On the ground, as we well know, they do it with stones and bullets. In reality, the conflict which has been gradually escalating in the past several years is heavily tilted to one side, and the casualties are mostly adolescent Palestinians. In the virtual reality of cyberspace, things are much more recent and potentially much more even.

The war took to the ‘Net’ in early October last year with Israeli supporters crashing the Jordanian-based Albawaba.com site and filling its chatroom with offensive emails and images. The same occurred on several Hizbollah-related web sites. Palestinian supporters retaliated by infiltrating Netvision, the Israeli ISP (Internet Service Provider) that hosts sites for the Israeli Parliament (the Knesset), the Foreign Ministry and the defence forces. This did little except to slow the service down and make life miserable for subscribers wanting to log on. When AT&T came to help Netvision, it became another American business to find itself on the recent list of companies boycotted by various Islamic and Arab groups.

The Guardian newspaper reports that iDefense, an electronic security firm, has identified about 90 Israeli and 20 Arab/Palestinian web sites that have been attacked. These infiltrations, like the ones mentioned above, have been relatively minor: either simply defacing the opposition’s site or co-opting sympathetic surfers to support an overload of the site’s ISP. One example is what happened to Unity, one of the Arab/Islamic groups, when it circulated an email claiming it had successfully defaced the Israel Institute of Technology’s site. The only proof of this could be found on Unity’s own web page, where a copy of the page was posted. The Institute had remedied the problem immediately. However, the Israeli response did not stop there. Pressure was brought to bear on Unity’s English-language ISP, Ummah.com. Ummah.com closed down its associated attack site, blaming ‘Zionists and their supporters’ for threatening to deny Ummah bandwidth which would effectively shut it down completely.

Web site overloading and interference may require more time to remedy but even less intervention, with the site relying mainly on the lack of sustained interest and support from surfers to continue their ‘jamming’.

However, hackers are an ingenious group of people and a certain ‘Doctor Nuker, founder of the Pakistan Hackerz Club’, has made a much more sophisticated attack. Dr Nuker accessed one of many pro-Israel lobby groups in the USA, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), where he/she not only defaced the site but also downloaded credit card details of 700 Internet subscribers - including a Republican senator. The FBI has advised them to cancel their cards and monitor transactions.

Not all of these Internet skirmishes have been bloodless. A sinister twist has occurred very recently with a reported Internet-linked killing. A young Israeli male was invited or lured to visit a Palestinian-controlled area with the intention of meeting a female chatroom correspondent. Instead, he met his death, as the Israeli press insists, at the hands of Palestinians.

Internet sites and Internet users will become more vigilant and more cautious. This is not like popular Internet games such as ‘Doom’ or ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ where baddies can be virtually blasted to pieces and the heroes can always fight another day. This Virtual Reality is becoming reality. Nothing prevents either a technically adept individual or technologically advanced government agency from wreaking cyber havoc upon an enemy. Nothing perhaps except a well-developed sense of ethics or a well-founded fear of legal retaliation. The pen - in this case, the computer - is once again proving itself to be potentially much mightier than the sword. But will it be any less dangerous?

with thanks to The Guardian’s Brian Whitaker