JERUSALEM — Israel's bruising war on the Islamic militants who control Gaza has moved online, where sites like YouTube and Facebook are the new battlegrounds.
Israel posted video of its attacks on militants firing rockets over the past five days on a new YouTube channel to try to show the world the threat against it.
YouTube temporarily yanked the clips on Tuesday after viewers, apparently supporters of Hamas, flagged it as objectionable and asked that it be taken down. The video-sharing Web site restored the video a few hours later, labeling it inappropriate for minors.
Supporters of Gaza's Hamas rulers, meanwhile, have posted images of the devastating Israeli offensive on both YouTube and Facebook and on blogs, uploading images of the carnage and suffering in the tiny seaside territory.
The militants themselves regularly update their Web sites in Arabic and English. In addition, they broadcast images of masked, uniformed fighters on Hamas TV, which was bombed by Israeli warplanes but continues to broadcast from a mobile unit."The blogosphere and the new media are basically a war zone" in a battle for world opinion, an Israeli military spokesman, Maj. Avital Leibovich, said Wednesday.
The attacks are not just on each other, either. When Powerline included some of the IDF videos on their site they were hit with a denial of service attack that flooded their site with millions of hits in an attempt to keep legitimate traffic from getting through. It briefly slowed things down but has since been fixed with additional safeguards in place to prevent the future success of such an attack.
In this 24/7 media world we live in each side will do their best to win not only the physical battles but the propaganda fights as well.
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