A number of openly anti-Jewish Facebook groups have sprung up in the last three weeks and incidences of users posting anti-semitic messages have increased.

The number of times the phrase “dirty Jew” was posted on Twitter, for example, has gone up six-fold since Operation Protective Edge was launched, according to an analysis of data.

In the week before, there was an average of four tweets a day which included the offensive term, which went up to around 60 in the weeks after. Only a handful of them were used “innocently”.

The word Judiada, which in Spanish literally translates as Jewry but is used as a derogatory term, was tweeted almost 120 times the day Israel began its ground invasion. This compares with an average of 20 times a day in the month of June.