Internet access in Gaza is collapsing as ISPs fall offline

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As the conflict between Israel and Hamas reaches its third week, internet connectivity in Gaza is getting worse.

On Thursday, internet monitoring firm NetBlocks wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that the Palestinian internet service provider NetStream “has collapsed days after the operator notified subscribers that service would end due to a severe shortage of fuel supplies.”

According to Doug Madory, an expert who for years has worked at various companies that monitor networks across the world, internet connectivity in Gaza is dramatically worsening.

“The evidence of the crippled internet in Gaza is not hard to find. By every metric of internet connectivity, things are in bad shape,” Madory, who is now the director of internet analysis at Kentik, told TechCrunch.

Madory said that he monitored internet connectivity in Gaza during the 2014 war. At the time, despite some outages, “the ISPs were able to keep their connections to the outside world up using backup power, etc, even if many people were unable to access service due to power outages and infrastructure failures.”

NetStream did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to its email, Facebook, and WhatsApp accounts. NetStream’s website appeared offline as of Friday.

On October 7, Hamas terrorists launched a surprise attack against Israelis in their homes, at a music festival, and on the streets, killing more than 1,400 people. Since then, the Israeli military has responded with a series of airstrikes that have killed more than 7,000 people, according to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry, though U.S. officials have called into question the accuracy of these numbers. As part of its response to the terrorist attack, Israel cut off electricity in Gaza, reportedly reducing the region’s power supply by 90%.

IODA, which is a system that “monitors the Internet infrastructure connectivity in near-real time, with the goal of identifying macroscopic Internet outages,” is monitoring several internet providers in Palestine, including NetStream, and shows widespread outages or at least significant degradation.

The organization wrote on X that connectivity in Gaza further dropped on Friday, “due to a complete outage” of NetStream.

Amanda Meng, a research scientist at Georgia Tech, told TechCrunch that they are seeing “a continued decline” of connectivity in Gaza. Meng described the first decline beginning on October 7 with connectivity dropping to 20%, followed by a second decline early on October 21, dropping to about 15% and below.

IODA was originally developed by the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the University of California San Diego, and is now maintained by the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Digital rights organization AccessNow has warned that internet outages in Palestine can have serious repercussions on the ground.

“With thousands of people already killed, and currently in a near-complete blackout, access to information has become scarce, directly impacting the capacity to document atrocities perpetrated on the ground,” the organization wrote in a press release updated last week. “People find it nearly impossible to learn the whereabouts of their families and loved ones, and if they’re dead or alive.”



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