After the war began, Israel wanted to prevent the use of Musk’s Starlink in the Gaza Strip. Now a hospital in the sealed-off coastal strip is using the internet service.
Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s satellite internet service Starlink is now also being used in the contested Gaza Strip. The service is now active in a hospital in Gaza, Musk wrote on his platform X. This is supported by the United Arab Emirates and Israel. The internet service is intended to enable video conferences with other medical facilities and remote diagnoses in real time.
In February, Israel had already permitted the use of Starlink in its own country and in the Gaza Strip with restrictions for humanitarian purposes and approved it in a field hospital in Rafah operated by the United Arab Emirates. With Starlink, compact ground stations for internet access connect to a network of hundreds of satellites. The service belongs to the space company SpaceX, run by tech billionaire Musk.
In October, after the war began, Israel declared that it would do everything it could to prevent the use of Starlink in the Gaza Strip. The reason was that the Islamist Hamas, which rules the sealed-off coastal area, would misuse the system for terrorist purposes. Musk had previously announced that he wanted to use the satellite communications system to help restore the interrupted communication with internationally recognized aid organizations in the Gaza Strip.
The big advantage of Starlink is that access to the network is independent of the conventional telecommunications infrastructure. In the Gaza Strip, which has been badly damaged by the ongoing war, the telecommunications networks are unstable and have failed several times since the fighting began more than nine months ago.
Source: Stern
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