The building in red was reportedly the cyber headquarters for Hamas.
Israeli forces blew it up with bombs over the weekend.Israel says it answered a cyber attack with both cyber defense and then bombs dropped from the air:
And a ZDNet report shared the actual air attack on the Hamas cyber forces:
The offensive was part of a weekend of brutal fighting between Hamas in Gaza and Israel, which the Israel Defense Forces tallied like this:
The physical bombing of cyber operatives is shining new light on a question many in cybersecurity have been asking for awhile: when could cyber war be treated like "regular" physical war?
NATO made a key statement about this in 2016:
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has officially announced that "cyber" will become an official battleground for its members, which means that cyber-attacks on one country will trigger a collective military response from the entire alliance.
And SecureWorld reported a few months ago about a perspective on this topic by the World Economic Forum. Cyber attacks are bringing physical consequences:
"A worrying indicator is the barrage of cyber attacks to which Ukraine has been subjected since 2014, giving rise to suspicions that Russia is using Ukraine as a test-bed for disruptive attacks of ever greater sophistication, such as CrashOverride, an autonomous exploit designed to enable the remote closing down of electricity-generation systems.
Physical damage arising from activities initiated in the cyber domain is already a reality. Fatalities, at the very least as a second-order consequence of persistent and large-scale digital disruption, may not be far behind."
How will countries respond to cyber attacks which lead to citizens being killed? Will it be with a traditional military measures?
You can read more about this in our story, Cyber War vs. Traditional War: The Difference Is Fading.
And with the Israeli airstrike on Hamas cyber operations, it appears the distinction may have already faded.