Hizbullah: Arabs have ‘tremendous power to fight’ on new cyber-front Ranwa Yehia
Daily Star staff

The Arab-Israeli cyber-war has given many Arabs an opportunity to express their frustration against the Jewish state and show they have effective means to combat attacks, Hizbullah’s deputy secretary general says.

Arab people all over the world feel they want to contribute, each according to his own capacity and expertise, in the resistance and this (cyberwar) provided a gateway to that, Sheikh Naim Qassem told The Daily Star on Sunday. Hizbullah webmaster Ali Ayoub described the phenomenon that has gained so much momentum over the past week as a long-awaited discovery by Arabs.

What happened is that we found out that we have tremendous power to fight in our own way, that we can actually fight back in this technological war Israel started, he added. Ayoub quoted the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who said that if every Arab threw a bucket of water on Israel, the Jewish state would drown.

This is exactly what happened: supporters of the resistance from all over the world, both Arabs and foreigners, are contributing, he said.

The webmaster said Hizbullah had received thousands of e-mails over the past 10 days from supporters and sympathizers offering their services and asking what they could do to help.

I, of course, won’t mention names, but e-mails we’ve received are from very professional people in powerful positions all over the world. We’ve even received e-mails from Japanese computer programmers, he said.

The surge of attacks on Israeli websites has already downed the main Israeli government portal, the Foreign Ministry’s website, the Israeli Knesset’s website and the Israeli Army’s website. The Israeli Central Bank and stock exchange websites were frozen for several hours on Friday.

Although the Israeli Army hired AT&T last Thursday to provide advanced security for its website, the site was disabled for a couple of hours on Friday night as a result of a cyber attack, Ayoub added. E-mails circulating among Arabs urged them to boycott AT&T for its support of Israel. Ayoub believes that the Israeli Army was forced to resort to such a means because it could not handle the attacks on its own.

It shows how incapable the Israelis are of protecting themselves, Ayoub said. They actually had to resort to an American ISP. What a scandal for them.

An e-mail circulated on Saturday by a website providing Arabs with an opportunity to attack Israeli sites by overloading them gave an update of the Israeli sites Arabs have downed.

After discovering the trick that made the prime minister’s office site (www.pmo.gov.il) revive, the site was downed last night. It was still down as this report was compiled. Our greetings to the staff of Tehila Security for their poor job in protecting the main governmental server in the Zionist entity the circulated e-mail said.

The website of the Israeli prime minister’s office was back up and running on Sunday. Ummah.com Online, which launched one of the websites staging counterattacks, was forced to remove it on Saturday. In an e-mail sent to The Daily Star, ummah.com said: The bandwidth providers to our ISP, after receiving many complaints from Zionists and their supporters in the United Kingdom, have threatened to cut off our internet connection if this site is not removed. We have therefore removed this site in order to keep the rest of ummah.com online.