Hamas hack sends users to porn site

Smutty hackers have re-routed traffic destined for the website of Arab fundamentalist movement Hamas to an x-rated site showing explicit pornography.

Users typing in www.hamas.org are redirected to the hotmotel.com pay-to-view porn site. The attack on the Hamas site follows a suicide bombing by Hamas supporters in Israel at the weekend, which killed three people.

The hack was condemned by the spiritual leader of the political wing of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who accused the hackers of "trying to disfigure the image of Islam", according to reports from the Middle East.

"I'm telling them to die of their own fury," said the Islamic cleric. "These are the people who are shedding our blood, so it is not difficult for them to do something like this."

The hack was the most recent in an outbreak of increasingly bitter cyber-warfare in the region.

In October both the Palestinian group Hezbollah and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs suffered denial of service attacks. One Palestinian protestor called the attack on the Israeli government site an "e-jihad".

In February, Lucent was hacked by Palestinian supporters protesting at the telco supplier's business links with Israel.