The Palestinian Islamist movement, Islamic Jihad, seems to want the world to know it's going high tech like everybody else.

It seems terrorists are continuing to wake up to the fact they can cause trouble in cyber space.

In a report below by Menassat Online they show a
picture of Hassan Shakoura, former head of the Al-Quds Brigades' cyberwar unit before his death. © Ola Al-Madhoun

GAZA CITY, June 17, 2008 (MENASSAT) – The Palestinian Islamist movement, Islamic Jihad, has added a cyber-war division to its armed Al-Quds Brigades.

It was a response to years of attacks by Israeli hackers, and according to the Brigades spokesman, Abu Hamza, it equals the playing field in cyber-space.

"The Israeli's have worked very hard the past few years on monitoring all the Palestinian websites, especially those of Islamic Jihad and Al-Quds Brigades," Hamza told MENASSAT.

"They (Israeli hackers) hacked these websites and erased them from the electronic boards or even added indecent pictures to them," he said.

Hamza
told MENASSAT that the Brigades had to establish an e-media military unit "because we had to fight the enemy in the electronic media to resist being assaulted on two fronts – physically and virtually."

'E-martyr'

The e-media military unit told the London-based Arabic-language newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat in March that it had hacked several Israeli websites, uploading pictures on them of Al-Quds Brigades' martyrs and songs associated with Islamic Jihad.

"We hacked the Yediot Ahronot and Maariv newspapers, and put pictures of our martyrs like Hassan Shakoura on their sites," Hamza said.

Shakoura is said to have been the person in charge of the e-media military unit in Gaza up until he and two of his colleagues were killed on March 15 in northeast Gaza during a targeted Israeli missile strike.

The Brigades also claim to have hacked into some Israeli military sites and at least one site administered by the Jewish settler movement, as well as the Yisha news on Israel's channel 7 website, although MENASSAT could not get confirmation of this.

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