(Paris) American billionaire Elon Musk assured Saturday that his Starlink satellite internet access service would support the connectivity of “internationally recognized aid organizations” in Gaza, cut off from the world since Friday due to the shutdown of telecommunications and the internet.
“Starlink will support the connectivity of internationally recognized aid organizations in Gaza,” Elon Musk wrote on the social network X (formerly Twitter), which he also owns, without giving further details.
He responded to a message from a Democratic representative in the American House of Representatives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who on Saturday deemed the shutdown of telecommunications in the Palestinian territory “unacceptable”.
“We could really benefit from Starlink in trying to get in touch with our staff and our health facilities in Gaza. How can we achieve this? “, asked the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, on the same social network, while NGOs and UN agencies indicated that they had lost contact with their teams in Gaza.
Humanitarian operations and hospital activity “cannot continue without communications,” said Lynn Hastings, a UN official, for example.
The war between Israel and Hamas, which entered its 22nd on Saturdaye day, was triggered by the unprecedented attack by the Palestinian Islamist movement on October 7 on Israeli soil from the Gaza Strip.
In retaliation, the Israeli army has relentlessly bombed and besieged this cramped territory controlled by Hamas since 2007, where some 2.4 million Palestinians are crowded.
Hamas said on Saturday that 7,703 people, mostly civilians, had been killed in Israeli bombings, the heaviest toll since Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian territory in 2005, after 38 years of occupation.
According to Israeli authorities, more than 1,400 people were killed in Israel, mainly civilians.
The Starlink satellite internet access service, operated by the company SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk, was also deployed in Ukraine shortly after its invasion by Russia in February 2022.
In September, the American billionaire said he had prevented a Ukrainian attack on a Russian navy base in 2022, by refusing a request from Kyiv to activate this service in the Black Sea, near Crimea annexed by Moscow.
“We have received an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink to Sevastopol. The obvious intention was to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor,” he wrote on X.
These statements were strongly condemned by an adviser to the Ukrainian presidency, Mykhaïlo Podoliak. The city of Sevastopol is home to the base of the Russian fleet positioned in the Black Sea on the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Moscow in 2014.