“No internet, no laptop.” This is what sDuaa Fayez remembers, who calls herself a “survivor of war.” She spent seven years working as an editor and video producer. But when the war began she lost her job as a stringer for a number of news websites.

Duaa recounts her struggle to access the internet after the Israeli army severed communication links at the start of the war on the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023. She also lost her laptop in the bombing.

Duaa had been living at the time in Jabalia camp before she fled with her family to the central region of Gaza. She had no way to work there, since her job as an editor relied on internet,.Being cut off meant great hardship for her, especially given the difficult economic conditions caused by the blockade and the war. She also became the main breadwinner for her family, after her brothers lost their jobs in private companies in Gaza city. 

When battles rage in Gaza, female journalists normally work round the clock alongside their male colleagues to report the news and produce political reports and human interest stories. But in the latest war on Gaza, work has ground to a halt, and the phrase “there’s no internet” has become the most repeated phrase by journalists and media workers.

Since the start of the war on Gaza, the Israeli army has bombed internet masts and telecommunications companies, cutting off the people of Gaza from the rest of the world. A few journalists kept   broadcasting the news using Israeli Cellcom SIM cards connected to the internet, or “eSIM cards”. These allow for   communication without the need for a traditional SIM.

Severing communication among people is banned under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And the internet is, of course, one of the most important means of communication. Any infringement of this right is considered a breach of human rights.

The UN Human Rights Council, therefore, issued a resolution in 2016 condemning any measures designed to prevent or obstruct the dissemination of information and access to it on the internet.

Duaa Fayez did her best to keep working as a journalist. She braved the shelling to leave her home to go to the nearest internet connection point. There she would buy a “Street net” card for one shekel, sit on the pavement to wait for an email, file her copy or prepare for an interview. All of this put her life in constant danger.

She remembers sometimes having to climb onto the roof of her house at night to connect to the internet to keep covering the war, despite the risks involved, as Israeli planes flew constantly over Gaza.

Duaa says the worst thing that happened was when she was injured as she rushed out to get internet access to file a breaking story and caught her foot in a rope of one of the journalists' tents pitched near the Kuwaiti Hospital in Rafah. 

Having no communication or internet access also impacted her personal life, especially after her siblings had to move away. She could hear shelling near them, but had no way of communicating with them. This exacerbated her anxiety and psychological pressure.

The hardest thing Duaa had to face was when her father died in Jericho in mid-April 2024. He had to go there before the war for work, even though he was ill. Due to lack of means for communication, neither Duaa nor her family knew he had died until the funeral.

She says that her father was unable to check on the family and they could not contact him because of the communications blackout. With the weakness of the networks, it was hours after he had died that her father's friend managed to contact them to tell them his friends are organising her father’s  funeral. There was no way Duaa or her family could say a final goodbye to her father.

Her tragic story does not end there. The area she had moved to was hit by heavy shelling. She was almost killed, but rescue teams managed to pull her out from under the rubble.

I myself, Maha Shahwan, the author of this report, would have only two minutes of internet a week, no more. I used the time to message my uncle in Canada to check on my family in northern Gaza, because I had fled to the centre of the strip. I would WhatsApp him asking “How are they?” and he would reply, “They're okay.” He would know from my cousin, who lives in France and who would call his father, who lives next door to my family.

Many people are surprised to hear I only had two minutes of internet access a week. But the war has taught me a lot, not only about managing time, but managing all aspects of life that are under constant threat. During those two minutes, I relied on WhatsApp, because it was the only app on which messages arrived quickly, unlike Facebook. I updated my messages and, when the internet was cut off, I would read them and write replies to some of them. These would be sent off once I could open the internet again.

I remember one time I was lucky to find someone else who had been displaced and had an iPhone with an eSIM card. He let me use five minutes  of internet on his phone, but I wish he hadn't, because that's how I found out on Facebook that my cousin had been killed. Weeks would go by without me knowing anything about my family, to the point that I braced myself for bad news about them.

I suffered a lot at work because of internet and power outages. I developed a particular way of working: I would use the few minutes of internet access available to search for information related to the topic I was writing about. Then I would copy and paste the information and send it to my WhatsApp number. Following that, I would write out and edit the report on paper, charge my laptop using solar power, retype the material on my laptop, transfer it to my mobile, then connect back to the internet for less than a minute to send in the final version.

Similar Communication and Connectivity Challenges

Journalist Lamis Al-Hams lives with her family, her husband and four children, in northern Gaza, having refused to move south. Like most residents in the north, she had been trapped for weeks, cut off from the outside world by the absence of telecommunications and internet.

Al-Hams has been a journalist for 16 years and says that the internet outage has paralyzed their lives. “It is the basis of life in any society… to  communicate, follow the news, and check on family. But during the war, I couldn’t get in touch with my family, who moved to the central region, and couldn’t even find out if there was any bombardment near us.”

She adds, “At the start of the war, the internet was cut off in some areas and available in others. We had to walk miles to connect to get onto the internet and file our copy.”

Al-Hams underlines the complete isolation felt by those living in northern Gaza, just a few weeks into the war, when communication and internet links were completely cut off, making it impossible to find out what was happening in the immediate vicinity.

She recalls that she and her journalist husband, Mohammed Abu Qamar, went without internet or communications for a whole month. Their only source of news was when her husband ventured out of the house and asked displaced people he met “Where are you coming from? What happened to you?” so that they would know where the Israeli tanks were.

The Euro-Mediterranean Observatory confirms Al-Hams’s story, stating that the repeated Israeli targeting of civilians, while they are trying to pick up a phone or internet signal, happens mostly in areas under siege. There, the Israeli army is guilty of repeated violations of international law and is preventing the media from covering these crimes and bringing them to global attention.

The Observatory adds that this targeting is taking place at a time when the people of Gaza are suffering from an almost complete ongoing communications blackout, which makes their plight even worse, as they are being subjected to heavy, round-the-clock air and artillery bombardment, right up to the time this report is published.