They sure don’t tend to do that, but there are still mundane explanations for this. An unintentional collision between the satellite and another object being one of them.

“I find it hard to believe they would use such a big satellite as an ASAT target,” McDowell said.

Not because of Kessler syndrome, just your run of the mill space debris reentering the atmosphere and increasing the amounts of certain metals up there that contribute to ozone depletion. In other words, that may well happen even if we’re lucky and avoid Kessler syndrome.

A good point

The headline is clickbait since you don’t even need to get past the paywall to see that “The website does not appear to be linked to Hamas”. That domain is registered under Wix.Com Ltd., an Israeli software company. There is no hacking involved here, just an Israeli site masquerading as a Hamas site gloating with attrocities.

I think that this is part of a propaganda effort by Israel to capitalize on the October 7th attacks by maximising the emotional response from it. It’s all in English, so clearly directed at western audiences. It’s also quite on the nose with the caricaturistic portrayal of evil terrorist baby killers who do not understand PR.

If an actual Hamas site was hacked by Israelis, I’d expect the hackers to flaunt their victory by posting something the islamists clearly wouldn’t (like idk pictures of bacon, a woman’s ankles or maybe some dudes kissing).

As for an actual Hamas site, I’d expect a lot less displays of gore caused by Hamas and a lot more displays of gore caused by the IDF.