Near-total internet blackout hits Gaza as Israel ramps up strikes

pleasemakesense@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 408 points –
Near-total internet blackout hits Gaza as Israel ramps up strikes
nbcnews.com
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Why would you need to do this if your cause and actions are just? What are they trying to hide? I hope more people see this and understand Israel is morally bankrupt.

It is normal to disrupt and jam all communication ahead of an invasion.

IEDs, tactical comms etc.

Makes it harder for news to spread, documenting warcrimes and genocide, etc

I know, but this would happen whether war crimes were intended or not.

Can nobody here think like a military just for one second and understand that they don't care about spread of information? That information will be leaked after the blackouts are over, nothing can change that. That blackout is purely so that Hamas would lose their communication capabilities. It's a classic proven war tactic and a totally legit one.

You need to do this if your plan is to exterminate the Palestinians and move onto their land for your own purposes.

Not to sound like an invasion apologist, but I’d imagine they want to limit the ability for IEDs to be remotely detonated.

Israel could have broken the back of Hamas by simply helping the Palestinian people develop a bit of infrastructure and economy. If the Palestinians have something worth losing, Hamas has no power. Hamas is as powerful as it is because of Israels policies over the last 20 years.

Policies and direct funding

They've openly bragged about funding Hamas in order to keep the Palestinian population divided and prevent any kind of formal government from forming.

Hamas and Likud/Netanyahu need each other to stay in power. Without them, the people in the region may actually move towards peace.

And Hamas could have built Gazans an OK place to live in if they used the literally billions of dollars of foreign money for investments instead of for weapons and tunnels. Didn't happen either.

With what economy?

Israel is a first world nation with a high performance technocratic economy. What does Palestine have to work with?

We're again talking about what should have been done, and my point is that it's a pointless exercise, but if you really can't see any ways to build a functioning economy with literally billions of free money, then let's continue the exercise: about half of Palestinians used to have permits to work in Israel before Hamas fucked them over by attacking Israel. In the recent years the number of Israeli work permits has been increasing again, unfortunately Hamas decided to fuck them over again. So even if they had a small economy of their own, there was a way to work and bring money to then spend in Gaza.

But I find it really hard to believe you couldn't imagine a dozen things more useful for Gazans than things to wage war against Israel that ultimately only ever made their situation worse.

Another episode of "what should have been done" is that while with humanitarian aid it's not really possible, we never should have sent Gaza any development money without any conditions based on outcomes of their usage. But as with the above, what's done is done.

Ok, well, right now, Israel is a first world nation with a high performance technocratic economy and Palestine is rubble being ground into dust. Israel has the privilege to do better.

I'm not sure what else they're supposed to do. After a terrorist attack like this one, I don't really see any other option that would realistically be accepted by the government and the population other than attempting to wipe out Hamas completely. Israel is risking many lives of Israeli soldiers in order to reduce Palestinian civilian casualties by deciding to do a terribly difficult ground invasion instead of levelling Gaza to rubble, Grozny style. I don't blame them for trying to make the situation at least a bit easier by blocking communication of all things.

are you making the argument that the correct response to a terrorist attack is to genocide the people where the terrorists are based? because that's what Israel is doing right now It doesn't matter that they are Jews and have also suffered a genocide in their past. this is material, here and now, and happening. and you just argued for it.

Israel is a powerful nation with all the options they can imagine on the table. If they can't imagine another option then that's on them.

Israel is a powerful nation with all the options they can imagine on the table. If they can’t imagine another option then that’s on them.

You say that, but I don't see any other way to remove the Hamas threat than what they're doing. Is your argument just "Israel is all-powerful and they should find a different way even if we don't see any!"?

are you making the argument that the correct response to a terrorist attack is to genocide the people where the terrorists are based?

What? I'm mentioning Grozny. Have you heard about Grozny? If you haven't, maybe I understand how you could interpret my message in that way, though I still don't think it makes sense. In the second Chechen war, this is what Grozny looked like after Russia was finished with it, most likely on false pretenses (putin faking appartment bombings around Russia and blaming it on Chechens). They simply turned it to rubble.

Israel could do this and get away with it just like Russia did, and their reasons for attacking Hamas are more serious than reasons Russians had to attack Chechnya. Instead of doing that they chose to do a ground invasion, which will reduce the loss of civilian lives and infrastructure, despite the fact that it will dramatically increase the casualties on Israeli side.

That is not genocide, that is deciding to avoid genocide in a situation where they could likely get away with it.

I don’t see any other way to remove the Hamas threat than what they’re doing.

