years the channel brought in no money, but during the current war he began running ads and sponsored content. He says he now earns about 10,000 shekels a month, enough to live on, though less than he might make in a regular job. He says he has received approaches from media organizations, but has not decided whether to continue independently, join a news outlet, or study for a degree.