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Pyongyang says it will attempt its latest satellite launch before December 2 as Japan and South Korea remain on standby.

North Korea has said it plans to launch a spy satellite as early as Wednesday, following two unsuccessful attempts earlier this year.

North Korea formally notified Japan that the launch will take place at some point before December 2, prompting Japan and South Korea to issue maritime warnings for ships in the Yellow and East China seas.

While Japan is one of North Korea’s top enemies, it is also the coordinating authority for the International Maritime Organization overseeing the waters under the pathway of the satellite launch.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida immediately spoke out against the plan, something North Korea regards as its sovereign right, along with its rocket programme.

“Even if the purpose is to launch a satellite, using ballistic missile technology is a violation of a series of United Nations Security Council resolutions,” Kishida told reporters on Tuesday. “It is also a matter that greatly affects national security.”

Both Japan’s and South Korea’s militaries will be on high alert ahead of the launch, joined by the USS Carl Vinson, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, at South Korea’s naval base in Busan.

Kishida said the three countries will work together to “strongly urge” Pyongyang to cancel the launch.

South Korea has been warning for weeks of the impending satellite launch, which they said would also violate a 2018 agreement designed to de-escalate tensions.

“We sternly warn North Korea to … immediately suspend the current preparations to launch a military spy satellite,” Kang Ho-pil, chief director of operations at the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Monday.

“If North Korea goes ahead with the launch of a military reconnaissance satellite despite our warning, our military will take necessary measures to guarantee the lives and safety of the people.”

Whether the satellite launch will be successful is far from certain.

North Korea has successfully launched at least two “observation” satellites in the past, but its two attempts so far this year have been a failure.

South Korean officials say the wreckage from a recent launch showed the satellite had “no meaningful use” for reconnaissance.

This time, however, Pyongyang may have had help from Russia following a rare visit by leader Kim Jong Un there in September to meet President Vladimir Putin at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the country’s east.

Analysts speculated at the time that Kim may have offered some of his country’s ammunition – badly needed for the Russian war effort in Ukraine – in exchange for help with the satellite programme.

A spy satellite is a priority of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s plan to modernise the country’s military and develop cutting-edge weapons.

He hopes to one day have a fleet of satellites to monitor the movements of US and South Korean troops in the region and enhance its military capability.

South Korea separately plans to launch its own satellite from California on November 30 with US assistance.

Dhaka, Bangladesh – Every time Mosammat Mayna enters the dengue ward at Mugda Hospital in Bangladesh’s capital, sorrow and fear grip her mind.

The 23-year-old has been working as a cleaner in the hospital for just about a month, and the only reason she got the job was because her sister, Maria Ratna, died of dengue last month while doing her duty as a cleaner in the same ward.

“My sister worked relentlessly for months during this year’s dengue outbreak and eventually caught the disease. After she died, the hospital authority offered me her job,” Mayna told Al Jazeera.

“Our family was devastated by Ratna’s death, but since I was out of work, I took the offer despite being very scared.”

Bangladesh is undergoing its worst-ever dengue outbreak in history, with hospitals packed to the brim and the death toll rising. Last Wednesday, the country recorded 24 deaths – the highest in a day – from the mosquito-borne disease.

While the disease does not spread from person to person, a mosquito that bites an infected patient then becomes a carrier, and can transmit dengue to others it bites. That makes places with a high concentration of dengue patients — such as the hospital where Mayna works — more dangerous for those who are not yet infected.

Health experts are alarmed as dengue usually subsides in the South Asian region when the annual monsoon rains stop by the end of September.

As of Monday, at least 1,549 people – including 156 children, from newborns up to those aged 15 – have died of the disease in Bangladesh, which has recorded a total of 301,255 dengue cases this year, according to the government’s Directorate General of Health Service (DGHS).

The record deaths are roughly five times last year’s tally of 281 fatalities – the highest in a single year in Bangladesh’s history – until the outbreak this year. The previous highest number of cases in one year – 1,01,354 – was reported back in 2019.

“I have never witnessed a dengue outbreak of this proportion,” Mugda Hospital’s director Dr Mohammed Niatuzzaman told Al Jazeera, adding that patients were streaming in from across the densely-populated country. “It’s very unusual to see such a large number of dengue patients in November.”

