Although Gaza is one of the most economically troubled regions in the world, it has ironically always been a technology hub - not just for Palestine and Palestinians, but for the world: For years, international companies have sought to work there with talented tech freelancers, as well as the region's emerging startups.
For example, NVIDIA, known for its role in the new artificial intelligence boom, has been working with at least 100 engineers from the region over the years, according to sources who helped build these bridges.
Since at least 2008, there have been Palestinian tech companies, some of which serve their audiences directly and others of which serve the international tech community. Silicon Valley's interest in Palestine as a tech hub is growing, but like the ecosystem itself, it's still in its infancy: those working in the region estimate that as much as $10 million has been invested in the Palestinian tech ecosystem so far.
Notably, in 2017, Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff joined prominent Silicon Valley figures in supporting the establishment of the first-ever coding academy in Gaza.
Based in Gaza, the Alphabet-backed GazaSkyGeeks program provides pre-seed investment, training and technology resources to Gaza residents in Palestine and has been a beacon for entrepreneurship in the region. All of this is effectively gone now, just like the buildings in Gaza.
Hamas, the ruling group in Gaza, kidnapped at least 150 people and brought them into Gaza in a brutal attack on Israel over the weekend, killing 1,300 people.
Israel's strategy is to bomb the Gaza Strip to root out Hamas and recapture the hostages. So far, more than 1,500 Palestinians have lost their lives. Israel's tech industry - the country's largest export and largest contributor to GDP - has also been hit hard, but the impact on Gaza's smaller, more fragile ecosystem is inevitably far worse. The resulting physical, economic and social disruption makes the future of the tech industry there bleak.
Quite simply, no one can escape the consequences of war, let alone tech workers.
Israel has massed troops near northern Gaza in anticipation of a ground offensive against the densely populated enclave. Some 1.1 million people living in the northern region have been asked to leave within the next day. The United Nations warned that these latest actions would have "devastating humanitarian consequences." Israel is imposing a total blockade on the territory and is running out of fuel, food and water. Israel says restrictions will not be lifted unless Hamas releases all hostages.
Ryan Sturgill is an American and the former director of the GazaSkyGeeksaccelerator. "The area around the MercyCorps building where SkyGeeks is located in Gaza has been razed to the ground. Buildings that did not collapse have also been blown up," he said.
Gaza Sky Geeks (GSG) is the largest technical center in Palestine, providing various technical training on a large scale. In 2022, 5,000 coders and developers from the West Bank and Gaza will graduate from the program.
"Who knew what was going to happen. Offices were destroyed, fiber optic lines were destroyed. Universities were destroyed. Gaza's three main universities that produce computer science graduates were razed to the ground." Sturgill added: "I don't even know if people will be able to come back to northern Gaza after what happened today."
Since January, he has been helping Palestinian tech startups raise funds in the West Bank and Gaza.
"So far, there has been considerable development. A lot of companies in Saudi Arabia have set up back offices [in Palestine] to develop for various new companies and even applications that are currently developing in the Gulf, because Saudi Arabia is developing very fast in the technology field. NVIDIA and other international companies have outsourcing operations in Palestine. Apple has outsourcing operations in Palestine, Microsoft has R&D operations in Palestine, and they even want to see these operations expanded. Some companies have 200 developers in their offices in Ramallah," he said.
"I've talked to the heads of these different offices, and most of them are in Israel. They are very positive people who want to work hard to support the local tech industry, and those efforts have been well underway and growing," he added.
In fact, one of the leading Palestinian venture capital funds, Ibtikar, recently raised a second tranche of funding amounting to $30 million.
Emerging high-growth companies in Palestine include Menalytics (data analytics, funded by Flat6labs), Olivery (last-mile logistics, funded by Flat6Labs and Ibtikar Fund), Coretava (employee and customer loyalty) and Sellenvo (Amazon fulfillment partner).
Sturgill said Gaza was under attack by Israeli missiles and conditions were very difficult, and the situation in Ramallah was "super tense." I have a feeling things are going to get a lot worse there in the coming weeks.
Iliana Montauk, co-founder and CEO of Manara, a social impact startup backed by YCombinator, Seedcamp, Reid Hoffman, Eric Ries, Marc Benioff, Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, told Techcrunch via email that connectivity has dropped significantly over the past 24 hours.
"While Gaza has been bombed many times before, this time was completely different for the tech industry, for several reasons. Power was cut throughout the entire [Gaza] Strip. A lot of infrastructure was bombed (including internet service providers and many tall apartment buildings housing cellphone towers). Entire middle-class neighborhoods were destroyed."
