Gaza/Jerusalem: At least 20 Palestinians and four Israelis were killed on Sunday as a surge in cross-border fighting continued across the weekend. In a first, Israel responded to a cyberthreat by bombing the building where the hackers were based.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he ordered the military to continue “massive strikes” against Gaza’s ruling Hamas group and Islamic Jihad in the most serious border clashes since a spate of fighting in November.
Israel’s military said more than 600 rockets and other projectiles – over 150 of them intercepted by its Iron Dome anti-missile system – have been fired at southern Israeli cities and villages since Friday.
It said it attacked more than 260 targets belonging to Gaza militant groups. Gaza officials said Israeli air strikes and artillery fire had killed 20 people, including eight civilians, since Friday.
CLEARED FOR RELEASE: We thwarted an attempted Hamas cyber offensive against Israeli targets. Following our successful cyber defensive operation, we targeted a building where the Hamas cyber operatives work.
HamasCyberHQ.exe has been removed. pic.twitter.com/AhgKjiOqS7
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) May 5, 2019
“We thwarted an attempted Hamas cyber offensive against Israeli targets.”
“Following our successful cyber defensive operation, we targeted a building where the Hamas cyber operatives work,” the IDF tweeted.
The move marks an escalation of the practice of the use of force in response to a cyber attack, a tactic pioneered by the US while combating Islamic State in 2015.
A rocket that hit a house in Ashkelon on Sunday killed a 58-year-old man, police said. He was the first Israeli civilian fatality since the seven-week-long Gaza war in 2014.
Read the report by Nidal al-Mughrabi and Jeffrey Heller in The Sydney Morning Herald.