I bet Hamas is crying “foul”, they never saw that coming, it’s been convention to counter Cyber Attacks with further Cyber Attacks, but there are no rules, and to be honest Hamas would have no online infrastructure to attack back anyway, there’s not exactly some high tech network around their major industries of rocket and tunnel building, and it’s not in the Israeli nature to start attacking any civilian infrastructure intentionally.
So in a world first, after first mitigating the cyber-attack, they took out the building, destroying their entire offensive hacker unit. Israel are often world leaders in CyberSec , so why not. You can read more here at Forbes.
This mitigation method sure beats the HoneyPots and Firewall I use to secure this site, which is under constant malicious vulnerability scans and DDoS attacks, I used to (attempt) to hack a few of our own attackers back, but it’s a waste of time.
ZDNet disputes this being a first, claiming the drone strike on Junaid Hussain in 2015, but I argue that was more of an assassination of a particular nasty hacker, with no intel that he was actively involved in a hack. Removing the entire hacker unit as was done here was a far more elegant a response. You can read their dispute here at ZDNet.