Outbreak of ‘epidemic’ proportion

Dengue outbreaks earlier were largely confined to heavily populated urban centres such as the capital Dhaka, home to more than 23 million people. Experts say the disease this year has reached every district, including the rural areas.

The DGHS data says 65 percent of the cases reported this year were from outside of Dhaka – the first time the capital had fewer cases than the rest of the country.

Sohaila Begum came to Mugda Hospital from the southern district of Patuakhali with her 11-year-old daughter, who has had a high fever for more than a week now. With no beds available, they are staying in the hospital’s corridors.

“When her fever got worse, doctors at the district hospital told us to immediately take her to any good hospital in the cities,” she told Al Jazeera, adding that her daughter’s situation had improved.

“We came to Dhaka but are now running out of money. Everything is so expensive here. We will be in trouble if we stay longer.”

Public health expert and former DGHS director Dr ANM Nuruzzaman told Al Jazeera this year’s outbreak is no less than an epidemic.

“The problem is the severity of dengue has sort of gone out of the public and media’s radar as the country is going through a political turmoil ahead of the next election,” he said.

Bangladesh is expected to hold the general election on January 7 amid political uncertainty and violence gripping the country, as the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) is demanding the removal of the ruling Awami League government and the installation of a caretaker administration to ensure free and fair polls.

“Dengue is a serious crisis as the pattern and severity of the disease have changed and turned to worse. The government should have declared it a public emergency long ago,” said Nuruzzaman.

Government officials claim that they have done everything to check dengue’s spread and that declaring it a public emergency or epidemic would not have made much difference.

“All the government hospitals across the country were instructed to open special dengue wards in the beginning of August. The health ministry also allocated an emergency budget to fight the outbreak,” Dr Mohammad Robed Amin, director of noncommunicable disease at DGHS, told Al Jazeera.

“The problem is our country’s healthcare system has serious limitations because we are a large population and it’s almost impossible to ensure healthcare and treatment for all,” he said.

Amin noted that cases and deaths this year are “abnormally high” for several reasons. “The first and foremost reason is the overwhelming prevalence of Den-2 type strain of dengue among the patients,” he said.

Dengue has four types: Den-1, Den-2, Den-3 and Den-4. A person becomes immune to a dengue type after infection, but not to other types.

“For the last couple of years, Bangladesh mostly had Den-3 type strains and people had developed immunity against it. But this year, over 75 percent of patients were diagnosed with Den-2 and almost all the patients who died were affected by this particular strain,” said Amin, adding that multiple studies have found that Den-2 outbreak is worse when it is followed by years of Den-3 prevalence.

Another reason behind the high fatalities is the outbreak in rural areas, he said.

“This year, the disease has spread across the country, and in rural areas, the health facilities are very scarce. Besides, most people are not aware of the severity of the illness. If you don’t get treatment on time, it can get fatal. And that has happened in many areas.”

What caused the record deaths

Meanwhile, entomologists say they may have found the possible reason behind this year’s record outbreak.

Kabirul Bashar, professor of medical entomology at Bangladesh’s Jahangirnagar University, told Al Jazeera that the pattern of dengue subsiding by September changed last year when the disease reached its peak in October and caused 86 deaths. A year before that in 2021, that number was 22.

“We rang an alarm last year, saying the very pattern of the disease has changed. Now dengue is not a disease associated with monsoon anymore, it’s a year-long thing,” said Bashar, who is also the lone scientific expert on the country’s National Anti-Dengue Committee.

The scientist said climate change is altering patterns in temperature, rainfall and other natural phenomenon.

“Now, we see almost monsoon-like consistent rain throughout October and early November. It changes the breeding and lifecycle of the Aedes mosquito populations,” he said, referring to the type of mosquito that carries dengue.

Dengue is mostly prevalent in South and Southeast Asia between June and September, when stagnant water provides the ideal habitat for the Aedes mosquito, which usually breeds in clean water and feeds during the day.

But in a groundbreaking finding, Bashar, who has been studying mosquitoes for more than two decades, discovered that the mosquitos now breed even in dirty sewers and in saline seawater.

“So, on the one hand, you have unusually consistent rains during the off-season that provide an ideal ground for their breeding and, on the other hand, you have the mosquitoes broadening their horizon for reproduction. It’s a double whammy,” he told Al Jazeera.

Entomologists also discovered that the two most widely used insecticides, malathion and temephos, had become “useless” against Aedes mosquitoes in Bangladesh.

