During a war, each conflicting sides can launch a variety of strategies to win. And in a wartime context, weapons aren't limited to just guns and rockets, as a man nicknamed 'Omar A' has shown.
Following the surprise attack on October 7th by the Palestinian's Hamas on Israel, both sides have been hurling rockets toward each other, creating structural damage and the lost of lives from both sides.
Omar, who reportedly a computer programming graduate of the Islamic University of Gaza, was able to use his keyboard as one of the most powerful weapons against the Israel.
According to reports, Omar is credited as being the architect behind the hacking of Israel’s notorious ‘Iron Dome’ air defense system.
This makes him one of the prime targets by the Israeli's government.
And Türkiye saved him from them.
Türkiye’s National Intelligence Organisation (Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı, or MIT) is revealed to have saved Omar A., a hacker, from Israeli's wrath.
Omar could have been abducted, or worse, assassinated, by the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, revealed MIT's counter-operations against its Israeli counterpart.
While Omar wasn't credited for helping in the war following October 7th, he is credited for helping the Palestinian Resistance group Hamas’s political wing – the Al-Qassam Brigades – launched rockets toward Israel without being adequately intercepted in 2015 and 2016.
He is also credited as being the man behind the hacking software for Gaza’s Interior Ministry, which can be used to infiltrate cell phones operating on Android.
Omar who knows how his well-being is affected by his line of work, frequently change places to stay.
But the Israeli's intelligence managed to trace him after three years trying to track him.
In order to lure him out of his hiding, Mossad anonymously offered Omar a job through a Norwegian company in 2019.
Omar didn't take the bait due to suspicions of Israeli involvement.
He remained under the radar.
But Mossad wasn't giving up.
The agency deployed an agent named Raed Ghazal, posing as the human rights manager for the French company, Think Hire. He offered Omar a job, and managed to interview him. Realizing that Omar was out of his hiding, another Mossad agent, named Omar Shalabi, was sent to the field to contact Omar. posing as another representative for Think Hire, tasked in convincing Omar into completing a software for $10,000.
Omar did the job well, and as promised, he was paid by the French company.
But the agency was still not able to locate him.
Then, in June 2022, another Mossad operative using the name Nikola Radonij contacted Omar, offering him a job either in Brazil or in Istanbul. He was accompanied by three other agents who posed as "developers."
While they tried to convince Omar to join the team for an online project, Radonij tried to reach him personally, as a friend, not a colleague, in order to persuade him to travel abroad, to a location where the agency can arrest him and bring him to Tel Aviv.
Omar was about to accept the offer, but it the MIT intervened.
The Türkiye intelligence team contacted him and warned him against the scheme.
The Mossad, seeing yet another failure, was not giving up.
Then in September 2022, Omar was having a vacation in Malaysia.
And this was when he was captured.
The Mossad agents managed to kidnap him while he was in Kuala Lumpur, where he was then brought to a remote cabin in a secluded place in the Malaysian capital.
There, Omar was interrogated and tortured.
Mossad operatives in Tel Aviv joined the interrogation through video call.
He was questioned on the methods he employed to infiltrate Iron Dome and Android-based hacking software he developed.
The MIT anticipated this, and this was why they discretely planted a spyware on his phone after their first encounter. When the Türkiye agents became aware of Omar's abduction, the officials contacted the Malaysian authorities and through tracking software, helped them to pinpoint the location where Omar was held.
Malaysian security forces raided the house and rescued Omar.
Eleven suspects were arrested in connection with his abduction.
Following the ordeal, Omar reportedly returned to Türkiye and was taken to a safe house provided by MIT, where the agency can ensure his protection, preventing further confrontation with the Mossad.
Israeli's Iron Dome, is a state-of-the-art mobile all-weather air defense system.
Developed by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries, the Iron Dome is designed to intercept and destroy any incoming short-range rockets and artillery shells that come within range.
Each Iron Dome system has three components: the first is a radar that detects incoming threats; the second is the Tamir interceptor missile that is launched to intercept the incoming rocket in the air; the third is the command-and-control center which contains the software needed for the radar and the missile to communicate with each other.
The goal is the system, which reports said that 11 is being used, is to thwart any threats that target Israeli populated area.
With initial funding from the Israeli government, the cost for each interception is around $100,000 to $150,000, which was way too much if compared to the cost of the threats the system was design to intercept.
After further calculations and tweaks, the cost was significantly decreased to around $20,000 to $50,000, when the Iron Dome was tweaked to only intercept incoming threats that can cost lives and structural damage.
It's worth noting that each Qassam rocket the Palestinian Hamas use costs $800 to make and deploy, whereas the more expensive BM-21 Grad rocket costs only several thousand dollars.
And Omar here managed to disrupt the system, by hacking into the Iron Dome command-and-control center, allowing more attacks from Palestine to reach its targets in Israel.
Besides other cyberattacks, this is the reason why Omar is considered an enemy of the state by the Israeli.
In the world where the internet has reached even the most remote places on Earth, information can travel instantly, allowing people to get whatever data, no matter where they are, at any time of day.
While this makes espionage and information extraction a lot easier, there are certain times where agents are still needed on the field to intercept targets.
Targets, like Omar A., is valuable to the Israeli, and this is why his well-being is also important for whoever is against Israel.
Before this, MIT uncovered similar Mossad plots to spy on Palestinians in the country. In July, media outlets reported that MIT exposed a "ghost" cell of 56 operatives spying on non-Türkiye nationals on behalf of the Mossad.
Türkiye-based media also reported that in May. the MIT found another cell of 15 Mossad agents based in Istanbul and made six arrests.
According to reports, the field agents who were specially trained in Europe by Mossad executives were tasked with watching a company and 23 individuals with trade ties to Iran and targeted by Israel.
Then, in December, Türkiye exposed another group of seven people spying on Palestinians for Mossad, which used their intelligence to launch online defamation campaigns and threats against Palestinians.
Besides dealing with the Israeli, the MIT previously uncovered espionage networks in recent years, including one working for Russia. They also thwarted a plot by Iran agents to assassinate Israeli citizens taking refuge Türkiye. This operation led to the discovery of a plot where Iranian intelligence operatives planned to kidnap Iranian dissidents living in Türkiye.
