Their main target was the Bank of Israel's Web site, but they couldn't shut it down.
IDefense spotted jihadist hackers unsuccessfully trying to take down the Bank of Israel's Web site (see box, p. 76).
D-marks, the Bank of Israel has repeatedly been forced to sell shekels to keep the currency from bursting through the band.
But at the same time, the Bank of Israel, the central bank, wants to lower inflation to the 3-4% range, close to that in other wealthy countries.
In addition, substantial amounts of national wealth remain concentrated in conglomerates controlled by a small number of powerful families, something that concerns policy makers as senior as the governor of the Bank of Israel.
The Bank of Israel released a statement last Tuesday saying that, based on information from credit card companies, only around 15, 000 credit card numbers were exposed and those credit cards were blocked for use in Internet and phone purchases.
Quitting Gaza, the Palestinians fear, will simply give him diplomatic cover, and free resources he can concentrate on his longer-term strategy, which they claim is to use the security wall to carve out a Greater Israel on large chunks of the West Bank, the bit of occupied territory Israel really cares about and where there are settlers in their hundreds of thousands, not just thousands.
Travelling around the holy sites of Bethlehem is made difficult by the West Bank Barrier, a security wall built by the Israeli army to seal off the West Bank from the rest of Israel.
Mahmoud Zahar, for instance, fondly recalls taking the train from Gaza to his mother's hometown of Ismailiya, on the far bank of the Suez Canal, before Israel's 1967 occupation.
In any event, the Fatah-dominated PA still controls only limited areas of the West Bank, as Israel keeps a tight grip on much of the land.
The Palestinians resisted this because they had good reason to suspect that Israel's then government was interested less in reaching a final agreement than in keeping the bulk of the West Bank under Israel's permanent control.
One reason is that the current repression of Hamas in the West Bank looks like a repetition of the Fatah-Israel collaboration in the mid-1990s, when Hamas was trying to disrupt the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the late Yasser Arafat's Fatah.
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Earlier on Wednesday, he visited Qasr el Yahud - the site on the West Bank of the River Jordan where Israel says Jesus was baptised.
An old-style democrat, he is also a hardliner who argues for a Greater Israel that would embrace the whole of Palestine, with the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza given full citizenship of Israel.
To be sure, military governance is by its nature not fully democratic, and absent a near-term ability to resolve the ultimate status of the disputed West Bank, Israel can enhance its own democratic institutions by transitioning institutions in the West Bankto more democratic rule.
The suicide bombings, in particular, have weakened Palestinian calls for international intervention in the teeth of Israel's reconquest of the West Bank.
They include Israel annexing up to 4% of the West Bank in exchange for an equivalent chunk of Israel.
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The stage will then be set for the ultimate defeat of Fatah by Hamas in the West Bank as well, putting all of Israel within range of its weapons.
The agreement in January on the West Bank town of Hebron and, even more, the accompanying pledge by Israel to withdraw in stages from other (unspecified) parts of the West Bank locked Mr Netanyahu into the process.
The settler movement as a whole sees disengagement as the thin edge of a wedge that will eventually lever Israel out of the West Bank and parts of Jerusalem as well.
But it will be a matter of time before al Qaeda and other Saudi-backed Islamist groups use this territory - and whatever parts of the West Bank Israel foolishly decides to surrender next - to prepare their attacks on the rest of us.
They strongly oppose the colonisation of the West Bank and admit that, in practice, Israel's treatment of its Arab citizens has fallen far short of the standard that should be demanded of a liberal democracy.
If Israel is not in danger of losing its Jewish majority even if it retains control over the West Bank, then Israel may retain all options on the table for ultimate resolution of the conflict from yielding the territory to a peaceful Palestinian neighbor through power-sharing in the areas to full incorporation of the areas into Israel.
The Bush spokesman walked a delicate balance, trying not to criticize Israel's decision to build a fence along the West Bank to keep Palestinian suicide bombers out of Israel, but making it clear the administration did not necessarily think that is a "constructive" step.
Faced with such a stark choice between the Israeli people and the Biblical land, Israel, he says, would choose the people and withdraw from the West Bank, uprooting dozens of settlements, though not those in the main blocs protecting Israel's border.
The eastern sector of the holy city is one of the territories that Israel has occupied, along with the West Bank, Gaza and others, since a 1967 war.
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The danger for the Palestinians is that the Gaza pull-out and the vague talk of a land swap turn out to be a cover for Mr Sharon to concentrate on what they suspect is his longer-term strategy: to use the barrier wall to incorporate big chunks of the West Bank into a Greater Israel.
He left the Palestinian West Bank in 1967 at the age of 11 after Israel moved into the territory during the Six Day War.
He has not moved an inch in his demands: statehood, East Jerusalem, 100 percent of the West Bank and the right of return of Palestinian refugees (which would swamp Israel demographically and instantly destroy the Jewish state).
Jordanian officials fear that the frustrated travellers could be the first trickle in a flood of refugees born of Israel's re-occupation of the West Bank.
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