The main counter-terrorism agency of the United Kingdom ordered the pulling offline in that country of a computer game that simulates the actions of a Hamas terrorist murdering Israelis.
Steam, a video game digital distribution service, rendered the game titled “Fursan al-Aqsa: The Knights of the Al-Aqsa Mosque” unavailable to users identified as being in the United Kingdom following a request by the Counter-Terrorism Internet Referral Unit, TheGamer website reported on Monday.
The CTIRU asked the Valve Corporation that founded Steam to take down the game, the technology site 404 reported last week. A spokesperson for the CTIRU confirmed this but declined to specify the grounds for the request.
The game remains available, as it has been for more than a year, on Steam to most users who are identified as accessing the platform from other countries, including the United States, Canada and the Netherlands.
The news in the United Kingdom prompted fresh news coverage of the game. Several Jewish groups demanded it be removed worldwide. One such group, the Canada-based Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, demanded this in Canada in a letter it sent on Monday to Valve Corporation President Gabe Newell.
“This game glorifies horrific acts of terrorism and is rife with violent and antisemitic content, including the explicit recreation of the October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel by Hamas,” Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, the group’s senior director of policy and advocacy, wrote in the letter.
Valve did not immediately reply to a query by JNS asking for a response to criticism warning the game encourages jihadist violence and solidarity with Hamas.
The game’s initial release predated Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacres in 2023. However, its developer, a Muslim man named Nidal Nijm who identifies as a Brazilian Palestinian, appears to have updated the game and incorporated in it references to the massacres, whose supporters refer to it as “the Al-Aqsa Flood.”
The game allows the player to assume the role of a Hamas terrorist, become a suicide bomber, and kill IDF soldiers.
The actions required for the player to win the game are extremely violent, and the methods for killing Israeli security personnel include suicide bombings, slitting throats and decapitation, similar to the actions of Hamas terrorists during the Oct. 7 attack. The locations are taken directly from IDF bases surrounding Gaza, and the game encourages players to attack security personnel there.