Gaza’s phones and internet are completely shut down

The Palestinian telecommunications agency stated that internet and phone networks were down across the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, the second such outage in less than a week.

The Palestine Telecommunications Company (Paltel) tweeted, “Dear people in our beloved homeland, we are sorry to announce that communications and internet services have been completely cut off in Gaza”, through its official ‘X’ handle.

Netblocks, a global network monitoring service, stated that Gaza is in the midst of a new internet blackout with a significant impact on the last remaining major operator, Paltel.

“The incident will be experienced as a total loss of telecommunications by most residents”, it wrote on ‘X’.

Last week, the internet and phone networks were entirely down, but they were restored over the weekend.

At the time, the authority of the Palestinian militant group Hamas accused Israel of forcing the shutdown in order to perpetrate massacres in the Gaza Strip.

Jawwal, a Palestinian telecoms company, blamed the blackout on Israel’s ‘heavy bombardment’ of the territory.

In recent days, violent confrontations have erupted between Israeli ground troops and militants in Gaza, as Israel presses its mission to crush Hamas after it went on a rampage in southern villages, killing 1,400 people, the majority of them civilians.

Since then, Israel has retaliated with a relentless air and artillery bombardment, according to the health ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza, which has killed over 8,500 Palestinians, two-thirds of whom were women or children.

Also read: Israel Army has hit 11,000 terror targets in Gaza Since War’s outset