On July 18, independent media outlet Mondoweiss reported that an anonymous collective of tech professionals, known as Zionism Observer, had successfully led a campaign to shut down a horrific “extortion” website managed by Israeli Defense Forces for the third time since its April launch. In a remarkable and inspiring example of effective grassroots anti-Zionist activism, multiple major online hosting, domain registration and software companies were publicly pressured into purging the monstrous resource from the web. But today, it’s operational once more.

Known as Alkasheff Gaza, the website hosts a searchable database of Palestinians, along with their names, government identification numbers, addresses, places of worship, and more. It is claimed that the individuals listed spied for Hamas. This information is drawn from local municipal police files seized by IDF operatives. The resource burst into public view in May when Israeli forces rained down leaflets on Gazans featuring pictures and names of 130 purported spies and a QR code for visiting their contactable Telegram channel.

Even more sinisterly, these leaflets threatened that the IDF would publish damaging details on even more Gazans if they didn’t first call the IDF on a number included on the leaflet.

Hundreds of thousands of reports on you, the people of Gaza, have been collected…Do you want to know if you were spied on and reported? Go to the website, enter your ID number, and find out who reported you.

A “military source” told Israeli publication Haaretz that the IDF had “legal permission to engage in this extortion.”

“Collaborator with [Hamas] General Security! Have you found out if your ID number is on the website? We will soon reveal your details to everyone. You can still save yourself – call us,” the pamphlet warned. Adjacent, the photo and name of a Palestinian man featured, along with the caption, “today’s snitch.” He allegedly provided information to Hamas on an individual who frequently visited Egypt to have sexual relations with a married woman whose husband spent extended periods away from home in the Gulf States.

Such disclosures starkly contrast to the declarations of a nameless IDF official, who, in defending the leaflet drop, told Haaretz that Israel’s military “didn’t put personal stories there” or “provide details about what these people knew or collected.” The same source also dismissed suggestions that Alkasheff Gaza was a “means of extortion.” Instead, they claimed the intention was to “awaken the public there, showing it what Hamas has done.”

People whose photos we’ve published were carefully selected by Hamas, which recruited them for spying and extorting people. These are people from clans which are identified with Hamas. It’s part of the way Hamas uses people. We propose to all civilians and people who’ve had similar experiences to give us information.”

Gravely undermining this benign explanation, some of the “informants and collaborators” pictured on the IDF’s leaflets were just children, some of whom looked no older than 10, while others appeared younger than five. In addition to allegations that individuals featured on the leaflets had spied for Hamas, they featured an ominous threat to reveal deeply damaging personal information on targets, including criminal records, extramarital affairs and sexual proclivities. These were accompanied by requests for intelligence on Hamas and the location of remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza.

Mental coercion of civilians in war zones is a brazen violation of established laws of war and the Genocide Convention. Yet, these tactics have been a core component of IDF operations since October 2023. Israel has bombarded Palestinians with leaflets demanding “surrender now or you will die” or simply mocking their impossibly bleak situation. One airdrop in December even featured a Quranic quote about the fate of “wrongdoers.”

In reality, it appears the purpose of Alkasheff Gaza is psychological torture – to spread distrust, disunity, and disillusionment among the area’s already embattled population, who live under the daily threat of total annihilation. As monstrous as this effort might be, there are substantial grounds to believe its repeated respawning is reflective of the IDF’s broader catastrophic failure in Gaza. And, in turn, yet another harbinger of Israel’s impending, inevitable extinction.

 

‘Very Sloppy’

A Zionism Observer activist – a software developer who wishes to remain anonymous – tells MintPress News that the ease and speed with which their activist group initially succeeded in purging Alkasheff Gaza from the internet “felt like a substantial victory.” But then, the IDF completely rebuilt the online database using new tools and hosts. The second time around, the website featured a note stating without irony: “Suspicious people are trying to keep us from exposing Hamas.” Zionism Observer promptly added “suspicious people” to their X bio.

The software developer suspects that the website’s earlier, “scarier” incarnation was a significant factor in compelling NameCheap, Webflow, and Twitter/X to deplatform Alkasheff Gaza within a matter of days in May. Zionism Observer and many named and unnamed online activists bombarded these companies with requests to remove the site, and they acquiesced. In addition to photos and biographical information on innocent children, “the site had a timer, along with a warning that when the timer expired, damaging information would be released on average citizens without delay.”

Zionism Observer was very surprised by the third relaunch, on May 25, which they then took down in the days. The fourth led to its current iteration, which remains extant as of July 31 and can be accessed via .com, .info and .net domains. For a variety of reasons, Zionism Observer is at a loss as to why the IDF persists in maintaining the site, let alone relaunching it whenever it’s taken down:

The database became useless after the 12th evacuation order, if not before. It lists information on locals, where they are, and where they pray, but do the mosques listed even exist anymore? Israel has been shoving people all over the place. Despite facial recognition cameras throughout Gaza, I don’t think the IDF has any clue where people are. This could just be psychological warfare, intended to make the population not trust each other and terrify individual citizens into believing the Zionists have dirt on them somehow.”

