Elon Musk said his Starlink satellite internet service is now operating in a hospital in Gaza, following months of negotiations over humanitarian exceptions to an internet blackout Israel imposed across the war-battered territory.
Musk wrote on X on Tuesday that Starlink was now active there with the support of Israel and the United Arab Emirates, which has been involved in negotiations to mitigate some effects of the Israel-Gaza war. While the provision of internet service for a single hospital is a breakthrough, its limited impact reflects the Israeli government’s reluctance for residents of Gaza to have internet access more broadly, lest it be used by Hamas in the war.
“It’s a minuscule offer,” said Ken Zita, a telecommunications expert who worked for the U.S. government around a decade ago on securing internet connectivity in the Palestinian territories. “It’s one location.”
The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a statement last week that the United Nations was in discussions with the Israeli authorities on getting essential security and communications equipment into Gaza to ensure the safety of humanitarian workers.
“Humanitarian aid workers need communication equipment to coordinate operations and ensure the safety of the teams operating in a very dangerous environment,” the U.N. humanitarian affairs office said.
GET CAUGHT UP
Stories to keep you informed
Starlink’s arrival in Gaza is the latest reflection of the growing geopolitical influence that Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, wields through his fast-growing satellite business, which is part of SpaceX. Although Musk is better known for his consumer-facing ventures, Tesla and X, it is SpaceX that makes him one of the U.S. government’s largest contractors and an increasingly prominent player in international affairs.
While satellites have been around for decades, Starlink has broken new ground by deploying huge numbers of small satellites into low orbit through SpaceX’s reusable rockets. This has made affordable satellite high-speed internet possible for the masses — as well as enabling next-level surveillance capabilities that the U.S. military and intelligence agencies are contracting the company to engineer.
The global reach of Starlink came into focus in September, when author Walter Isaacson reported in his biography of Musk that the mogul had declined to turn on Starlink over Crimea for Ukraine to use it to launch an attack against Russian boats. While Musk disputed some of the details, he confirmed the general incident.
“There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol. The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor,” Musk wrote in a post on X. “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”
Starlink’s international controversies have also extended to Iran, where the U.S. government has supported Iranian political dissidents’ use of Starlink terminals to circumvent official censorship, to Tehran’s ire. Iran has appealed to the U.N.’s International Telecommunications Union for help shutting down Starlink service across the nation, but the U.S. government has defended Starlink, saying in a letter reviewed by The Washington Post that it was “neither required nor practicable” for Starlink to shut off satellite signals over entire countries at the request of foreign governments.
Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi announced in November that Musk had reached a “principled understanding” with Israel to operate Starlink in Gaza with Israeli approval, following a visit by Musk to Israel, where he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Musk’s visit to the country had come as he faced widespread criticism for antisemitic content on X, as well as his own amplification of an antisemitic conspiracy theory on the platform, which he later apologized for.
While the communications blackouts in Gaza began as part of the war triggered by the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, Zita said Israel’s government has been restricting access to advanced internet and phone services in the Palestinian territories for three decades.
“They block equipment that they think is dual-use, which makes it more difficult to provide basic internet service,” he said, using the term for technologies with both military and civilian applications. “They also blocked the use of satellite earth stations to receive international telecommunication signals.”