How Tech Workers in the Bay Area and Beyond Are Striving to Keep Gaza Online

For over a month, Vallejo resident Hannah Brannan has been intensively monitoring the social media accounts of her mentees and colleagues in Gaza.

“I’d constantly just be refreshing. ‘Okay, is this person alive? Have they been on Twitter or on Facebook?’” said Brannan, a software engineer who volunteers with Gaza Sky Geeks, a program started in 2011 that provides mentorship opportunities to aspiring tech workers in the enclave. “And the moment that [the] internet really started crashing — it’s just devastating because you know that they’re in active danger and you can’t do anything.”

Brannan, the founder of Gather Flora, an online marketplace connecting florists with local growers, got involved with the program five years ago and has traveled to Gaza several times since then.

“Gaza is a place that teaches you life and hope like no other,” she said. It “teaches you to see the joy because they are not always offered that.”

Brannan said she recently received a harrowing video message from Mahmood Khwaiter, a Gaza Sky Geeks staffer who, until recently, lived in Gaza City before evacuating to the south.

“There’s no place to go. Gaza is all in danger,” Khwaiter said in the video, sent on Oct. 14 while he was still in Gaza City, during the first week of Israel’s aerial bombardment. “It’s been 24 hours without electricity and water, without food, without anything. So remember me. Remember my family.”

Brannan describes Khwaiter as an incredible human being — and said his message was heartbreaking to hear.

With the Israeli siege of Gaza now well into its second month, and the Palestinian death toll topping 11,000, according to Gazan health officials, Brannan is one of many volunteers involved in an international effort to send electronic SIM cards to Gaza residents. eSIMs, as they’re known, can be transferred digitally through either QR or manual codes that enable recipients to activate cell phone plans on mobile networks and retain internet access when it’s otherwise unavailable.

The resource, according to digital civil rights nonprofit Access Now, can be a crucial lifeline to the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Gaza, where dwindling resources and badly damaged or destroyed telecommunication lines have resulted in severely limited phone and internet access. According to the UN, the Israeli military has targeted this civilian infrastructure, a move that Access Now called a “human rights violation.”

Last week, when PalTel, the Palestinian telecommunications company, announced it was about to run out of fuel amid the ongoing Israeli blockade — prompting a short telecommunications blackout — Brannan and other volunteers went into overdrive.

It’s “why we’re kind of trying to get round-the-clock volunteer efforts on getting people connected to (eSIMs), because, in theory, with that, you seem to be able to have hotspots from international networks,” said Brannan, who recently formed a new group devoted to the effort, called Gaza Online. “It’s definitely spotty and not reliable and not consistent and not the default match for people’s technologies, but it’s something.”

Brannan said that as of Saturday morning, Gaza Online volunteers had received nearly 1,000 requests for eSIMs.

Iliana Montauk, a Berkeley resident who joined Gaza Sky Geeks in 2013 and has since visited the enclave several times, says she found a community of creative entrepreneurs and technologists in Gaza with impressive visions despite their often fragile circumstances. On one trip, she recalls being pitched on an extensive range of projects, everything from a video game embedded in Arab culture to an e-commerce website for Arab moms.

“(We) had 60 founders in the space all pitching their ideas to me and asking me for help preparing for their pitches to investors,” Montauk said.

Most cafes and homes had WiFi, and co-working spaces were everywhere, she said. That’s in part due to the sorely outdated telecommunications infrastructure in Gaza, where any major upgrade projects must first be approved by Israel.

“Palestinians were some of the first to get online and be connected on social networking and all of that because their people are starving for some connection to the outside world,” Montauk said. “As soon as email and social networks were available, [Palestinians] got onto it.”

When she visited Gaza, electricity was only available about four hours a day, further limiting connection, Montauk said.

“There’s just been a limit to how much electricity Gaza can provide for itself internally,” she said. “I’ll be working with people online, and they’ll be sitting in darkness because their electricity will get shut off, but they’ll have their WiFi attached to [battery] power and their laptop charged up so that they can keep working.”

Participants in her program would also just keep working through whatever unrest was going on at the time, Montauk said, recalling how “you could hear bombing in the background” during previous escalations.

Montauk remembers how on her first day in Gaza — in 2013 — “there were sonic booms overhead from Israeli warplanes, and we were putting safety glass up in the windows and preparing an evacuation plan.”

Since then, Montauk has helped launch Manara — which means lighthouse in Arabic — a startup aimed at connecting tech companies to talented prospects in the Middle East & North Africa, with a specific focus on women and Palestinians.

About 80 engineers in Gaza are involved in Manara’s community, including ones who are still in training and others who are working remotely for international companies. Many of them have lost their homes and entire neighborhoods in recent weeks and need eSIMS to stay connected, Montauk said.

Hailey Yoon, a Manara mentor based in Dubai, has been leading the effort to contact the engineers and their families in Gaza and help send them eSIMS.

“If we really put into realistic words, I was checking if everybody was dead or alive, every day,” she said.

The eSIMS delivery process has required tireless experimenting, with Manara community members still trying to determine where eSIMs work best in Gaza and which formats are most effective.

Yoon said the Manara community is doing its best to keep tabs on the location of its eSIMs recipients by monitoring messenger apps like Telegram and WhatsApp to see when users were last online — and check where their eSIM cards have been activated.

Because of the logistical complexities, Yoon recommends that people interested in helping donate an eSIM card to an organization rather than trying to activate one themselves. Manara recently sent out a call for eSIMS in Qatar, while Egyptian journalist Mirna El Helbawi has been a key organizer spearheading pools for eSIMs donations on social media.

Meanwhile, in the Bay Area, Brannan refers people to a form used by groups to organize donations.

She said sending eSIMS to Gazans is one way to stand up for their basic liberties.

“It’s the ability to connect with loved ones,” she said. “The ability to tell your story.”

Correction (Nov. 21): The original version of this story stated that Gaza Sky Geeks was co-founded in 2011 by Iliana Montauk. Rather, Montauk joined the group in 2013.