TEHRAN – General Gholamreza Jalali, the head of the Passive Defense Organization of Iran, said Monday that Iran thwarted many big cyberattacks before they were launched. 

Speaking at a press briefing in Tehran, Jalali said, “Since last year, with the help of the Ministry of Intelligence and the Intelligence organization of the IRGC, we have been able to identify and repel 10 basic cyber attacks before the attack.”

He added, “In one case, the intelligence sources told us that an attack will be made on the electricity dispatching in the next few days. We designed 16 operational measures in a short period of time and were able to identify and repel this attack with the cooperation of the cyber friends of the electricity company.”

He added, “We took strategic measures in the field of cyber defense. We solved most of the simple problems in this field with training.”

Jalali said, “In the field of security holes, we came to the conclusion that we should have internal products. As a result, with the cooperation of knowledge-based companies and the Ministry of Defense, we prepared 300 local products in this area and last year we repelled 80% of attacks with these products.”

He continued, “Another measure in this field is the establishment of the country's National Cyber Defense Center, which has been studied for more than two years and will be launched in the next few months.”

He also said Iran came under cyber attacks after the Palestinian resistance groups launched an attack on Israeli sites. “In the last two weeks and after the Al-Aqsa storm operation, the enemy made attempts for cyber attacks, all of which were repelled,” he said. 

Israel began a bombardment campaign against the Gaza Strip on October 7. Since then, Israel has been relentlessly pummeling civilian infrastructures in the besieged Palestinian territory. 

On 17 October, Israel committed a heinous crime that shocked the world to the core, bombing a Christian hospital – Al Ahli- which resulted in the killing of hundreds of civilians, mostly injured and patients. The magnitude of the crime was so abhorrent that the Israeli authorities quickly walked back their statements confirming their bombardment of the hospital and ultimately blamed the targeting of the hospital on a Palestinian resistance group “misfired” rocket.

Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, has said that Israel committed war crimes. 

“Our research points to damning evidence of war crimes in Israel’s bombing campaign that must be urgently investigated. Decades of impunity and injustice and the unprecedented level of death and destruction of the current offensive will only result in further violence and instability in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” she said.