Third communications blackout hits Gaza

Gaza was plunged into a communications blackout for the third time in 10 days on Sunday, once again leaving its population without access to the internet or telephone services as night fell and Israel’s heavy bombardment of the enclave continued.

According to NetBlocks, an internet monitoring service, the widespread power outage began shortly before sunset, around 4:20 PM local time.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said this on social media that the blackout affected more than two million civilians, cutting off access to emergency medical services as the bombing continued, and that, as during previous blackouts, the country had lost contact with its teams in Gaza. UNRWA, the UN agency that helps Palestinians, also said it was unable to reach “the vast majority” of its team in the enclave.

The World Health Organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he was “very concerned” by the outage and reports of heavy bombing in the enclave.

“Without connectivity, people in need of immediate medical attention will not be able to contact hospitals and ambulances,” he said said on social media. “All channels of communication must be restored immediately.”

The outage was confirmed on Sunday by Paltel, Gaza’s main telecommunications provider, which said the “complete interruption of all communications and internet services” was due to a shutdown “on the Israeli side.”

NetBlocks director Alp Toker said in an interview on Sunday that his organization could not immediately determine whether the blackout was caused by Israel taking technical measures. or through physical damage to Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure.

He said the loss of connectivity in Gaza on Sunday was “technically completely consistent” with the previous two blackouts, the first of which lasted almost 36 hours and the second about 10 hours.

“What happened in each one is happening again,” Mr Toker said.

After the first blackout, two U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said the United States believed Israel was responsible for the communications severance and had urged Israeli counterparts to do what they could to restore service.