Internet access in Gaza is falling as ISPs are offline TechCrunch

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As the conflict between Israel and Hamas enters its third week, internet connectivity in Gaza is deteriorating.

On Thursday, Internet monitoring company NetBlocks In X, previously wrote Twitterthat Palestinian internet service provider NetStream has been down days after the operator informed subscribers that service would be suspended due to severe fuel shortages.

According to Doug Maduri, an expert who has worked for many years at various companies that monitor networks around the world, Internet connectivity in Gaza is deteriorating dramatically.

It’s not hard to find evidence of crippled internet in Gaza. “By any measure of internet connectivity, things are in bad shape,” Moduri, now director of internet analytics at Kentik, told TechCrunch.

Maduri said he monitored Internet connectivity in Gaza during the 2014 war. At that time, despite some outages, ISPs were able to maintain connections to the outside world using backup power and the like, even though many people were unable to access services due to power outages and infrastructure failures.

NetStream did not immediately respond to a request for comment to its email, Facebook and WhatsApp accounts. The NetStreams website appeared offline on Friday.

On October 7, Hamas terrorists launched a surprise attack on Israelis in homes, at a music festival, and in 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 Hamas-run Gaza’s health ministry, although U.S. officials have questioned the accuracy of those numbers. As part of its response to the terrorist attack, Israel cut off electricity to Gaza, reportedly reducing power to the areas by 90 percent.

IODA, a system that monitors Internet infrastructure connectivity in near-time with the goal of identifying large-scale Internet outages, has been monitoring several Internet providers in Palestine, including NetStream, and has shown widespread outages or at least significant degradation. .

Organization He wrote on X This connection was reduced in Gaza on Friday due to a complete blackout of Netstream.

Amanda Meng, a research scientist at Georgia Tech, told TechCrunch that they are seeing a steady decline in connectivity in Gaza. Meng described the first drop on Oct. 7 with connectivity dropping to 20 percent, followed by a second drop early on Oct. 21 to around 15 percent and below.

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

Digital rights organization AccessNow has warned that an internet shutdown in Palestine could have serious consequences on the ground.

With thousands of people dead and now in a near-total blackout, access to information has become scarce, directly impacting the capacity to document crimes committed on the ground, the organization wrote in a press release updated last week. . It is almost impossible for people to know where their families and loved ones are and whether they are dead or alive.