“These two insecticides have turned sub-insecticide, losing their efficacy against mosquitoes because they have developed resistance,” said Md Golam Sharower, professor at the National Institute of Preventive and Social Medicine.

“Unfortunately, most of our city corporations across the country still use these two insecticides, which help very little in controlling the mosquito population.”

Bashar said the government needs to take a full-fledged five-year plan to control the spread of dengue and eventually eradicate the Aedes mosquito population.

“The disease will only get worse in the upcoming years if such a plan is not activated immediately,” he said.

Back at Dhaka’s Mugda Hospital, Mayna, overwhelmed by the unusually long dengue epidemic, has begun to rue her decision to work as a cleaner.

“I thought dengue would subside with the end of the rainy season, but patients keep coming in every day. Forget the ward beds, there is no space even in the hospital corridors,” she told Al Jazeera.

“I fear I might also end up like my sister.”

There’s a makeshift shrine like none other outside the Ayoub family home in southern Lebanon.

Underneath a large picture of three little girls and their grandmother is a bright pink and white wreath of flowers.

But there are also black charred children’s shoes, a singed pencil case and blackened schoolbooks, with the edges of each page burnt.

There’s a section of what could be part of a car bonnet speckled with shrapnel holes sitting amongst two fluffy toy ducks and a pink teddy bear.

This is all that remains of an Israeli strike on the car carrying the three sisters, their mother and grandmother.

The family’s uncle Samir Ayoub is kneeling down in front of the shrine gathering up the scraps of burned school paper.

“I’m keeping them because there may be DNA on them, or blood or something that the international courts can use to prosecute the people who did this,” he says.

Latest updates: Premature babies ‘fighting serious conditions’ make it out of Gaza

He’s not the only one determined to get justice for what happened to his family. Human rights investigators are also gathering evidence to press for an independent criminal investigation into what they say is a war crime which took place on 5 November in Aynata in southern Lebanon.

“We found no evidence of any military target nearby,” says Ramzi Kaiss, from Human Rights Watch (HRW) in Lebanon.

He adds: “We have found this strike is unlawful because it violates the obligation that all parties should have to protect non-combatants.”

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF), known as the Israeli Occupying Force (IOF) in Lebanon, released drone footage on social media early on 6 November, the day after the strike.

The series of videos and stills of strikes that they posted appeared to indicate the attacks were in Gaza. There is no mention of Lebanon at all.

Among the grouping of hits, there was one video of an attack on a lone car moving along a road.

The Israeli military said at the time they had also hit a man called Jamal Musa who they say was responsible for the special security operations within Hamas.

It was not clear which strike they were referring to in the group of attacks they posted collectively on social media.

The Sky News Data and Forensics team managed to geolocate the footage to Lebanon – and the same road from Yarin to Aynata on which the family car containing the five women and girls had travelled.

Following our repeated requests for information and after multiple exchanges, the IDF then told us that it had hit what it called a “suspicious vehicle” with “several terrorists” inside but it is now investigating whether some ‘uninvolved civilians’ were also in the vehicle.

It did not give us any details about who the “several terrorists” might have been.

Ramzi Kaiss, from Human Rights Watch, says the admission by the IDF that it had carried out the strike indicated a “disrespect” for international humanitarian law.

The organisation insists that under humanitarian law, if there is any doubt, no attack should have been carried out and there needs to be evidence the target presents imminent danger.

HRW is now calling for international intervention and pressure to ensure humanitarian law is upheld.

“Israel on several occasions,” Kaiss says, “has failed to conduct credible investigations and hold individuals accountable for war crimes or other violations so Israel’s allies UK and US and others should press for accountability on this apparent war crime”.

The family of women and girls had decided they needed to finally leave their home on the southern border with Israel after weeks of slowly escalating attacks between Israel and the Iran-backed Lebanese group, Hezbollah.

Many of their neighbours had already left the area for safer regions away from the border.

The family’s tragic journey

The Sky News team went on the same journey the family took with Samir Ayoub, their uncle and a journalist and political analyst from the Russian broadcaster RT.

He’s lived in Russia for 33 years but had returned to southern Lebanon to help his sister Samira relocate with her three grandchildren; 14-year-old Rames, Talin, aged 12 and 10-year-old Lee-Anne, as well as her daughter-in-law, the girls’ mother, Houda.

