Over the past 10 days, a website called anti-Israel-employees.com published more than 17,000 posts, which one of the people behind the site said had been taken mainly from LinkedIn. The site, which claimed to be a “global live feed of potentially supportive sentiments for terrorism among company employees”, listed thousands of people and grouped them by their workplaces, in an apparent attempt to shame them for their sentiments on the Israeli-Hamas conflict.

The website, which was taken offline for a day before being migrated to a new web address, named employees of major international corporations and shared their profile photos, LinkedIn pages and posts.

Itai Liptz, a hedge fund manager who said he was one of the people behind the original site, said that its goal was to “expose people who supported Hamas publicly”.

But the site also highlighted posts from people who did not explicitly show support for Hamas, according to posts seen by The New York Times. Some people used hashtags like “#GazaUnderAttack” or sought to draw attention to the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.

Liptz, who said he did not expect the site to become as popular as it did after spreading via WhatsApp groups, called the far-ranging capture of all pro-Palestinian sentiment a mistake. “If somebody says ‘Free Palestine’ that is totally OK, and we shouldn’t put it on our website,” he said on Saturday.

The site, however, was back online on Sunday at a new web address and still displayed the posts and names of people that Liptz had said would be removed.

Now at an Israel-specific domain, the site is being overseen by Guy Ophir, a lawyer in Israel.

A spokesperson for LinkedIn said the company determined that the site had used automated programmes to extract content from the platform.

New York Times News Service