Palestinian Territories — Gaza residents have been largely without internet and telephone services for a week, an internet monitor said on Friday, the longest outage since the Israel-Hamas war broke out on October 7.
Internet services in the Gaza Strip have been constantly disrupted throughout the war, with telecom firms blaming Israel’s bombardment of the besieged territory for the outages.
The “near-total telecoms blackout” has now lasted for 168 hours, NetBlocks posted on X, formerly Twitter.
The United Nations has warned that the blackouts are worsening the Palestinian territory’s already dire humanitarian situation.
“The blackout of telecommunications prevents people in Gaza from accessing lifesaving information or calling for first responders and impedes other forms of humanitarian response,” the UN humanitarian agency OCHA said on Thursday.
At least 24,762 Palestinians, about 70 percent of them women, young children and adolescents, have been killed in Israeli bombardments and ground assaults, according to the Gaza health ministry’s latest figures.