Internet connectivity in Gaza is getting worse as the conflict between Israel and Hamas enters its third week. On Thursday, internet monitoring company NetBlocks wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that Palestinian internet service provider NetStream "has crashed days after the operator informed users it would terminate service due to severe fuel supply shortages."
Doug Madory, an expert who is now director of Internet analytics at Kentik and has spent years monitoring global networks at various companies, believes that Internet connectivity in Gaza is deteriorating dramatically.
"Evidence of the internet being paralyzed in Gaza is not hard to find. By every indicator of internet connectivity, the situation is dire."
Madoli said he monitored Gaza's internet connectivity during the 2014 war. At the time, despite some outages, "Internet service providers were able to maintain connectivity using things like backup power, even though many people were left without service due to power outages and infrastructure failures."
NetStream did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent to its email, Facebook and WhatsApp accounts. As of Friday, NetStream's website appeared to be offline.
On October 7, Hamas terrorists launched surprise attacks at Israeli homes, at music festivals and on 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 the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. In response to the terrorist attack, Israel cut off power to the Gaza Strip, a move it said reduced electricity supply by 90%.
IODA, a system that "monitors Internet infrastructure connections in near real-time with the goal of identifying macro-Internet outages," is monitoring several Internet providers in Palestine, including NetStream, and is showing widespread outages or at least significant performance degradation. Internet connectivity in Gaza dropped further on Friday "due to a general outage" from NetStream, the group wrote on X.
Amanda Meng, a research scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said they are seeing a "constant decline" in connectivity in Gaza. Meng described a first drop starting on October 7, with connectivity dropping to 20%, followed by a second drop early on October 21, to around 15% and below.
Meng specifically noted that Paltel and Zaytona are two of the "few networks that still show connectivity" and that even with lower connectivity, there are still networks available.
IODA was originally developed by the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the University of California, San Diego, and is now maintained by the Georgia Institute of Technology.