Communications with Gaza have been nearly shut down for two days.
Gaza has been in a near communications blackout for two days — at least the fifth mass blackout of phone and internet lines during the 10-week war — leaving more than two million Palestinians virtually cut off from the outside world and each other amid ongoing conflict . Israeli airstrikes and ground attacks.
This is the longest outage in the war so far. Authorities and communications companies in Gaza say previous power outages have been caused by Israeli attacks on telecommunications towers, Israeli control of the enclave’s communications lines or a fuel shortage.
On Thursday evening, Paltel, the main Palestinian telecommunications company, said on social media that “all telecom services in the Gaza Strip have been lost as a result of the ongoing aggression. Gaza is darkened again.”
Some cell towers and underground fiber optic cables had been destroyed or damaged by Israeli airstrikes, said Abdulmajeed Melhem, CEO of the Paltel group.
The Israeli military said it would not comment on questions about whether its strikes caused the latest blackout.
Even before Thursday’s complete blackout in the enclave, northern Gaza had been experiencing mobile power outages for 10 days, he said.
Israel’s war in Gaza, launched after Gaza’s Hamas rulers attacked Israel on October 7, has caused widespread destruction to cellular infrastructure in Gaza, including in Gaza City and elsewhere in northern Gaza, Mr. Melhem said.
Due to the intensity of fighting between Israeli forces and armed Palestinian groups, including Hamas, technical teams have been unable to reach key data centers in the enclave, leaving the extent of damage to the network unclear, Mr Melhem said.
Paltel technicians tried to reach the main data center in southern Gaza on Saturday, he said. If successful, phone and internet service could return to the South, he said.
In November, all telecommunications services went out of service “because all energy sources supporting the network were exhausted and fuel stopped coming in,” Paltel said at the time.
Gaza is experiencing a severe fuel shortage, affecting not only communications but also emergency services and hospitals as a result of Israel’s complete siege of the territory. Israel cut off most fuel, food, water and medicine to the area shortly after the October 7 attack.
Frequent communications disruptions during the war — which Gazan officials say has killed nearly 20,000 Gazans — have raised concerns among Palestinians on the ground and rights groups abroad that a lack of phone and internet service has made it harder to document human rights abuses. , the continued massacres of civilians and widespread destruction.
The United Nations said the latest power outage was the fifth in the enclave since October 7, when the war began.