The Israeli military has cut off the Gaza Strip from the internet by bombing the last remaining main fibre-optic route, as troops continue to kill dozens of Palestinian aid seekers on a daily basis.
According to the Palestinian health ministry, at least 21 people were killed and 294 others wounded on Thursday morning while attempting to reach a food distribution centre operated by the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
The incident follows a similar one on Wednesday, when Israeli forces killed 60 Palestinians as they approached a GHF point near Netzarim in central Gaza.
According to official figures, at least 245 Palestinians have been killed near aid distribution sites since the new Israel-US aid coordination mechanism was implemented more than two weeks ago.
The emergency department at Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City said it had admitted dozens of people in recent days who had been killed or wounded while waiting for aid.
"Many Gazans went to the Nabulsi and Netzarim areas to receive aid and were shot at and shelled with tanks," said Mutaz Harara, the head of Al-Shifa's emergency department.
"Many patients died while waiting for their turn."
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Telecommunications Regulatory Authority said that a complete blackout of internet and landline services hit Gaza on Thursday after Israeli forces targeted the last remaining main fibre-optic route.
"Digital isolation is intensifying due to the systematic targeting of infrastructure, despite repeated attempts to repair severed and alternative routes," the authority said.
"The southern and central areas of Gaza have now joined the state of digital isolation already affecting Gaza City and the northern Strip for the second consecutive day."
The authority warned that the blackout will isolate Gaza from the outside world and hinder humanitarian, health, media and educational services.
As the afternoon drew to a close, more and more Blackshirts and [other Fascists] appeared on the streets. All postal and telephonic communications in and out of Ethiopia had been suspended,²⁶ a measure designed to put an information blackout over the terror that was about to be unleashed. The result was that the European news agencies were for some time starved of information, and many of their early reports were speculative.
(Emphasis added.)