Communication systems are being restored to Gaza, two days after phone and internet service vanished for most of the territory amid a heavy Israeli bombardment.
It is a welcome development for Gaza following a communications blackout that began late on Friday as Israel expanded ground operations and launched intense airstrikes that illuminated the night sky with furious orange flashes.
Only a few Palestinians with international SIM cards or satellite phones were able to get news out.
On Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the country’s military has opened a “second stage” in the war against Hamas by sending ground forces into Gaza and expanding attacks from the ground, air and sea.
He said these will only increase ahead of a broad ground invasion into the territory.
Mr Netanyahu said: “It will be long and difficult. We are ready.”
The Palestinian death toll in Gaza on Saturday rose to more than 7,700 people since the war began, with 377 deaths reported since late on Friday, according to the Gaza health ministry.
By Sunday morning, phone and internet communications had been restored to many people in Gaza, according to telecommunications providers in the area, internet-access advocacy group NetBlocks.org and confirmation on the ground.
After weeks of a total Israeli siege, Palestinians in Gaza felt the vice tightening.
Social media had been a lifeline for Palestinians desperate to get news and to share their terrifying plight with the world.
Exhausted and afraid her link to the world was so tenuous it could drop at any moment, 28-year-old Palestinian journalist Hind al-Khoudary said the massive airstrikes that shook the ground exceeded anything she had experienced over the past three weeks or any of the four previous Israel-Hamas wars.
Residents on Saturday darted across dilapidated neighbourhoods under heavy bombardment to check on loved ones. Medics chased the thunder of artillery and bombs because they couldn’t receive distress calls. Survivors pulled the dead from the rubble with bare hands and loaded them into cars and donkey-drawn carts.
“It’s a catastrophe,” said Anas al-Sharif, a freelance journalist. “Entire families remain under the rubble.”
Reached by WhatsApp, freelance photojournalist Ashraf Abu Amra in northern Gaza said panic and confusion surrounded him.
“It’s barely possible to send this message,” he said. “All I want to convey is that the international community must intervene and save the people of Gaza from death immediately.”
Local journalists posting daily on social media scavenged the 140-square-mile territory to find even a spotty connection. Some moved closer to the southern border with Egypt, hoping to pick up that country’s network.
Others had foreign SIM cards and special routers that connected to Israel’s network.
When the pace of bombardment slowed on Saturday morning, residents rushed to the homes of loved ones with whom they had lost touch overnight.
“People right now are walking, using their cars because there isn’t internet,” al-Khoudary said. “Everyone is checking on us, seeing us, and now we are going to check on others.”
She went directly to Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest, where doctors, exhausted from operating on patient after patient with dwindling fuel and medical supplies, pressed on, despite the crowds of some 50,000 people sheltering in the compound.
The wounded poured in from Shati refugee camp in Gaza City, al-Khoudary said, where Israeli bombs wrought destruction the night before.
Health authorities in Gaza and UN agencies warned that the blackout has exacerbated Gaza’s humanitarian crisis.
Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said the communication outages had paralyzed an overwhelmed health system.
International aid organisations, whose limited operations inside the enclave have teetered on collapse, said they couldn’t reach their staff nearly 24 hours after the blackout.
