Violent, distressing imagery related to the conflict between Hamas and Israel, including graphic posts showing dead children and adults, are easily accessible to young users on platforms such as Instagram, researchers have found.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a research group that studies online platforms, created accounts on Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat under the guise of British 13-year-olds. Within a 48-hour period from Oct. 14 through 16, the researchers said, they found more than 300 problematic posts. More than 78 percent of the posts were on Instagram, and about 5 percent were on Snapchat. The figures were released in a report on Wednesday.

The researchers said they switched on Instagram’s Sensitive Content Control feature and TikTok’s Restricted mode — which are meant to shield young users from potentially risky material — before running their searches.

Despite policies and features meant to protect increasingly online youth, the researchers found that grisly content was not difficult to find: 16.9 percent of the posts that surfaced when searching for the “Gaza” hashtag on Instagram were graphic or violent, compared with 3 percent on TikTok and 1.5 percent on Snapchat. TikTok’s search function was sometimes automatically populated with phrases like “Gaza dead children” and “dead woman Gaza,” the researchers found.