Bomb Gaza: The Game

A mobile phone game that required players to bomb Gaza while attempting to avoid Hamas missiles has been unceremoniously removed from the Google Play store. The game, uncreatively titled Bomb Gaza, was developed by mobile game development studio PlayFTW, and was downloaded over a thousand times since being uploaded to the Play Store on the 29th of July. A Google spokesman said “We remove apps from Google Play that violate our policies,” confirming that the game had been removed from the marketplace, however he did not confirm what specific aspect of Google’s policies, which prohibit “hate speech, bullying and violence”, the game violated.

In its short life on the Google Play app store, the game received hundreds of outraged comments from people who were offended by, what many saw to be, the developers making light of a conflict which has taken the lives of over 1,800 Palestinians. One commenter registered his outrage by commenting “WTF There is ongoing conflict in which people are dying and you seem to find it acceptable to make a game of it. That’s fucked up.” The developers Facebook page, where the game still exists in a playable form as a Facebook App, was also inundated with more furious comments, with one poster saying “My only hope is to find you on the wrong end of one of these bombs. If my son or daughter had come across this and downloaded it and been subjected to this, you would not have found a place deep enough to hide.” Clearly the developers should be regretting their tasteless decision to create this game.