The website of Radio 786 was hacked on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, allegedly from Israel. A journalist from the radio station, Gadija Davids, was the only South African onboard the flotilla which was trying to deliver supplies to Gaza when it was attacked by Israeli Defence Force soldiers.
Radio 786 is a community radio station in Cape Town. The station’s licence holder is the Islamic Unity Convention.
A notice on the Radio 786 homepage reads: ‘We apologise for the downtime on the Radio 786 website. Subsequent investigation by our service providers has revealed that the Radio 786 website and server came under attack from a foreign IP address, causing it to crash.”
Hate mail
An audio clip on the site from the Radio 786 service provider says the IP addresses of the computers that attacked the site were traced to Israel. Since the website crashed, the radio station has received hate mail.
Nick Arvanitis, managing associate at information security company Sensepost, told the Mail & Guardian on Wednesday that it would be fairly easy to attack a website, as many people were not aware of how to protect their sites from being compromised. “It happens a lot; it’s definitely possible,” he said.
He explained that tracing IP addresses was also quite simple to do: “Log files will be stored on a web server, and addresses within a specific range are linked to a certain registry, and this is region-specific.” However Aravantis said the Israeli IP address did not necessarily mean the attack had come from Israel. “It could be someone who had compromised a vulnerable server in Israel and made it look like it had come from Israel. So it could legitimately be an Israeli, or it could be someone just wanting to stir the pot,” he said.
Davids is on her way home after being detained with hundreds of other activists during the deadly raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla, and kicked out of Israel on Wednesday, AP reported.
New shipment
Now, with nine unidentified bodies lying in the mortuary, a new stand-off with a pro-Palestinian aid ship is looming.
Israel’s political leadership was locked in talks over how to handle the arrival of another foreign aid ship, due early next week.
And as the diplomatic fall-out intensified over the bloody commando raid, which reportedly killed four Turks, Ankara issued an ultimatum that it would rethink its ties with Israel if all of its nationals were not released by Wednesday evening.
Monday’s bloody showdown may have hurt Israel’s international standing but it appears to have done little to deter activists bent on running the Gaza blockade.
VIPs on board
Another ship of Irish and Malaysian activists is heading toward Gaza and another potentially explosive standoff.
The Rachel Corrie, which is carrying building supplies, is in the Mediterranean, and organisers say it will be several days before it arrives in Gaza.
It is reported to be carrying 15 people, including a Nobel Prize winner from Ireland and a Malaysian MP.
There were about 380 Turks on board the six-boat flotilla when it was raided by Israeli naval forces in international waters in a pre-dawn operation that quickly deteriorated into bloodshed and chaos.
Turkish pressure
A diplomatic source in Ankara said four Turks were killed and about 20 injured, with the remainder held in an Israel jail until Wednesday morning, when at least 200 of them were bussed to the airport and sent home to Turkey.
Israel rushed to quickly repatriate all the activists on Wednesday in a move that appeared to be driven by pressure from Turkey’s top diplomat, who on Tuesday relayed a warning via the United States.