They are on Israeli SIM networks but special Palestinian SIM cards. Israel runs on technological spying. If Israel pulls the plug on the internet then they black out their own data scraping as well.

If you want to donate, donate to content creators or journalists raising awareness for Palestine. Donating to those within Gaza just for money does little to help them.

Or donate to the dev of the "No Thanks" app for Israeli boycotts.

"Palestine" encompasses some politically different territories.

Gaza: they access internet mostly via donated esims these days due to the blockade. A lot of them may be using Israeli telecom companies and towers (I bought an Israeli esim for a friend of mine in Gaza a while ago), but as far as I can tell there are other internet providers in the SWANA region whose esims also cover Gaza.

West Bank: afaik have different internet to Israel though I imagine there may be a mix between using Israeli internet providers and West Bank specific providers.

East Jerusalem: I imagine same internet situation as the West Bank, maybe leaning more towards Israeli internet providers?

Historic Palestine/'48 Palestine that's now "Israel": will be using Israeli internet. Remember that this is still Palestine, and there are still Palestinians living here, though very few. But they do exist; one of my Palestinian friends is a '48 Palestinian. She has an "Israeli" ID; her phone number is "Israeli"; etc.

If your goal is to help people experiencing genocide to stay connected, I recommend you donate esims. There are a lot of esim donation initiatives out there. Here's one for instance: https://chuffed.org/project/crips-for-esims-for-gaza

It's particularly crucial in the face of Israel's campaign against journalists, that the people of Gaza are able to broadcast what is happening.

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/25837169/12646313, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/21/keeping-gaza-online-gazas-telecom-heroes-risk-life-and-limb-under-israels-bombs

I’m trying so hard to claw at the smallest thing I can do to help

There's the mutual_aid community from Hexbear if you're interested in helping via donations, take a look at their latest Palestine donation megathread:

https://lemmy.ml/post/31793466

I take it that you want to do more than just donations though, right? (in that case I'd love to know too)

I'm literally not trying to pick a fight with anyone lol, I was just watching HOPE talks and thinking infrastructure.

Like fuck me, I don't know how to help stop a genocide

Man I've just been watching the HOPE conference videos and one attendee called out a speaker for delivering a talk about hacking against an opponent in the context of Ukraine, but she declined to answer why she's speaking at a conference in Tel Aviv

Back when I was in the Westbank in 2019 they had a separate mobile network than the Israelis. As a Palestinian you could not get a Israeli phone number.

Great question, very interested to hear the answer if anyone knows. Please mention me, future posters!

I expect the answer to be very different for Gaza and for the west bank.

My best guesses (NOT BASED ON KNOWLEDGE, JUST SPECULATION):

West Bank perhaps can connect to Israeli telecom service providers. I'm guessing that's what Israeli settlements in the west bank do, so no reason why Palestinian cities wouldn't do that too.

As for Gaza, again their only telecommunications have to be through Israel. It appears that Israel can literally just stop the internet service (and electricity and water for that matter), and Gaza would be in the dark. The fact that Israel isn't doing this is a bit of an enigma to me - not because I think they should (I don't), but because it's very obvious the the Israeli government thinks it should. Some ministers have literally said as much.

EDIT: I'm asking about Gaza

RIPE Atlas is what you are looking for. Not sure about probes in Palestine.

Short answer is anyway that they can. Israel is trying to cut the communication to hide their crimes and basically every thinking human is doing anything and everything that they can to help people in danger.

Anyone who isn’t will inevitably have to live in a world where the people they could have helped are not around to help them when they need help.