Friday October 20 12:27 PM ET

Hizbollah Says Pro-Israelis Damaged Its Web Site

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Lebanon's Hizbollah guerrilla group said on Friday its Web site server crashed earlier this month after being targeted by millions of hits and hostile e-mails from Israel and the United States.

It said the crash occurred on October 7, the day Hizbollah guerrillas captured three Israeli soldiers in an ambush at the border in south Lebanon.

``We have names of 8,521 servers mainly in these two countries that have been hitting our Web site regularly and sending us simultaneously tens of thousands of hostile e-mails, some of them carrying viruses to sabotage our server,'' Ali Ayoub, the group's web master, told Reuters.

``This is a well known method used to kill Web sites. This is Israeli technological warfare.''

Hizbollah's Web site provides detailed information and news on the group's policies, statements and guerrilla attacks. Hizbollah says the site normally gets between 100,000 and 300,000 hits a day depending on developments in the region.

``We noticed that the number of hits on our Web site increased significantly at the beginning of the month after we started showing live video clips and information about the killing of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza,'' Ayoub said.

``The number increased to nine million hits per day, mainly from Israel, the United States and to a lesser degree from Canada and South Africa. It became a real e-mail bombing,'' he added.

Ayoub said Hizbollah dealt with the problem by launching seven back-up sites on different addresses while trying to fix and upgrade the capacity of the main Web site (www.hizbollah.org) to cope with higher numbers of hits.

Ayoub said the Web site was important for Hizbollah in its campaign against Israel.

``We will never give up the Internet,'' he said. ``We have successfully used it in the past when we showed video clips and pictures of the damage caused by Israeli bombings on Lebanon.''

Hizbollah's war of attrition helped force Israel to pull out its troops from south Lebanon in May, ending a 22-year occupation.