On the anniversary of the killing of a top Iranian general two years ago, hackers targeted two major Israeli media outlets Monday leaving a message on their pages.
The website of the English-language Jerusalem Post and the Twitter account of Hebrew-language Maariv were taken over with a picture of a fist firing a shell out of a ring with a red stone on a finger toward an exploded dome.
"We are close to you where you do not think about it," reads the text in English and Hebrew below the fist.
The hacking came exactly two years after the Jan. 3, 2020 U.S. drone strike in Baghdad that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, who headed the Quds Force, the foreign operations arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.
The U.S. said at the time that Soleimani, who was often seen wearing a ring with a red stone, was planning imminent action against U.S. personnel in Iraq.
According to The Jerusalem Post, the hack lasted a few hours. Maariv's Twitter account had deleted the foreign tweet and had not posted anything new by Monday noon.
It was not immediately clear who had hacked the Israeli news outlets.
Israel fears Iran's nuclear program could be used to acquire weapons to harm the Jewish state, and the two countries regularly issue hints of possible strikes on one another.
