As Israel and Gaza traded fire with one another on Thursday, a growing war online has taken shape between the two sides, catching the attention of the world in the process. The conflict has not gone unnoticed by Anonymous, which has since launched an offensive of its own in support of Gaza.
The infamous hacker collective published a press release Thursday, issuing a warning to Israel.
To the IDF and government of Israel we issue you this warning only once. Do NOT shut down the Internet into the “Occupied Territories”, and cease and desist from your terror upon the innocent people of Palestine or you will know the full and unbridled wrath of Anonymous. And like all the other evil governments that have faced our rage, you will NOT survive it unscathed.
A video narrating the contents of that press release was also posted to YouTube and disseminated across various websites and prominent Anonymous social media accounts.
The online war between the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigadeaccounts on Twitter has been one of historical development. Numerous reports have commented that never before has the world seen such a public and brutal social media campaign between opposing forces in real time.
The conflict sparked Anonymous to launch #OpIsrael, a campaign primarily focused on ensuring that citizens of Gaza maintain alternate methods of accessing the internet in the event such access is intentionally shut down, as occurred in Egypt and other countries during the Arab Spring. However, there have been widespread reports of power outages in and around Gaza due to rocket fire and shelling from both sides.
The hacker collective also began a series of website defacements and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against various targets. Anonymous claims it successfully knocked offline the website for the International Security Academy, which was still down at the time of this writing. It also claims that it defaced another such target, which it called a “top Israeli security and surveillance website;” however, according to a search on the Internet Archive, that website does not appear to have been updated since 2010.
Breitbart has the full article, including the transcript of the Anonymous video
