Internet and telephone networks were completely down for several hours in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, a Palestinian telecommunications provider said, in the second such blackout in the territory in less than a week, as the war erupts between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas.
“To our good people of the beloved country, we regret to announce that communications and internet services have been completely cut off in Gaza,” the Palestine Telecommunications Company (Paltel) said on Wednesday X.
Global network monitor Netblocks confirmed that Gaza “is in the midst of a new internet blackout with a major impact for the last remaining major operator, Paltel.”
“The incident will be experienced as a total loss of telecommunications by most residents,” he said in a post on X.
Attempts to reach residents of Gaza by phone were unsuccessful early Wednesday.
An AFP reporter in Gaza confirmed the loss of communications, adding that his phone still had a signal because he was using an international SIM card.
Another AFP reporter said only people with Israeli or Egyptian phone lines could still use their cellphones in the border town of Rafah.
However, after a few hours, services gradually began to be restored, although it was unclear when full capacities would be reached.
Alp Toker, the director of Netblocks, said: “The service remains significantly below pre-war levels.”
Gazans lost contact with each other and the outside world on Friday when communications networks collapsed. The outage coincided with the launch of an expanded Israeli ground offensive, and service was only restored on Sunday, following pressure from the US.
The head of the IDF Southern Command, Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkelman (center), is seen in the Gaza Strip on October 30, 2023. (Israel Defense Forces)
At the time, Hamas had accused Israel of instigating the shutdown by “perpetrating massacres” in the Gaza Strip. The IDF declined to comment.
Palestinian telecommunications provider Jawwal had blamed the outage on Israel’s “heavy shelling” of the territory.
The Wall Street Journal Monday quoted a senior US official as saying that Israel had taken steps to shut down Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure, but was persuaded by Washington to restore services. Israel’s Defense Ministry declined to comment to the newspaper on the report.
The war erupted after the Hamas massacre on October 7, which saw around 2,500 terrorists cross the border into Israel from the Gaza Strip by land, air and sea under the cover of a deluge of thousands of rockets fired at Israeli towns and cities, killing 1,400 people and taking at least 245 hostages. The vast majority of those killed and abducted when terrorists seized border communities were civilians, including infants, children and the elderly.
Israel says its offensive is aimed at destroying Hamas infrastructure and has vowed to eliminate the entire terrorist group, which rules the Strip. It says it is targeting all areas where Hamas operates, while seeking to minimize civilian casualties and urging the civilian population to evacuate southern Gaza. Troops are already operating on the ground in Gaza.
Aid agencies have warned that the blackouts are seriously disrupting their work in an already dire situation in Gaza, where more than half of the population of more than 2 million Palestinians have been displaced and basic supplies are running low more than three weeks after the war.
The US, while strongly supporting Israel’s right to defend itself and the campaign to oust Hamas from control, has pressed Israel on the impact of its offensive on Gaza’s civilian population, emphasizing humanitarian needs .
Gaza has been sealed off since the start of the war, causing shortages of food, water, medicine and fuel. Israel has allowed international aid groups to send more than 200 truckloads of food and medicine to enter from Egypt over the past 10 days, but aid workers say it is not enough.
Trucks with humanitarian aid for the Gaza Strip enter Rafah from Egypt on October 21, 2023. (AP/Fatima Shbair)
The Hamas-run health ministry has claimed that more than 8,500 people have been killed in the enclave, a figure that cannot be independently verified. Hamas has been accused of artificially inflating the death toll, and also fails to distinguish between civilians and terrorist operatives. The terror group has rejected those claims and released an unverified list of names it says represent those killed. Some of the dead are believed to be victims of Palestinian terrorists’ own rockets.
Hamas and other terrorist groups have continued to rain rockets on Israel, displacing more than 200,000 people from their homes.
English 
Español de Venezuela 