After 20 days of lethal bombardment and a crippling siege of 2.3 million people, the situation in Gaza reached a new level with a complete communication blackout descending over the enclave beginning on Friday, 7 PM local time, caused by (obviously targeted) Israeli bombardment. All phone and internet connection in Gaza is gone, preventing any contact between Gazans and the outside world. Not even news and aid agencies like Amnesty International and the WHO can reach their workers on the ground there in Gaza. At the same time, Israeli strikes have picked up in intensity and the Israeli military said that they are expanding their ground operations as well. This suggests that Israel’s long awaited invasion of the Gaza Strip is about to be underway. But the biggest concern is that this new communication blockade could provide cover for Israelis to commit atrocities in Gaza or allow an escalation of the humanitarian carnage without the world being able to watch. A lot of disinformation may be able to spread more easily now. Without the world being able to know anymore what is happening to the people of Gaza, their suffering is very likely going to get much worse.
A recent update from Al Jazeera, which is one of the few lines still running in some capacity between Gaza and the outside world, gives a picture of just how dramatic the situation is.
“‘Bloodiest night in Gaza since the beginning of the war’
Al Jazeera correspondents in the Gaza Strip are able to provide sporadic updates via satellite but direct communication is often hampered due to the near-total communication blackout in the bombarded enclave.
From Hani Mahmoud in Khan Younis, southern Gaza
Palestinians have endured what’s being described as the most difficult and bloodiest night since the beginning of this war.
It all started on Friday when the Israeli military spokesperson distributed a map asserting that the al-Shifa Hospital was the headquarters of Hamas’s leadership. Hamas denied this but an hour later, Gaza experienced a complete blackout.
At about 7pm local time, a major attack by sea and land took place, concentrated on the northern part of the Gaza Strip, around the vicinity of al-Shifa Hospital.
We have been hearing reports that hundreds of people have been killed in those areas and emergency services were not able to get to them in time to help.
Families in the south of Gaza have also not been able to reach their relatives who stayed in the north.”
The implications of this story are quite disturbing. Its accuracy is not yet verified, and probably cannot be for quite a while, but the idea you get is that things are potentially taking a turn for the much worse and Israel does not want anyone to watch. If the blackout continues, only time will let us know Gaza’s fate, but what is clear is that, with the blackout, Israel’s siege of Gaza is complete. For weeks, no supplies, food, water, gas, or electricity was allowed to go in and no one was allowed to get out. Now, the same is true for the flow of information. That is how unrelenting Israel’s blockading strategy is.
Unlike the airstrikes, which cause immediate death and suffering, the siege of Gaza becomes lethal with the passage of time. Gaza is far from being self-sufficient, given that it is a small and densely-populated strip of land between sea and desert, and, with this siege, people’s needs are being completely denied to them. When one’s access to basic human needs are cut off, one can do fine for a little while. I can go the next several hours without drinking any water and, if I had only an unsafe source of water to drink, I could reasonably stand a chance of dodging illness for the next few days. But when situations of this kind continue, the impact grows exponentially.
In Gaza, the health of people will worsen as they continue drinking water contaminated with sewage or salinity. As they continue being malnourished, their immune systems will weaken and they will be more vulnerable to infection. The longer this siege goes on, the more time is given for epidemics to spread. With no electricity for life-support systems like dialysis, the health of the people who need them will eventually fail. Worst of all, the longer this period of siege is, the more babies that will be born in this period. Pregnant mothers and newborns require a great deal of care. After birth, they need to be washed with clean, warm water. No clean water is flowing for Gazans and, with no gas or electricity either, there is no way to warm water up. These are just some of the many individual problems thrust onto Gazans. When they are all combined together, such as pregnant women having to drink saltwater while no longer able to see a doctor for check-ups and treatment and suffering from fatigue and stress while evacuating amidst falling bombs, then you see just how catastrophically dire the situation is.
The bombardments magnify the needs of people, causing thousands to require hospitalization. At the same time, the strikes are also resulting in healthcare centers shutting down or being avoided, while the destruction of roads makes it harder to move around. Look at the fate of the Al-Ahli hospital and the report we just heard suggesting that Al-Shifa Hospital is now the bulls’ eye for Israel. Nobody in Gaza probably wants to go anyone near a hospital anymore. That means the only professional care available to them is keeping in touch with their doctor on phone, who can hear their problems and give them instructions, but the latest shutdown of phone and internet services has removed that option as well, since it affects communication within Gaza, not just with the outside world.
In this situation, it is important for journalists to continue doing their job. Whatever way is still possible for them, they should continue shining a light on what is happening in Gaza. Even if the rest of the world cannot listen right now, journalists should document so that the truth of what went on is not lost and any atrocity committed will not go unaccounted for. In the current blackout, that requires physically being there in Gaza, a harrowing job, to be sure. And for us journalists on the outside, there is something extra that we have to do.
