BEIRUT — Israel’s war against Hamas has left people in the Gaza Strip without food, water, electricity and shelter.
Communications are also cut off: Gaza’s mobile phone networks were dysfunctional even before the conflict, and now Israeli bombing and the mass displacement of Gaza residents have crippled them as people try to contact loved ones and access resources.
The communications blackout has hindered aid groups and emergency workers’ efforts to connect with local residents and each other, and it has also hindered journalists in Gaza in their efforts to tell the world about the suffering there.
How often do communication failures occur?
The Gaza Strip has been hit by nine communications blackouts since Oct. 7, when Hamas fighters attacked Israel, ranging from nine to 72 hours, according to cybersecurity monitoring group NetBlocks. It was shut down again on Friday.
What caused the power outage?
The Israeli bombing damaged the mobile phone network, said Mamoun Fares, director of business support for the Palestinian Telecommunications Company (Partel), one of the two mobile phone operators in the Palestinian territories. Most of the internal fiber-optic connections to switches and street cabinets “are damaged and need to be repaired,” he said.
Mobile phone towers were also damaged: “There are more than 550 cell towers in the Gaza Strip,” said Fares, who is based in the West Bank city of Ramallah. “Most of them have been partially or completely damaged.”
Compounding the problem, he told The Washington Post, is the displacement of more than 1.8 million people within the Gaza Strip. Migration from the north and central Gaza Strip to the south has strained the Strip’s communications capabilities.
“If traffic increased by 15 to 20 percent that would be OK,” he said. But with so many people heading south, “suddenly the damage takes away 50 to 60 percent or more of the network’s capacity, and a million people are stranded.” [in the south] It’s now 2 million.”
During a humanitarian shutdown in November, Paltel made repairs and restored some services. “Since then, the situation has only gotten worse,” Fares said.
Most of the repairs are being done “under fire,” he said. The company is coordinating the repairs with Israel, but workers are working with “fighting going on all around them. There are firefights going on all around them. Every now and then, tanks are coming at them.”
Two of Paltel’s employees were killed last week, according to its CEO, Abdel Majid Melhem. He said the employees had been “targeted” by Israel. The company said 13 of its employees had been killed since the conflict began.
Fares said Paltel is not making a profit in Gaza. To cover the costs of repairing the damage, the company is providing free airtime to help people stay connected and contact humanitarian services. “We just want to make sure the network stays up so people can make all those life-saving calls,” he said. “This is a wartime situation.”
In November, the Palestinian telecommunications operator announced it could not continue services due to fuel shortages. Ishaq Sidr, head of the Palestinian Ministry of Communications, said Palestinian telecommunications needed 14,500 liters of fuel per day in addition to its reserves “to avoid another such disaster.”
What was the state of mobile phone networks in Gaza before October 7th?
Gaza is served by two major mobile phone providers: Jawar, owned by Palestinian, introduced mobile communications to the Palestinian territories in 1997, while Ooredoo, a Qatari company, entered the market in 2017.
While Israel has rolled out 5G mobile phone service, the Palestinian territories rely on older technology, with the best service available in the West Bank being 3G and in Gaza 2G.
Helga Tawil Souri, a media and communications professor at New York University, said that under the 1993 and 1995 Oslo Accords, which outlined the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and a separate set of economic protocols, Israel controls mobile phone communications and technology built by the Palestinians.
“Communications and infrastructure are inseparable from a broader political context,” she said. “There are pages about what the Palestinian Authority is allowed to broadcast, what the signal strength is. They’re allowed to put these towers in certain areas. They’re allowed to build towers of this height. You can’t jam these kinds of signals. If you want to build something new, you have to work through the Israelis.”
By doing so, she said, Israel was able to cut off communications in the Gaza Strip at the start of the war.
“There are no cables connecting Gaza to outside Gaza, except for the ones that run through Israeli soil,” she said, “so it is ultimately the Israeli Ministry of Communications that has control over these fiber optic cables and can stop the flow of traffic on them.”
In November, a senior US official told The Washington Post that communications had been restored in Gaza after the US “made it clear that communications needed to resume.”
Another limiting factor, according to Tawil Souri, is the amount of spectrum (radio frequencies) allocated to mobile operators. “The Israeli Ministry of Communications is the only one that authorizes spectrum allocation across Gaza, Israel, the West Bank and Jerusalem,” he said, adding that spectrum has only been increased once since the 1990s, to allow Ooredoo to operate in the Palestinian territories.
During his 2022 visit, President Biden proposed upgrading mobile phone coverage in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to 4G, but Fares said the effort has stalled.
How will Gazans avoid blackouts?
Some people have access to satellite phones that connect directly to a satellite rather than through cellular infrastructure — allowing Al Jazeera to continue covering war times during blackouts, for example — but the technology is expensive to buy, maintain and use, making it out of reach for most.
Some Gaza residents use SIM cards from Israeli operators. Before the war, these cards could be purchased clandestinely from regular mobile phone stores. Israeli operators have better coverage and technology than Palestinian operators. The SIM cards connect to powerful Israeli base stations just outside the Gaza Strip.
eSims, digital versions of SIM cards, are another workaround: “If you have an eSIM and you can get close enough to the buffer zone or the Egyptian border, if you have a phone that has a roaming agreement with another company, you can pick up signal strength from those base stations,” Tawil Souri says.
Many eSIMs are provided by donors. Unlike physical SIM cards, eSIMs can be set up remotely. Egyptian journalist Mirna El Helbawy is leading an effort to collect eSIM donations for the Gaza Strip. Donors can buy an eSIM in their home country and send a photo of the QR code to El Helbawy. She told X that the effort has donated 100,000 eSIMs to people in the Gaza Strip.
What is causing the current outage?
The blackout that began Friday was caused by damage to underground cables, Fares said. It is the longest outage of the war.
Fares said repair crews have not been able to reach the cable because they have not yet received permission from Israel.
“We are working with the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East and coordinating with the Israeli side to allow our workers to access the affected areas and carry out repairs,” he said.
What does America say?
Biden administration officials stressed the need for communications in Gaza to function.
“Maintaining communications and making sure they are up and running and functioning is critical to allowing aid workers, civilians and journalists to communicate with each other and with the world,” said National Security Council spokesman Adrian Watson. “Without communications, not only does it deny people access to life-saving information, it also undermines the ability of first responders and other humanitarian workers to operate and operate safely.”
Asked Thursday about the blackouts and the lack of communication between Palestinian operators and the Israeli government, a senior U.S. official said coordination is one of the issues the U.S. is working on. “The biggest problem on all sides right now is deconfliction,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the matter. “We need COGAT and the IDF to talk and provide credible information so that everyone, including UNRWA, relief agencies and Palestinians, can take action.”
Lederle reported from Philadelphia. Karen DeYoung and John Hudson in Washington and Hajar Harb in London contributed to this report.
