The Palestine Telecommunications Company stated that communications and internet services in the Gaza Strip were completely cut off late Friday amid heavy Israeli bombing of feeder lines, towers, and networks. Additionally, Ooredoo Palestine, a mobile network operator in the West Bank, also announced it was out of service.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned that the telecommunications blackout in Gaza risks providing cover for mass atrocities. "This information blackout risks providing cover for mass atrocities and contributing to impunity for human rights violations," Deborah Brown, the group's senior technology and human rights researcher, said in the statement.

However, a senior US official revealed to the Washington Post Sunday that the United States pressured the Israeli government to switch back communications in Gaza after "Tel Aviv" did not inform Washington of the reason behind their actions.

"We made it clear they had to be turned back on," the top official said. "The communications are back on. They need to stay back on," he added on the condition of anonymity.

The people of Gaza stayed entirely out of reach for days, with calls receiving out-of-network messages, and connections were at best poor and could not be maintained.

The people of Gaza believed that an outright genocide was imminent once the communications were turned off, with one Palestinian mother saying that once the internet was cut off, she thought: "'They will finish us and no one will be able to know anything about us.'"

She underlined how the Israeli occupation was issuing warnings for the people of Northern Gaza to head south, but she was unable to due to the high cost of transportation and the fact that the south was being bombed by the Israeli occupation forces, too.

Read next: Israeli warplanes struck fleeing Palestinians after evacuation calls

Meanwhile, the director of Al-Shifa Hospital - which is home to more than 50,000 displaced people who are seeking shelter in it as a medical facility even after the IOF bombed a hospital before during its aggression on Gaza, killing some 300 people in the process - underlined that the blackout resulted in countless deaths.

Al-Shifa Hospital Director Mohammad Abu Salmiya said the blackout imposed by "Israel" exposed many wounded people to certain death as ambulances and civil defense teams could not be alerted to their plight and thus they could not reach them.

Related News

US strikes deliberately avoided Iran’s Isfahan reactors: Bloomberg

Trump’s surprise ceasefire shakes US officials and allies: NYT

On another note, the situation in the hospital is greatly dire, as patients are being treated on the floor without anesthetics, with the only source of light being flashlights for the medical professionals who have been overworked due to being at work for the past several weeks since the start of the Israeli occupation and the behemoth amount of people flooding into hospitals.

The decision taken by the United States to compel the Israeli occupation to turn communications back on, when taken into consideration in the context of previous statements that had come out of Washington, shows that the Biden administration does not really care about the genocide being committed in Gaza; it only cares about its image as people are being killed en masse using its missiles and fighter jets.

The Israeli occupation forces have been massacring Palestinians nonstop for over three weeks, but Washington did not one time call "Israel" for restraint when it came to the massacres it is committing. However, it quickly called on "Israel" to change the course of its actions once they affected communication services, which, in light of a highly biased media, have been serving as the only outlet for Palestinians to show the massacres being committed on their soil.

US President Joe Biden in the early days of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, launched by Hamas, said the operation and the actions carried out during it as "sheer evil" while completely disregarding all the actions taken by the Israeli occupation against Palestinians.

"There are moments in this life - I mean this literally - when a pure unadulterated evil is unleashed on this world," he said during a speech from the White House. "This is an act of sheer evil."

Biden still failed to mention that the Israeli occupation was brutally killing civilians, using white phosphorus, and bombing religious sites and schools where people typically seek refuge in times of war.

He underlined that the United States would support the Israeli occupation "today, tomorrow, as we always have."

However, his administration called for "Israel" to restore Gaza's communication services.

"The United States stands with "Israel." We will not ever fail to have their back, we will make sure that they have the help their citizens need, and they can continue to defend themselves," Biden said during a press conference.

In an Update, White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said on Monday that the United  States was part of discussions that led to the Israeli decision to restore internet and phone service in Gaza.

"We were part of the conversations that led to that restoration," Kirby said during a press briefing.

Kirby declined to clarify if it was the United States that solely pressured Israel to reverse its decision.