Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy Co-Director claims her LinkedIn account was hacked, abused
by Piyush Mathur
The co-director of the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD) has claimed that her LinkedIn account was hacked and misused for approximately two weeks.
In a post published on LinkedIn on January 15, 2026, Inès A., who identifies herself as the PIPD’s co-director, reported that her account had been ‘hacked and hijacked’, resulting in posts and activity that did not originate from her. She stated that the account appeared to impersonate a different individual—a ‘sophisticated Latino-Arab AI called “larysa”’—while retaining her profile credentials. Inès A.’s full name is Inès Abdel Razek.
According to the post, the issue has since been resolved. She advised contacts to report any suspicious content associated with her account and said she intended to investigate the source of the alleged intrusion further, suggesting it may have originated from the United States.
Inès A.’s post included two combined screenshots of her account when it was in control of the hijacker (which could have been an AI robot).
One of these screenshot shows another woman in a standing posture; the other screenshot is that of a fake AI-generated post made by the hijacker.
This is a screenshot of Inès A.’s LinkedIn post of January 15, 2026, informing her followers of her account’s 2-week-long hijacking and its end.
(Image credit: LinkedIn & Inès A.)
Neither screenshot, however, mentions the name “larysa,” and Inès A did not respond to a query on her post about how this name arose, given that it does not appear in the screenshots of the account she has provided from when it was under the hacker’s control.
No independent verification of the hacking claim is available so far, and LinkedIn has not publicly commented on the matter.
Thoughtfox messages regarding this hacking claim sent to the PIPD’s LinkedIn and Facebook accounts as well as via its website have remained unanswered over the course of the past 5 days; this is a bit ironical given that in October last year, the PIPD launched a project called ‘Communicating Palestine’.
However, in a comment made in response to Inès A.’s post, Nizar Farsakh—a part-time faculty at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs—did mention that he had been asked by the hacked account to wire it $37,275.
A screenshot of Inès A.’s post—which itself combines two screenshots (as mentioned previously)—is included in this report; it could also be accessed on this URL:
Located in Ramallah, the West Bank, the PIPD functions as a global network.