With "empty intestines" the prisoner Hisham Abu Hawash snatches a date with freedom

An advisor to the Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners Affairs Commission said that "the prisoner Hisham Abu Hawash has suspended his open hunger strike, after reaching an agreement with the Israeli occupation authorities to release him on February 26 next."

Palestinian prisoner Hisham Abu Hawash suspended on Tuesday evening an open-ended hunger strike in Israeli prisons, which lasted 141 days, in refusal of his administrative detention, after an agreement was reached to release him on February 26.

Hassan Abd Rabbo, advisor to the Officials' Affairs Commission, said in a statement to Anadolu Agency that "Abu Hawash (40 years) suspended his open hunger strike, after reaching an agreement with the Israeli occupation authorities."

He explained that "the agreement stipulates the release of Abu Hawash with the expiry of his current administrative detention order on February 26 next."

The Anadolu Agency reported that celebrations pervaded the courtyard of the prisoner’s house, Abu Hawash, in the city of Dura, west of Hebron, in the southern occupied West Bank, with fireworks being fired, and amid chants praising his steadfastness and victory over the jailer.

During the past days, the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian factions held Israel fully responsible for Abu Hawash's life, while the Palestinian territories circulated solidarity activities with him.

Abu Hawash is a father of five children, and Israel arrested him on October 27, 2020, and transferred him to administrative detention.

Administrative detention is a decision to imprison by an Israeli military order for a period of up to 6 months, subject to extension, on the grounds of a security threat, without trial or indictment.

And before Abu Hawash, more than one Palestinian prisoner was also able to extract their freedom from Israeli prisons, through the weapon of "empty intestines (hunger strike)."

In total, the number of Palestinian prisoners and detainees in the prisons of the occupation, until the end of last December, reached about 4600, including about 500 administrative prisoners, 34 female prisoners and 160 minors, according to institutions concerned with prisoners' affairs.

Iran and Israel Will the cyber attacks ignite a military war between the two countries?

Electronic warfare methods between Israel and Iran have evolved to include attacks targeting vital places such as gas stations, various infrastructure facilities such as water and electricity, and ports. Observers point out that this could spark a devastating war between two countries that are in a state of constant escalation.

The past few months have seen an escalation of mutual accusations between Iran and Israel about cyber attacks, in which the two countries blamed each other, but neither of them officially claimed responsibility for the attacks.

And on Monday, January 3, 2022, which coincides with the second anniversary of the assassination of the former commander of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Qassem Soleimani, the account of the Israeli newspaper Maariv on Twitter and the website of the Jerusalem Post newspaper, affiliated with it, were subjected to hacking operations suspected of Tehran's involvement.

The perpetrators of the cyber-attacks published pictures of an Iranian bomb targeting the Israeli Dimona reactor, and a picture of Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated by the United States two years ago.

Observers warn that with the recent continuous escalation in the cyber war between Tehran and Tel Aviv, and the ensuing consequences and a state of panic that reached civilians, this may ignite a devastating war between two countries that raise controversy from time to time over their nuclear programs.

Israel fears that Iran could use its nuclear program to develop weapons to target the Jewish state, while the two countries have repeatedly hinted about the possibility of carrying out strikes against each other.

Disabling services and hitting infrastructure

The methods of electronic warfare between Israel and Iran have evolved to reach attacks targeting gas stations, various infrastructure facilities such as water, electricity, and communication networks, in addition to other vital places such as ports, targeting the two countries by creating a state of paralysis in vital institutions and facilities that cause huge financial losses.

On May 7, 2020, a series of Israeli water facilities were subjected to a cyber attack, without knowing whether their operating systems were seized at the time, or whether the pumping operations were merely disrupted. Meanwhile, the American Fox News network reported, at the time, that "Iran used American servers to launch a cyber attack on water and sewage facilities in Israel."

Tel Aviv’s response quickly came, as the port of “Martyr Raja’i” in Bandar Abbas, Iran, was subjected to a cyber attack that was carried out on May 9 of the same year, which caused great damage to the work of the aforementioned port, according to a report by the American newspaper “Washington Post” published after about week of the attack.

The newspaper quoted sources in the US administration and other countries as saying that the cyber attack caused serious disruptions to movement in the Iranian port area, as the computer systems that organized the movement of ships, trucks and goods transport collapsed.

According to Amos Yadlin, the former head of the Israeli Military Intelligence Division (Aman), the cyber attack on the Iranian port “appears to be the Israeli response to an earlier Iranian cyber attack on the Israeli water and sewage infrastructure,” noting that “the cyber is now being integrated into the dimensions land, sea and air to fight as a major area of ​​war."

A quantum leap in electronic warfare

Gil Baram and Kevin Lim, security studies experts in the Middle East, see that the unusual public cyber escalation between Iran and Israel is moving the conflict between them to a new, more public stage, and that conflict moves electronic warfare to a new stage, and sets different rules of electronic engagement and deterrence.

The two experts add in an article published in the American "Foreign Policy" magazine, that both adversaries deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure with cyber attacks, stressing that "even if they publicly denied this, Israel apparently chose to leak details about its attacks."

In the same context, the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman and the Iranian journalist Farnaz Faihi stated that the electronic exchange between the two countries succeeded to a large extent in creating a state of panic among civilians who felt direct targeting, which amounted to violating the privacy of civilian users in some cyber attacks.

In their article in the American newspaper, the New York Times, Bergman and Fassihi pointed out that "Israel and Iran have engaged in covert electronic warfare by land, sea, and air over the past years, but this is related to military objectives. Now, electronic warfare has expanded to target civilians on a large scale."

The article of the American newspaper touched on a cyber attack on 4,300 Iranian fuel stations last October, which Tel Aviv was accused of being involved in, which caused heavy losses and disrupted operations that provide civilians with fuel in Iran for 12 days until service was fully restored.

Likewise, following days of cyber attacks in Israel against a major medical facility and a popular gay and transgender dating site, officials in Tel Aviv pointed the finger of accusation in all of these attacks to Tehran.

The two journalists concluded that although no one died in these attacks, they succeeded in creating chaos, anger and emotional turmoil on a large scale, which constitutes a qualitative leap in the arena of electronic warfare.