[Emore]

This could be either because:

1) Israel is pushing Twitter to censor these terms

2) Someone at Twitter HQ blindly supports Israel

Either way it completely destroys perhaps the most important usage for Twitter: a voice for those in the epicenter of something happening.

[dagw]

3) Some sort of technical issue or bug.

[lsc]

Considering the interests of all involved, this seems to me like the most likely answer. There is no way that people at twitter rationally weighed their self interest and decided to start censoring things. There is zero upside, and a rather large downside for twitter. It's just not in their financial best interest. Israel isn't going to block them or take other action that would financially harm twitter for simply publishing text messages from people. And the publicity fallout from censorship is so obviously bad that there is no way that any rational owner of twitter would approve a move like this.

My money is on a haywire spamfiltering system... but we will see. If the people running twitter are not morons, we'll see an explanation shortly.