Palestinian Sentenced to 9 Years for Hacking Israeli Drones

A soldier brings a ‘Searcher II’ UAV down for a landing after returning from a reconnaissance mission.

Jerusaalem, 06 Jumadil Awwal 1438/03 February 2017 (MINA) – A court in Israel on Thursday sentenced a Palestinian computer engineer from Gaza to nine years in prison for hacking into Israeli drones for the terror group Islamic Jihad, the Justice Ministry said.

Timesofisrael.com quoted a transcript of the court proceedings released by the ministry as saying that Majid Oweida, a 23-year-old from Gaza City, had been convicted of spying and other offenses, following a plea bargain earlier this week.

On Thursday, it said, the district court in the southern city of Beersheba passed sentence.

The ministry said Oweida had pleaded guilty to “various offenses against state security including membership of, and activity in, a forbidden organization.”

The transcript said Oweida admitted that in 2015 he agreed to develop software “to hack into and monitor broadcasts of pictures from the skies of Gaza” by Israeli military drones.

“In so doing, he entered a conspiracy to pass information to an enemy liable to assist it in harming (Israeli) state security.”

It said he was equipped with a laptop computer, a signal decoder and a satellite dish capable of receiving data from Israel’s Amos civilian communications satellite.

It added that after two failed attempts, he managed on the third try to hack into the drone transmissions “in real time… and full HD quality.”

The pictures revealed “intelligence information about terror operatives active in firing and storing rockets in Gaza.”

The court heard that he had been recruited by Islamic Jihad in 2011 and agreed that year to “write a computer program with which it would be possible to monitor traffic cameras in Israel for the purpose of Islamic Jihad attacks.”

The transcript said live access to police data could have helped Islamic Jihad improve the accuracy of its rocket attacks into Israel and reveal the location of Israeli security forces.

It said he also infiltrated the computer system of the interior ministry of Hamas, the dominant Islamist movement that rules Gaza.

Oweida, who initially worked for Islamic Jihad as a sound engineer and presenter on one of its Gaza radio stations, was arrested in February 2016 as he traveled from Gaza to the West Bank for a broadcast of the “Super Star” Arabic-language TV singing contest.
(T/RS05/RS01)

Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)