About Hamal

Hamal

Hamal, at hamal.co.il, is a Hebrew-language real-time breaking-news service in Israel, owned by Walla! Communications. Its name is the Hebrew acronym for a military operations room, and the name describes the product exactly: a continuous, short-form feed of news flashes from Israel and the world, updated in real time, in which most items are brief and many carry photographs or video. Hamal began life as a Walla! application launched on 5 May 2017 and has been available in the browser since 2019. It is also a participatory platform: registered users can themselves publish short news reports with videos and photographs, read and watch reports published by other users, and comment, which makes Hamal part news wire, part reporting community.

Launched by Walla! on 5 May 2017

Hamal appears in reference works as a service of the Walla! portal. Walla!'s documented list of services describes it directly: Hamal is an application reporting real-time news flashes, launched on 5 May 2017, and available for viewing in the browser as well from 2019. An item published on it is usually short, and can include pictures or videos. The site's own terms of use, published at hamal.co.il, state the position in legal form: the site is a site of Walla! Communications Ltd, and serves as a platform for providing news updates and reports from Israel and the world which are for the most part short and concise, updated in real time.

The launch date places Hamal in the second wave of Israeli mobile news. Walla! itself, founded in 1995 and headquartered in Tel Aviv, was one of Israel's first great web portals, and by the 2010s its news operation competed with Ynet and Mako for the general Hebrew audience. A dedicated flash-news product, separate from the main portal's full articles, let the group compete for the fastest-moving layer of news consumption: the reader who wants to know what has just happened, in one or two lines, before any full report exists. Since 2020 Walla! has been fully owned by The Jerusalem Post group, the Eli Azur media group that also holds Maariv, and Hamal is listed among that group's outlets.

The operations-room idea

The choice of name is part of the product's meaning. In Israeli usage a hamal is the operations centre from which a military unit or emergency service coordinates events as they unfold — a room of screens, radios and incoming reports. A news service calling itself Hamal promises the civilian equivalent: a single screen on which every incoming report appears in sequence, attributed and time-ordered, whether it comes from a police spokesperson, the army, the ambulance service or a member of the public who was present. The site's design carries the metaphor through: its front page is a single rolling stream of short reports, each with its source named, and a prominent red-alert element reflecting the rocket-warning alerts that are a recurring part of Israeli news life.

That format distinguishes Hamal from a conventional news site. A conventional site's basic unit is the article, written after an event is understood. Hamal's basic unit is the report, published while the event is still happening: an arrest, a road accident, a military announcement, a weather forecast, a security incident. The terms of use describe the services in exactly those terms — users can publish short news reports together with videos and photographs, and read and view reports published by the site's users — and the live feed shows the model working, item by item.

What the live feed carries

The composition of Hamal's feed on any given day shows its sources and range. Official sources appear under their own names: the Israel Police, the IDF Spokesperson, Magen David Adom, the national ambulance service, and the Reuters agency. Named Walla! and Hamal journalists appear alongside them, among them military analyst Dr Amir Bohbot and political correspondent Idan Kowler, crime reporters such as Hodaya Ran for the centre of the country, and reporters including Yoav Itiel and Amit Avitan. The Hamal system itself, credited as the Hamal newsroom, publishes many items directly.

From security incidents to celebrity news

The subjects in the stream are correspondingly broad and fast-moving: arrests by the police, Shin Bet security announcements, IDF exercises and restrictions, court and crime stories, fatal and minor road accidents, weather forecasts, world stories from the wire, election demonstrations, celebrity news and consumer items such as a full car park at a shopping mall before a concert. A scorpion sting treated as a minor injury, a grenade thrown in Eilat, an Iranian war plan and a singer revealing her son's name can sit minutes apart in the same feed. That juxtaposition — hard security news, municipal incident reports and viral national content in one chronological stream — is Hamal's editorial signature, and it is why the batch record for this profile describes the site as a news aggregation and original-content website.

News reported by its readers

Hamal's most distinctive feature is that its readers are also its reporters. The site repeatedly invites visitors, in its own words, to register quickly if they want to react and upload reports: registration is offered directly or through Google and Facebook accounts, and the terms of use grant users the right to publish short news reports with attached video and photographs, subject to the site's rules. A page of guidelines for Hamal reporters is linked from the site alongside its terms of use, privacy policy and accessibility statement. Registered contributors appear in the feed's topic structure under their own heading, your reports, which on the sampled front page carried more items than any single news category.

This model has a practical logic in Israel. The country is small, densely covered by smartphones, and its news often begins as a bystander's photograph: a road closure, a fire, a security incident, a flooded street. A platform that can receive, frame and republish such reports within a branded, moderated feed converts that bystander material into news faster than a conventional desk waiting for an official statement. Hamal's terms place responsibility for use of the service clearly on the user, set a minimum age framework for registration and reserve Walla!'s right to update the terms — the legal scaffolding a publisher needs when the public supplies part of the news.

Topics, hashtags and the shape of the site

Alongside the chronological stream, Hamal organises its material by hot topics and hashtags. Its front-page topic counts give a snapshot of the editorial mix: politics is the largest news topic, followed by sport, then entertainment, technology, health and a dedicated Hamal soldiers topic serving military-related reports for and about soldiers. A must-not-miss section collects the items the desk most wants read, and the your reports section collects the public's contributions. The proportions are instructive: politics and security dominate, as they do across Israeli news, but sport, health, entertainment and celebrity material is substantial enough to make Hamal a general-interest feed rather than a pure security ticker.

Hamal also exists as a mobile application — listed in app-store rankings for Israeli news apps as Hamal, breaking news in real time, published by Mintmark Ltd alongside the Walla! app — keeping the service in the same push-alert environment as the Ynet, N12 and Kan apps with which it competes for the phone's lock screen. The browser version, available since 2019, reproduces the same stream for desktop readers.

Hamal inside the Walla! and Jerusalem Post groups

Institutionally, Hamal belongs to Walla! Communications Ltd, and through Walla! to The Jerusalem Post group. Reference listings of Israeli media ownership place Hamal among the outlets of Eli Azur's Jerusalem Post and Maariv group, alongside the English-language Jerusalem Post and the Hebrew Maariv. Within that group Hamal fills the speed niche: the Jerusalem Post serves English-language readers, Maariv serves the Hebrew newspaper audience, Walla! serves the general Hebrew portal audience, and Hamal serves the reader who wants the news as a live wire of attributed flashes, some of them filed by the public itself.

That group position also explains Hamal's sourcing. Its feed credits Walla! journalists and Walla!'s image infrastructure, republishes the statements of Israeli official bodies in full news-flash form, and draws world material from Reuters. It is best understood not as a standalone start-up but as a format innovation inside an established news group: the portal's newsroom, reorganised as an operations room.

Why Hamal matters in Israeli online news

Hamal records a wider change in how news is consumed in Israel. The country's news cycle has always been fast — shaped by security events, a small geography and a highly connected population — and the smartphone turned that speed into a format. Ynet's flashes, N12's push alerts and Kan's live blogs all serve the same appetite. Hamal's contribution is to make the flash itself the whole publication, and to open the feed to the public's own reporting under a publisher's brand and a publisher's terms.

As an online-news entry, then, Hamal is a Hebrew real-time news service from Tel Aviv's Walla! group: launched as an app on 5 May 2017, on the web since 2019, publishing short, attributed, continuously updated reports from official sources, professional reporters and registered readers alike, and organising them by the topics — politics, sport, soldiers, health, entertainment, technology and the public's own reports — that make up the daily rhythm of Israeli news.