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Members of Anonymous recently targeted dozens of Israeli Web sites in response to Israel's attacks on the Gaza strip.

"The long-simmering conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians sharply escalated Wednesday, with both sides launching airstrikes," explains The Huffington Post's Gerry Smith. "The fighting has killed at least 15 Palestinians and at least three people in Israel over the past two days, according to The Associated Press."

"In a coordinated action that began at 3 a.m. New York time Thursday, hackers attacked Web sites belonging to the Israel Defense Forces, the prime minister’s office, Israeli banks, airlines and security companies by flooding them with Web traffic, in a campaign they called #OpIsrael," writes The New York Times' Nicole Perlroth.

"For far [too] long, Anonymous has stood by with the rest of the world and watched in despair the barbaric, brutal and despicable treatment of the Palestinian people in the so called 'Occupied Territories' by the Israel Defense Force," the hackers wrote in a press release on Thursday. "Like so many around the globe, we have felt helpless in the face of such implacable evil. And today's insane attack and threatened invasion of Gaza was more of the same."

"A number of Twitter handles claiming to represent various factions of Anonymous have listed sites that hackers have compromised or taken down," writes NBC News' Devin Coldewey. "Several point to a list at this Pastebin document, which has at least 50 separate sites serving hacker messages from various groups."

"As part of OpIsrael, the decentralized Anonymous collective is not just using its numbers to deface and disrupt sites, but also to inform Gazans on how they can remain online if the Israeli government cuts their internet connection," writes SC Magazine's Dan Kaplan.

"Anonymous Twitter accounts provided links to what they described as an Anonymous Gaza Care Package with tools for staying online if Israel cuts Internet service the Gaza Strip during its military action," writes Forbes' Andy Greenberg. "Another hacker group, Telecomix, provided its own detailed instructions in English and Arabic for using dial-up connections, a technique it first suggested during the Egyptian Internet outage surrounding the Arab Spring protests there last year."