Mossad has a lengthy, deplorable history of blackmailing LGBT Palestinians, threatening them with public exposure if they refuse to turn agent and spy on their families, friends, and local communities. “This would be doing that at scale,” Zionism Observer’s software developer tells MintPress News. Although, they aren’t entirely convinced of that explanation. They are also confused by the site’s unsophisticated construction. Despite apparently being a formal IDF project, it isn’t built using the same tools as the Forces’ official websites:

They’re using ‘no/low-code’ tools that help people who aren’t programmers build software. If professional developers created the site instead, there is a good chance that I wouldn’t even be able to figure out what tools were used to build and power the site, and there certainly wouldn’t be abuse-reporting forms and e-mails to direct people to. This could have been running on a server in an IDF datacenter, completely opaque to researchers. Perhaps someone unqualified to do this kind of thing got the contract, did it in a very sloppy way, and they’re now desperately trying to keep it going?”

Another mystery for Zionism Observer is whether the database is working from the IDF’s perspective and, if not, whether it ever did. What “working” would entail is likewise opaque. Have any scared Palestinians reached out to the IDF? That was clearly a core founding objective of Alkasheff Gaza, given that accompanying Telegram accounts were registered and leaflet recipients and website visitors were directed to contact the Forces anonymously through these resources.

Eerily, what’s clear is that Alkasheff Gaza was intended to gather information on all its visitors. Among the back-end revelations, Zionism Observer identified was that the site’s searchable database of entries forwarded not only any terms entered to the IDF but also a visitor’s IP address, latitude, longitude, and city and region of residence.

This would, of course, harvest a wealth of deeply sensitive intelligence on both Palestinians and foreign citizens. The software developer speculates:

Perhaps that is the site’s value, and why they refuse to give up. Or, is the IDF as technologically incompetent as they are militarily? Maybe all they’re really good at is spying on people, and the operatives spying on people are spending more time jerking off to webcams than they are doing their actual jobs?”

 

XXXX

Alkasheff Gaza is not the only ineptly constructed IDF resource over which Zionism Observer has run roughshod. Another, a subsection of Israel’s dedicated “Iron Swords” website, ostensibly provided an interactive “evacuation” – read: forced displacement – map for trapped Gazans. It relied heavily on a secret Israeli military intelligence database, which was openly revealed in the site’s publicly and easily accessible source code. As a result, the IDF effectively leaked its own secrets to every site visitor, both English and Arabic.

Strikingly, the map divided Gaza into 620 “population blocks” – so too did the database, which dated to April 2022. This could just be a coincidence. Or it may suggest that the ongoing genocide has been in Israel’s pipeline for a long time. Whatever the truth of the matter, Zionism Observer turned the tables on the “evacuation” site, using its source code to construct a resource of their own – Gaza Maps.

They hope it will soon be interactive, allowing visitors to click on areas of Gaza and see TikTok videos shot there by the IDF, relevant evacuation orders, and much more. This is one of many Zionism Observer projects under development, and the collective intends to keep going in the name of Palestine solidarity. Like the tireless Resistance, time, justice, and virtue are on their side. So, too, is international law.

Throughout the U.S., state laws designed to damage or outright proscribe the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement are on the local statute. This could make it illegal for companies to deplatform Alkasheff Gaza or any other Israeli government-affiliated website. In Arizona, where NameCheap is based, for instance, “an amended anti-boycott law in effect…prohibits state contracts with and state investments in entities that boycott Israel or territories occupied by Israel.”

Yet, in the wake of the International Criminal Court seeking arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his Security Minister Yoav Gallant in May for “crimes against humanity” committed in Gaza since “at least” October 8, 2023, there is now a significant degree of legal protection for pursuing and enforcing boycotts against Israel, that would override such anti-BDS legislation. As MintPress reported in June, an analysis by the University Network for Human Rights spells out the legal obligation to prevent genocide in the wake of ICC rulings:

The duty to prevent genocide in Gaza encompasses a range of measures. First, it is imperative that states exercise all means of political and diplomatic pressure toward the cessation of Israeli military operations in Gaza. States exporting arms or military equipment to Israel or providing other forms of military aid or logistical assistance that contribute to or enable Israel’s military operations against Palestinians in Gaza have an obligation to immediately terminate all forms of aid and assistance.

The duty to prevent genocide starts as soon as a state learns or should have learned, about a serious risk of genocide. The ICC highlighted this serious risk of genocide in Gaza in a preliminary finding in January in a case brought against Israel by South Africa. All of Israel’s Western allies, who are signatories to the Genocide Convention and provide military and political support to Tel Aviv, are consequently obligated to attempt to stop the violence in Gaza. There has been little state-level action on this since the genocide began. As such, it falls to concerned citizens and major corporations to fulfill those obligations. The success of Zionism Observer’s efforts to date should give us pause—and the motivation to pressure all companies providing services of any kind to Israel to boycott, divest, and sanction accordingly.

Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News

Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist and MintPress News contributor exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. His work has previously appeared in The Cradle, Declassified UK, and Grayzone. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg.

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