Then you need to do better. They can use special ops. They can appeal to the Palestinian people. They can revise their foreign policy to not set these situations up in the first place (see the previous 20 years of Israeli policy towards Palestine).

They arent' targeting Hamas, they are targeting any Palestinian with a pulse. Right now, you are acting as an apologist for a genocide and you should seriously reconsider your position. It will not age well.

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It also theoretically would cease some methods of communication between Hamas members.

Also not taking any sides here, just an explanation as to why communications get shut down during military conflicts.

Yeah, I get people are against the invasion, but if they cannot see legitimate and obvious reasons for restricting options of (human or machine) communications, they're either completely ideologically blinded or stupid.

A simple two way radio would counter that, unless the are jamming all RF.

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I'm not supporting Israel or anything but denying your enemy the lines of communication is, like, one of the core tenants of warfare.

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Non-Google AMP link: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/rcna122531

If you see the word "amp" in the url, please do everyone a favour and delete it. Usually that's all it takes.

Sorry for my ignorance, but what does this AMP do and why is it important to remove it? Is it a referral link or something?

AMP is a project started by Google, Accelerated Mobile Pages, which ostensibly speeds up loading web pages (primarily news websites) by consolidating them to a single set of servers. This was always a lie, however, as the bottleneck with mobile devices is almost always the mobile connection itself, not the back end interconnections between different news websites' servers.

In reality the goal is to consolidate web traffic to make it easier for Google to track users. Google also strong armed websites into using it, as if you didn't use it then your articles wouldn't show up in the news ribbon at the top of search or in Google Now voice search. Supposedly they don't do this anymore, however they no doubt still require it in the terms of other services they provide.

Based on what Netanyahu posted this morning, they are likely planning on destroying the biggest hospital in Gaza and killing everyone there and in the surrounding area.

So, hundreds of deaths. And they want to prevent it from being recorded and shown to the rest of the world.

I doubt they're dumb enough to think that cutting off most real-time communication would prevent those images from coming out.

Nope, every other county is going to have video from drones, they will however just use it as leverage instead of evidence.

Just a little theory: they might be waiting for most of the population to die from lack of food, water, and medical equipment, and the rest to join Hamas before the ground invasion. It wouldn't be a great look to go around killing civilians on the ground like they're doing in the West bank, but going around and freeing the area from Hamas terrorists? well, now we are talking.

I don't know what you mean by "most of the population" but a million-plus people dying of dehydration, starvation, or treatable illness isn't a better look than people dying in a ground assault. If anything, it's more cruel. I'm not defending it (using food and water as a weapon against a population is a war crime) but I could make a case that increasing desperation could benefit them. If deaths are even a fraction of that though, their already-shaky international support would collapse.

but a million-plus people dying of dehydration, starvation, or treatable illness isn’t a better look than people dying in a ground assault.

well you can just say: "It's a side effect of war, HAMAS can use those resources too! we cannot allow that to happen", but when your troops are on the ground and can see what they're killing Al-Jazeera becomes a problem.

The same can be applied to airstrikes: "They cannot see what they're hitting"

their already-shaky international support would collapse.

I can assure you that they can kill nearly anyone in the middle east at this point and that won't happen, they can kill an entire population and they will get away with it if they do it over a long enough period of time.

increasing desperation could benefit them.

You might be right, it looks like the invasion is very close.

No, no, no.

All the people dying of dehydration, starvation, or treatable illness because Israel neither lets them out nor lets anywhere near enough humanitarian aid in (only about 5% of what is needed and that didn't last a week before being stopped) are the fault of Hamas because they're being used as Human Shields^(tm?)^

/s

Paltel was the last ISP standing and now it is kaput. Fairly common for Iran to turn off their internet after Friday prayers, but Gaza was caused by shelling.

Ya'll can't think for a second from a military perspective.

No. This is not about hiding what they do - things will leak either way after the blackout is over - you can't erase data from people's devices.

This is a 100% legitimate war tactic of breaking your enemie's communication, making them less prepared for combat and catching them by suprise.

If ya'll are pro palestinian then you're also anti-Hamas, and that's a 100% anti-Hamas move. That's a good sign of Hamas about to take a massive hit.

Hamas terrorists operate inside and under Shifa hospital and other hospitals in Gaza with a network of terror tunnels, Shifa is not the only hospital, it is one of many. Hamas use of hospitals is systematic. We have concrete evidence that hundreds of terrorists flooded into the hospital to hide there after the massacres

Nice going Hamas, the dildo of consequences of rarely comes lubed.