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Gaza’s 2.2 million residents were cut off from internet, cell phones and landlines networks over the weekend – the third time this has happened since Israel declared war on Hamas on October 7 and began its subsequent military campaign in the enclave.
The resulting communications blackout effectively sealed off the enclave’s residents from the outside world and each other, preventing information from entering or leaving and plunging residents into digital darkness. Inside the Gaza Strip, aid groups said Palestinians were unable to contact emergency services amid heavy strikes.
Here’s what you should know about Gaza’s communications blackouts.
What is a communication failure?
According to the largest Palestinian telecommunications provider Paltel, residents of the Gaza Strip experienced a complete disruption of their internet and communication services starting Sunday evening, which lasted for several hours. Internet monitoring groups also noted a significant disruption in the enclave’s connectivity.
“We have clearly and immediately tracked the observable decline in internet connectivity,” Alp Toker, director of cybersecurity watchdog group NetBlocks, said in a telephone interview on Monday. The group, which monitors internet connectivity by tracking what proportion of endpoint users are reachable online and sending a signal back, observed a precipitous decline in internet connectivity across the Gaza Strip at 6:20 p.m. local time on Sunday. “Landline and also domestic mobile connectivity, including calls, have been completely disrupted as a result,” he said.
During the blackout, the only way to reach the outside world was with an expensive satellite phone, satellite dish or possibly a SIM card from a foreign cell phone provider capable of receiving signals from across the border in Israel or Egypt, Toker said. This likely left most Gazans unable to communicate with the outside world.
In addition to a gradual deterioration in internet connectivity since the war began, NetBlocks has “observed three collective communications outages that manifested themselves in near-total disconnection from the outside world,” Toker said. These took place on October 27th, November 1st and November 5th.
After the outages, each lasting several hours, internet connectivity on the Strip suddenly returned to pre-outage levels. Toker said this points to a possible technical glitch as the possible cause – rather than damage from military attacks, which could take days, if not weeks, to fix.
“Gaza relies heavily on Israeli upstream providers,” Toker said, giving Israeli authorities the technical ability to block internet access to the enclave if they wanted to. “If we rely solely on technical data, I think we can see signs of upstream disruption, but there are still many reasons for doubt,” he said.
U.S. officials have issued statements directly linking the blackouts to Israeli efforts and describing their efforts to reverse the blackouts.
What is life like in Gaza during a communications blackout?
Without phone reception or access to the internet, the power outages have plunged Gazans into digital darkness. In the face of heavy military bombardment, they have made it nearly impossible for residents to contact family members or access up-to-date information and have hampered emergency services’ efforts to respond to the injured.
According to the Palestinian Red Crescent Societywhich said it had lost touch with itself During the communications blackout, people in the Gaza Strip had no access to emergency medical care on Sunday evening. During a previous blackout, the World Health Organization said rescue workers had no way of reaching the wounded after a night of strikes.
No text, no conversation. The Palestinians plunged into digital darkness in Gaza.
In a statement shared on X on Sunday eveningOfficials at UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, said they were unable to reach “the vast majority” of their own personnel in Gaza. “This is the third communications outage in the last 10 days. The people of Gaza are completely cut off from their loved ones and the rest of the world,” the post said.
According to UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini, the power outages are exacerbating panic and desperation among civilians in the Gaza Strip. “My colleagues in Gaza are warning of a breakdown in civil order – we saw the beginning of it when dozens of people broke into UN warehouses on the day of a total communications blackout,” he said in an address to the UN General Assembly on Friday.
The power outages prevent Palestinians from accessing breaking news about the conflict and limit the ability of journalists in Gaza to report on what is happening. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said in a statement that news outlets’ loss of contact with their teams and reporters in Gaza meant the world was losing a crucial window into the reality of the war and creating an information vacuum.
“A communications failure is a communications failure. This can have serious consequences, leading to an independent, factual information vacuum that can be filled with deadly propaganda, disinformation and misinformation,” the CPJ statement said.
What is the cause of poor connectivity in Gaza?
Internet connectivity levels in Gaza were already low before Sunday’s blackout, ranging between 30 and 40 percent of prewar levels, according to NetBlocks. “We have been tracking the gradual decline in connectivity due to various factors: power outages, airstrikes, as well as some decline in connectivity due to population movements,” Toker said.
Much of the gradual deterioration in internet connectivity since October 7 can be explained by specific examples of damage to communications infrastructure, he said. For example, just days after the start of the war, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that airstrikes had destroyed two of the three main lines on which Gaza’s population relies for mobile communications. According to a later update on November 1, OCHA said that almost half of Gaza’s local fiber optic network – made up of street poles, cables and fiber optic trenches that connect internet infrastructure to end users – had been damaged since the start of the war.
What does Israel say about the communications blackouts?
When asked by The Washington Post on Monday to respond to allegations that Israel had deliberately shut down the Internet to Gaza as part of its military strategy, an IDF spokesman declined to comment.
In separate messages on X, formerly known as Twitter, Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi argued that Hamas militants would benefit from any attempt to connect the Gaza Strip to the internet. In response to a promise from Elon Musk to support certain aid groups working in Gaza with a Starlink internet connection, Karhi tweeted: “HAMAS will use it for terrorist activities.” There is no doubt about that, we know it and Musk knows it.”
After an earlier blackout in October, a senior US official told The Washington Post that Israel was responsible for cutting off communications in Gaza. The Israelis did not tell their U.S. counterparts why they had shut down communications, the official said. “We have made it clear that they need to be turned back on,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations.
In a briefing on November 2, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that in war there are cases in which both sides try to limit the other’s ability to communicate.
“But in this particular case, we felt that such a power outage particularly impacted the ability to receive humanitarian assistance and impacted the ability of humanitarian organizations to communicate with their people on the ground,” he said.
Claire Parker, Miriam Berger and Niha Masih contributed to this report.