People gather on seashore as communications blackout extends

Hundreds of Palestinians flocked to the seashore west of Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip to try to overcome communications outages in the Gaza Strip for the eighth consecutive day.

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.

Palestinians are forced to go to open or high places and seashore to try to pick up the signals of mobile phone networks outside the Gaza Strip, so that they can communicate with their families and the people displaced between the besieged governorates of the blockaded territory.

“It’s important to stay connected even with people outside of the Gaza Strip,” Mohammed al-Hayek said. “Some people can no longer work because their jobs depend on the internet.”

The “near-total telecoms blackout” has now lasted for 168 hours, internet monitor NetBlocks said.

Source: AlJazeera