34 hours of fear: the blackout that separated Gaza from the world

For 34 hours, the vast majority of the more than two million Palestinians living in Gaza had no way to reach the outside world or each other.

They had no way of knowing if their loved ones were alive or dead. Emergency telephone lines were cut off. Desperate rescuers tried to rescue people by driving towards the sound of the explosion. They left the wounded to die in the street.

At sunset on Friday, three weeks after Israel bombed Gaza and as Palestinians braced for an imminent Israeli ground offensive, poor phone and Internet service that allowed some life inside the besieged enclave to continue. found, suddenly cut off. Two US officials said the US believed Israel was responsible for the loss of communications, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Panic swept through the realm.

Fathi Sabah, a journalist based in Gaza, wrote on his Facebook profile on Sunday after some telephone and internet services were restored: “I felt blind and deaf, unable to see or hear.”

Since gunmen from Hamas, the armed group that rules Gaza, broke through the border fence on October 7, killing about 1,400 people and taking more than 220 hostages in southern Israel, according to Israeli officials. The people of Gaza say they are living in a nightmare. . In response to these attacks, the Israeli army surrounded the densely populated area, cutting off electricity, water and medical supplies, and unleashed a relentless barrage of aerial and artillery bombardments.

On Sunday, Israel’s military announced it had expanded the ground offensive overnight, warning with increasing urgency that Palestinian civilians should move to the southern part of the coastal strip, even as airstrikes continued to kill people there.

The Israeli army also announced that it was carrying out airstrikes in Lebanon after at least 16 rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israeli territory. In Gaza, 47 aid trucks crossed the Egyptian border, carrying the most water, food and medicine in a single day since the trucks arrived on October 21, but compared to the level of aid that aid agencies say It is still not enough.