In the past, if entire neighborhoods were destroyed, it was usually in poor areas bordering Israel, so the impact on the tech industry was less, she said.
She said: "The technology industry is now almost completely non-functional in Gaza. Most people are at risk and unable to work; some people have been evacuated three times in the past 24 hours, moving from friends' houses to their own homes, because every time they go to a neighborhood, the next neighborhood is bombed. They usually receive warnings to evacuate their homes 10 minutes before an explosion occurs, so they do not sleep, monitor the situation at all times, and prepare to evacuate within a minute."
"Most people have completely lost their mobile phone connectivity and internet access, or can only use 2G networks through their mobile phones." She added: "There is only a few hours of electricity every day, and people's generators are running out of gas."
Manala has about 100 software engineers in Gaza, some of whom work remotely for Silicon Valley/European tech companies.
Montauk said a software engineer who worked at Upwork was missing for several days and luckily was still alive when he was found.
Dalia Awad, who published an article on Medium about joining Google from Gaza that went viral in 2021 (at one point ranked #1 on HackerNews and was retweeted by Paul Graham on Twitter), returned to Gaza after interning at Google and Datadog to graduate from college. She found a full-time job at Datadog in Paris, but decided to stay home in Gaza and look for a remote job that would allow her to be closer to her family.
"Tonight is the worst night," she wrote to Montauk on Tuesday. "Thankfully my family and I are fine. There are explosions everywhere and we don't know where they are because there is no internet. Many of my friends have lost their houses in the Rimal area. There is no Wifi and we have to use cell phone data." But it was only 2G and the connection dropped after a few minutes. So we couldn't read the news on social media. In the morning we saw the videos they shared on Whatsapp, but it took a long time to download a few seconds of video."
Montauk said Awad didn't get back to her in the past day.
Mai-Temraz was Manala's first employee and currently works in San Bernardino, California. Her family lives in Gaza City. They narrowly escaped an explosion (she posted a video of them bleeding on Instagram [content warning]). "My family in Gaza barely escaped an attack on a building next door. They asked people to leave, where? There is no one to save [sic] anywhere in Gaza," she said.
"Before the situation escalated, Gaza's tech scene was growing," said Montauk, the former head of Gaza Sky Geeks. "I just met some companies in Riyadh that hired their entire software development teams in Gaza. Upwork and other Silicon Valley companies are now recruiting software engineers remotely from Gaza. In addition, some people are leaving Gaza and working abroad. Jobs at Google, Amazon, Qualtrics, etc. When I was last in Gaza a year ago, almost everyone I spoke to asked me how they could find a job and leave Gaza. They wanted to bring their children to a place where there was no such high risk. "These people just want to live a normal life."
Those living in the West Bank say activity in Gaza has had an inevitable impact.
Leen Abubaker of FlowAccelerator is the co-founder of Sawaed19. "Tech companies are either operating on a very limited scale, making it difficult for employees to reach their offices in the West Bank due to unsafe roads blocked by Israeli occupying forces and settlers, or they are being forced to cease operations in Gaza entirely."
She added that some buildings in Gaza that are critical to the local tech industry, such as Burj Al-Wattan, have been destroyed by Israeli air strikes and that the tech industry is not the first priority group in the emergency. "How can you break away from the harrowing reality and cling to the last glimmer of hope for your business?"
Mohammad Alnobani is the founder of "The Middle Frame" and a Palestinian. "Middle Frame" is an Arab photo gallery platform powered by artificial intelligence tools that aims to break stereotypes of the Arab world through pictures and reduce bias in artificial intelligence.
He told me he was on his way back from the One Young World summit in Belfast, where he gave a speech on peace and reconciliation, and was about to reach the border to reunite with his family in Palestine when the war broke out.
"The border was closed and I had to turn around and go back to Jordan," he said. "I'm still there, constantly checking on my family in Jerusalem and trying to contact my contacts in Gaza. His co-founder, Raya Fatayer, is in Ramallah, at home with her children and husband, unable to travel."
"Our entrepreneurial friends in Gaza have had their homes destroyed by airstrikes, and some we can't even contact anymore because they have no electricity because of the blackout. Dealing with this situation while trying to move forward as best we can is a daily challenge," he said.
He said that this conflict with Israel is obviously different from the past: "Before, every time Gaza was attacked by air strikes, we knew that certain areas were almost safe. Today, it is clear that no one is safe."