Internet monitoring companies say the near-total internet blackout in Gaza is entering its seventh day, the longest outage in the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict so far.
Doug Madory, director of internet analytics at Kentik, told TechCrunch in a Signal message that this is “the longest internet blackout ever and longer than all previous blackouts combined” in Gaza.
A graphic showing Internet connectivity in Gaza. (Image: Kentik)
On January 12, Palestinian telecommunications giant Paltel was announced that “all telecommunication services in the Gaza Strip have been lost due to the ongoing aggression. Gaza has turned black again.”
Paltel said the closure was a result of damaged infrastructure in Khan Younis, a town in the south of the Gaza Strip. according to the New York Times.
Early Thursday, Internet monitoring company NetBlocks reported on X (formerly Twitter) that its data showed an outage of 144 hours (six days) and counting, which is consistent with data collected from Kentik and Paltel’s public announcement. According to NetBlocks, this is the “ninth and longest sustained telecommunications outage since the start of the current conflict with Israel.
David Belson, chief intelligence officer at Cloudflare, which also monitors internet connectivity around the world, told TechCrunch on Thursday that there is an ongoing internet outage in Gaza.
When TechCrunch tried to contact a telecommunications engineer on a chat messaging app, who previously asked to remain anonymous to protect his security, the message could not be delivered.
Nebal Farsakh, a spokesman for the humanitarian organization Palestine Red Crescent Society, told TechCrunch that the internet blackout is affecting the organization’s efforts to help the injured.
“People in Gaza cannot call the 101 emergency line to get ambulances,” Farsakh said in an audio message. “And this completely hinders the work of our ambulances and delays their arrival to the injured.”
A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the US and UK governments, launched a surprise attack on October 7 targeting Israelis in their homes, killing at least 1,200 people. In the following months, Israeli military forces responded with retaliatory airstrikes and a ground offensive in Gaza that have killed at least 22,000 people in the region. according to recent figures from the Palestinian authorities.
Digital rights organization Access Now, which regularly campaigns against internet shutdowns around the world, he wrote in a press release that “documenting and sharing information about what’s happening on the ground is increasingly difficult, if not impossible,” as a result of the shutdown.
Hisham Mhanna, representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross, he told the Times that “when you’re trying to plan any mission during a blackout, you can’t anticipate the surprises or challenges the team might face along the way — it’s hard to report back home.”
“This is where it gets dangerous,” Mhanna said.
Nazar Sadawi, a Turkish Radio and Television correspondent working in Gaza since late December, he told The Nation magazine that the internet outage forced journalists to return to traditional reporting methods, such as walking between bombed areas, talking to survivors and witnesses to get a sense of the death toll, and the radio.
“News that I used to get in three minutes now I get in an hour or two,” Sadawi said.
Updated with comment from the Palestine Red Crescent Society. The death toll from the October 7 Hamas attack has been corrected to at least 1,200 people, as confirmed by an Israeli government spokesman in November. This is due to an editor’s error. ZW
