An Israeli laser weapon that also shoots down Hamas rockets is a wise addition to Israel’s quiver, considering Hamas’ active cyber efforts to neutralize the Iron Dome system and disrupt IDF communications at high and low frequencies in the May 2021 war.
According to a senior Israeli officer, Hamas established “electronic warfare units in order to disrupt the accuracy of the IDF. Hamas wants to infiltrate or disrupt IDF systems on the spectrum, on the web, using GPS jammers and other capabilities.” He continued, “The aim is to lower the level of accuracy of the weapons and to impair connectivity.”
On May 15, 2021, Israel demolished the Jalaa Building in Gaza after warning residents to evacuate. Heeding the warning, everyone left the building and no one was hurt. “The first five floors were offices, with floors six to 10 inhabited by families,” according to the Guardian. “On floor 11, the top floor, were the Gaza offices of the Associated Press and Al Jazeera.”35
The British paper went to great length to identify the residents on floors six to 10 and detail their fears and plight. But who inhabited the “offices on the first five floors?” Hamas special units.
“In the newsroom building, there were international media agencies,” explained Brig.-Gen. (res.) Nati Cohen, former chief of the IDF’s C4I (command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence) unit. “But in the same building, there was Hamas weaponry and units whose purpose was to disrupt the IDF’s systems. If you looked at the roof, there were a lot of antennas, ostensibly for communication. But not all of them were. Some of them belonged to Hamas.”
Cohen continued, “Hamas sought to disrupt the IDF’s cybernetic superiority and established elite units for that purpose. Some of the Hamas people killed were on this power accumulation axis. At least ten targets destroyed during the Guardian of the Walls operation were Hamas C4I and electronic warfare targets.”
A Hamas Computer Server Farm
There are indications that Hamas was running a cyber “server farm.” Was one of those IDF targets against Hamas the server farm used to process vast amounts of data like radio signals and process information for jamming transmissions? Maintaining a “server farm” of hundreds or thousands of computers entails running them 24/7, using massive amounts of power, and providing a stable cooling environment.
Brig.-Gen. (res.) Nati Cohen responded to a question about an IDF attack on a Hamas server farm, a topic that has not been discussed in the public media:
This is a dilemma between the intelligence officer who wants to collect information [presumably by hacking the Hamas cyber facility] and the C4I officer who wants to disrupt the capability. There is always tension between collecting and attacking. We exhausted the information, and it was decided that the server farm was producing excess power for Hamas. One of their goals is to produce messages. So the farm became a legitimate target.
Picture: An Israeli airstrike destroys a high-rise building in Gaza City, Gaza Strip, that housed media outlets including The Associated Press and Al Jazeera.