[infowar.de] Palestinian websites knocked offline

[Krystian Woznicki <krystian -! - snafu - de>]

Infowar.de, http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~bendrath/liste.html
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1966000/1966335.stm

Palestinian websites knocked offline

By Alfred Hermida
BBC News Online technology staff

Israel's military action in the Palestinian territories has disrupted the 
region's computer networks. Many Palestinian websites run from the region 
have been knocked offline for weeks, including most government sites. Since 
the Israeli withdrawal from certain areas, Palestinians technicians have 
been working to restore the telecoms network. For their part, computer 
security experts say Israeli websites have been the target of hackers, 
although most government websites have remained readily available.

Equipment destroyed

The disruption to Palestinian websites started at the beginning of April, 
when Israeli troops hit the Nablus headquarters of the Palestinian telecoms 
network, PalTel. Set up in 1996 at a cost of $65m cost, PalTel provided the 
communication infrastructure for the territories. As a result, many sites 
were set up to temporarily redirect visitors to a holding page at the 
US-based ElectronicIntifada site. "During the time of incursion, most of 
the servers were affected," said Sabri Saidam, a technology consultant who 
worked on the Palestinian Authority web projects. "The rampage targeted 
Palestinian institutions, as well as internet service providers and private 
groups," he told the BBC programme, Go Digital. In some cases, computer 
equipment was destroyed, offices badly damaged and electricity supplies 
cut. An eyewitness who visited the offices of the Health, Development, 
Information and Policy Institute in Ramallah described a scene of 
devastation there. "All the computers in the office have been thrown into 
one big pile at the entrance, desks and chairs are broken and scattered on 
top of each other," wrote Patricia Smith in a report for a Palestinian NGO. 
"The computer hard-drives have been taken out and the server is gone, 
together with all the printers and fax machines."

'Extremely painful'

Rebuilding the computer network is going to take time and money. Many of 
the fledgling websites of the Palestinian Authority had been funded by 
international donors. The EU, US and even China had helped to pay for the 
equipment and facilities destroyed in the recent violence. "There were 
hopes of building on the peace that existed in the last seven years," said 
Dr Saidam. "Sadly, all this seems to have collapsed. All these dreams seem 
to have been dashed. "It has been extremely painful to see everything you 
have worked on being demolished before your own eyes," he said. For 
activists, the damage has been done to the ability of Palestinians to use 
the net to spread information about events on the ground. "These days much 
of the Palestinian advocacy takes place on the internet. This relies not so 
much on websites but on e-mail from the ground," said Nigel Parry of the 
US-based ElectronicIntifada.


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