Internet access in the Gaza Strip has been severely affected by power cuts and infrastructure damage since Hamas launched an attack against Israel over the weekend, according to groups that track online connectivity.
As of Monday, eight of the primary internet service providers serving the Gaza Strip had little to no connectivity, according to NetBlocks, a company that tracks internet censorship.
“Some of them are connecting and disconnecting, but mostly they are not in a good shape,” said Isik Mater, the group’s director of research.
A spokesperson for Cloudflare, a San Francisco internet connectivity company, said Monday that the company had seen traffic at multiple networks serving the Gaza Strip experience outages after Israel began a blockade that included cutting off electricity.
Fusion, one of the top internet providers for Palestinians, posted on Facebook Monday that infrastructure damage from bombings has caused service delays.
There have been no significant cyberattacks against Israel since the invasion, the country’s top cyberdefense agency said Sunday. Rob Joyce, a senior adviser for cybersecurity strategy for the U.S. National Security, concurred on Monday.
“One of the big worries of course is, is there a cyber component of it at this point? And I’d say not yet,” Joyce said at the Cipher Brief Threat Conference in Sea Island, Georgia.
However, various hacktivist groups — which often claim to be allied with a particular country, but whose identities aren’t possible to verify — have launched a range of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, a basic hacker tactic to flood a website with traffic so that it loads slowly or not at all.
The Jerusalem Post, one of Israel’s top newspapers, went offline Sunday after one group announced its plans to DDoS, and remained offline Monday. The official Hamas website has faced similar connectivity difficulties and also was inaccessible Monday after another group announced a DDoS.
