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ISRAEL

Ship to Gaza hit by cyber attack

The website of Swedish Ship to Gaza has been subjected to a cyber attack, in the latest setback to befall the aid and protest convoy the Freedom Flotilla II.

Ship to Gaza hit by cyber attack
Photo: Screengrab Ship to Gaza blog

The group were forced to shut down their website on Friday after a so-called overload attack which forced their server company to pull the plug.

“Since Friday morning our server supplier has been under attack, which means that our website is down. We can’t say for sure if it is directed against us, but it is obviously an advanced attack,” Ship to Gaza wrote in a statement.

The organisation shifted their information feed to a temporary blog and are considering whether to report the matter to the police, while they sought to play down the impact of the attack.

“The effects of the attack were not those desired,” Ship to Gaza press spokesperson Mikael Löfgren told the TT news agency.

The Freedom Flotilla II, uniting 300 activists from all walks of life and 22 different countries, and aiming to transport necessities and to protest the Israeli blockade of the Palestinian-controlled coastal strip, has suffered a slew of setbacks.

Israel has made no secret of its determination to prevent the flotilla from reaching Gaza, which has been under a blockade since 2006 after militants there snatched an Israeli soldier who is still being held at a secret location.

Earlier this summer the Swedish Ship to Gaza group reported damage to their boat Juliano, while berthed in Piraeus harbour in Greece.

The Israeli government later rejected the claims of the Swedish Ship to Gaza movement that “foreign agents” had sabotaged their boat, calling it a “James Bond-esque” insinuation, with no bearing on reality.

The Juliano remains held by the coastguard in Iraklio, Crete having recently lost its second flag, from St.Kitts and Nevis, after Sierra Leone earlier withdrew theirs.

The French-registered ship Dignité is currently the only vessel of the original fleet to be sailing towards the Gaza coast. Swedish Ship to Gaza spokesperson, Dror Feiler, is among the ten activists onboard.

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ISRAEL

Former Israeli soldier attacked on Berlin street

A former Israeli soldier was attacked in the German capital Berlin, police said Saturday, with one or several unknown assailants spraying him with an irritant and throwing him to the ground.

Former Israeli soldier attacked on Berlin street
Israeli soldiers on operation near the Gaza Strip. Photo: dpa | Ilia Yefimovich

The 29-year-old was wearing a top with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) logo when the attackers started harassing him on Friday about his religion, the police added, calling it “an anti-Semitic attack”.

Officers are seeking the assailants, who fled immediately after the attack, on suspicion of a politically-motivated crime.

Saturday is the second anniversary of an attack by a far-right gunman on a synagogue in the eastern German city of Halle, who killed two in a rampage when he failed to break into the house of worship.

It was one of a string of incidents that led authorities to declare the far right and neo-Nazis Germany’s top security threat.

Also this week, a musician claimed he was turned away from a hotel in eastern city Leipzig for wearing a Star-of-David pendant.

While the allegations prompted a fierce response from a Jewish community unsettled by increasing anti-Semitic crimes, several investigations have been mounted into contradictory accounts of the incident.

In 2019, police recorded 2,032 anti-Semitic crimes, an increase of 13 percent year-on-year.

“The threat is complex and comes from different directions” from jihadists to the far right, the federal government’s commissioner for the fight against anti-Semitism Felix Klein said recently.

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