Nov 01, 2023 | Posted by Abdul-Rahman Oladimeji
Internet services have now returned in Gaza after another outage, which took the connectivity in the entire country down for several hours. This disruption occurred just before 3:00 a.m. local time, with Palestinian telco Paltelco announcing that connectivity to the Gaza Strip had been cut off by Israel.
Paltelco wrote on X, "Dear people in our beloved homeland, we regret to announce a complete interruption of all communications and Internet services with the Gaza Strip due to international routes that were previously reconnected being cut off again.” A similar issue occurred on October 27 as residents in Gaza were unable to contact the outside world due to a “collapse in connectivity. Internet services were only regained slowly on October 29.
Elon Musk said that the Internet service Starlink would be available for aid workers to provide "support connectivity to internationally recognized aid organizations in Gaza." However, Israel's Minister of Communications, Shlomo Karhi, strongly opposed this as he stated that Israel would fight against this.
He said, "Israel will use all means at its disposal to fight this. Hamas will use it for terrorist activities. There is no doubt about it, we know it, and Musk knows it. Hamas is ISIS. Perhaps Musk would be willing to condition it with the release of our abducted babies, sons, daughters, elderly people. All of them! By then, my office will cut any ties with Starlink."