As journalists, our focus is always to report the news. That means that, whatever is happening, we just gather information of it and broadcast it. But as I explained recently on PPLDM’s YouTube channel in a video called Gaza and Reporting in Disasters, people must also be able to understand the news. Journalists can shed light on a humanitarian crisis and say that these people are suffering like this, but what about how humanitarian crises actually work? That sort of knowledge is unfortunately lacking for many people who have no experience with enduring a humanitarian emergency, and even for many people who do. And when there is a major crisis on the news, that is often the only time that people pay attention to this subject matter. That means that this is the time when educating the world about current events is important.
You can go through all the coverage being aired on the Gaza crisis and you likely will still not know exactly where Gazans get all their sources of water from and how the water supply system of this place works. We hear that dialysis patients are in danger, but what is dialysis exactly and why do people need it? What are all the diseases that Gazans are at greater risk of? How do they spread and how do they impact the human body? Most importantly, what is a pregnant woman to do to maximize her and her baby’s chance of survival when she is about to give birth and there is no hospice care, no facility, no water, nothing available to her? And how many hospitals are in Gaza and how are they structured? We only hear the names of specific hospitals in the news when they are bombed or journalists get in touch with their staff about the difficulties they face or Israel warning them to evacuate. The media should have produced maps of the layout of Gaza’s healthcare system the moment that Israel launched its campaign against the enclave.
When scientific matters are talked about in the media, we sometimes witness professional and well-respected news anchors not being able to tell the difference between viruses and bacteria, or between the Gulf Stream and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or between the Jetstream and the Polar Vortex (maybe even between the Gulf Stream and the Jetstream, if things are bad enough). That shows how much of a disconnect there is between news reporting and being educated about what is reported. Let’s change that, and now it is imperative to do so.
That should include getting experts on air to talk about the news. These experts can then have the opportunity to get involved in a career in media and journalism. What they do can not only produce a better-informed audience but also contribute to solving humanitarian issues. For example, Gaza is suffering an acute water crisis. It does not very much involve a lack of water per se, but the people only have access to unsafe and often contaminated water. In this situation, filtering water becomes important. We need the media talking about the ways that unsafe water is hazardous and how water is purified, not just in normal circumstances but how people in Gaza can do so within the limited resources and time they have. This will help aid workers in Gaza and the ordinary people of Gaza as well, if they are able to listen to media broadcasts.
Here is a video detailing how to make homemade charcoal out of wood pellets or cotton and use it to filter water, Overlooked Survival Item You Need to Learn to Make. It is by a former Boy Scout and part-time NGO worker who, of course, only runs his own private outlets on the Internet and does not appear on major media channels, as far as I know. But we need the kind of knowledge he has to be available for those watching world events and current affairs like the war in Gaza. To serve that purpose here, I am providing the link to his website City Prepping and YouTube channel. Also, check out his recent, more expansive video on water filtration How to Make a Water Filter With Available Items (Enhanced Microbial Removal) – DIY.
With all eyes on Gaza, it is time for the field of journalism to seize the initiative and help the world truly understand what this crisis really is. We can begin with the latest turn of events. The news tells us that Gaza’s telecom infrastructure is down, but how does telecom technology work exactly. Why is it that mobile and internet services were easy to erase and why are some people in Gaza still able to keep in touch using satellite phones? What is different about satellite communication, and how is it that Israel can track their use and launch airstrikes on their location, as sources say is a potential danger? How does electromagnetic shielding, which sources say Hamas is using to protect their cables from Israel, work? (again, CityPrepping is a good source for learning about this.) And what about StarLink? Elon Musk is reportedly providing it as a lifeline to aid agencies in Gaza. So what is StarLink, how does it work, what makes it different, and how can Israel potentially interfere with it? One of the most comprehensive news reports on the latest situation is this 28 October analysis by Al Jazeera Analysis: Israel’s ground attacks yield lots of bang, little success, but it does not delve into the physics, tech, and engineering of the subject matter contained and it does not contain links to any sources that do.
That is the very first step that journalists should embark on. We need to scan the web for educational material relevant to the stories we cover so we can use them as source material or further reading for our online reports. Then our readers can click those links to learn more. That will give them access to knowledge that can help them in their own lives, including if they are ever caught in a crisis situation of their own. On this very blogsite, you can find a list of materials related to disaster risk reduction compiled on the Resources page.
Even if the war has reached the point that information about what is happening in Gaza is completely blocked, this is one job that journalists can do that will not be hampered in any way by the actions of those fighting the war.
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And one final note: I know the situation in Gaza and Israel is a very complicated one, but there is one measure the involved parties absolutely must take. If 2.3 million Palestinians are trapped within the Gaza Strip because both Israel and Egypt consider letting them in to be a security risk, at least all those who are vulnerable and who need help, like birthing mothers and ill and injured people, should be allowed to be taken to a place of safety and where better facilities are available for them. They obviously cannot be a threat to anyone, so this should be implemented as a long-term policy ensuring that, every time violence erupts in Gaza, the most vulnerable are spared its effects.
Pakistan's People Led Disaster Management - PPLDM 