Several major Israel websites were offline Wednesday after being hacked to show visitors pro-Palestinian messages on the heels of recent clashes at the Gaza border.
The websites of multiple Israeli hospitals and municipalities were defaced Tuesday to display an image of the recent border clashes overlapped with the message: “Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine.”
“We will not forget our martyrs,” the defaced websites said, The Times of Israel reported.
Several of the more than a dozen affected sites couldn’t be accessed a day later, including the websites for the Israel’s national opera, the Israel Teachers’ Union and the Israeli Defense Forces Widow & Orphans organization, among others.
Messages left on the defaced websites attributed the hacks to “Th3Falcon,” and a Twitter user with that handle took credit for the defacements in a series of posts Tuesday.
“Stand up for what you believe in even if it means standing alone,” they tweeted Tuesday using the hashtag #OpIsrael, an anti-Israeli hacking campaign waged annually every April since 2013, typically by individuals who’ve aligned themselves with Anonymous, a loose-knit hacktivist movement.
On Zone-H, a website where hackers archive their exploits, Th3Falcon boasted of defacing more than a dozen major Israel websites this week, including the the Israc Laboratory Accreditation Authority, The Baruch Padeh Medical Center, The Hillel Yaffe Medical Center and municipality websites for Kfar Saba, Eilat, Herzliya and Acre, among others.
The same hacker previously took credit for breaching Israeli websites in February and March, according to their Twitter and Zone-H profiles.
Israeli police killed more than a dozen people along the Gaza border in the last week while countering recent protests waged by Palestinians amid the decadeslong dispute between nation.
“I think that all of our troops deserve a medal,” Israel’s defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said Sunday, The New York Times reported.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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