Samir was escorting them in a separate car from their home in Yareen. He told us on the way to meet them, he was held up because of constant bombings along the route.

When he met up with them, the family, travelling in two cars now, chose to stop at a corner shop in the village of Aynata to pick up some water and snacks before their journey to Beirut.

CCTV outside the shop shows them entering the shop and then Houda, the mother, and 10-year-old Lee-Anne leaving and loading water bottles into the back.

Samir can be seen emerging on the right-hand side of the CCTV picture to help them.

As the car pulls away, you can just about catch sight of a woman wearing a black hijab in the passenger front seat (which Samir says was where grandmother Samira was sitting while Houda was at the steering wheel) and little figures in the rear of the car seat showing the three little girls sitting behind them.

He says he drove off first, in his car and had them in his rear-view mirror for the next 1.7km (one mile). He had already turned the corner of the road when he heard a huge blast.

He stopped and went back and when he looked round the corner the car had been blown off the road and into the nearby field and was already burning.

He ran down and says he saw the girls in the back who appeared already dead along with his sister, their grandmother Samira.

Their mother Houda was half out of the car and Samir pulled her to safety. “I could see the children melting in the flames and all I wanted to do was try to stop their mother from seeing her own children burning,” he told us as we stood next to the incinerated vehicle wreck.

“She didn’t say help me, or rescue me,” he said. “She just said I want my kids, where are my kids, help me get them out of the car.”

Even as we spoke, an Israeli drone circled above us the entire time. Samir pointed upwards and told us: “They were watching us on the day of the attack.”

He adds: “I even told the girls to play around outside of the car before we set off so the drone would see the vehicle was only carrying children.”

Vehicle became an inferno

Pictures filmed by eyewitnesses show that after the strike, the car turned into an inferno.

One of the shopkeepers who’d seen the family before the attack says they’d seemed excited. When they heard the explosion, one of them raced to the scene because he recognised the location was in the vicinity of his own home.

Hassan Kawsan said the vehicle was already on fire when he arrived. He described how he tried to put the flames out but the extinguisher wasn’t working properly.

By the time he returned with a functioning one, the vehicle was engulfed in flames.

That night, local television filmed Samir with his shirt still covered in blood after pulling Houda out of the vehicle.

He was shouting at the cameras, addressing the Israeli military: “Are these children terrorists?” he demanded to know.

He wants the International Criminal Court to investigate and is urging European countries to help to ensure someone is held accountable for what happened to his family.

The death of a Reuters reporter

Meanwhile, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has conducted an investigation into the death of Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah who was killed on 13 October, a few weeks before the girls and their grandmother – this time in Alma Shaab, Lebanon.

The group concluded the “targeted strike” came from the Israeli direction. “According to the ballistic analysis carried out by RSF, the shots came from the east of where the journalists were standing; from the direction of the Israeli border,” RSF said.

Jodie Ginsberg, from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), told Sky News: “We want to see an independent investigation into the killing of Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah in an attack which also severely injured several other journalists.

“A report by CPJ in May this year showed a decades-long pattern in which – prior to this latest war – at least 20 journalists have been killed by members of the Israel Defence Forces over the past 22 years and where no-one has ever been charged or held responsible for those deaths.

Journalists are civilians, not targets and those responsible for their killings must be held accountable.”

Referring to the incident in which Issam Abdallah was killed, an IDF statement said on the afternoon of 13 October, Hezbollah militants had launched attacks at several positions along the blue line, firing an anti-tank missile that struck the security fence of Israel near the community of Hanita.

The IDF said: “Immediately following the anti-tank missile launch, IDF soldiers suspected a terrorist infiltration into Israeli territory and, in response, used tank and artillery fire to prevent the infiltration.

“A report was received that during the incident, journalists were injured in the area. The incident is under review.”

Reporter’s friend speaks about incident for first time

We’ve spoken to one of Issam Abdallah’s close friends who was also working alongside him on the day.

Elie Brakhya, who is speaking about the incident publicly for the first time, is a veteran cameraman of numerous wars, including Ukraine, Syria, Yemen as well as Lebanon.

He tells us from his home in Beirut how the group of seven journalists had gone to the hilltop position in Alma Shaab on 13 October. The Israeli military and the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah have been trading fire across the border between the two countries since 7 October.

The group of journalists had gone to record the exchange of fire and were from a range of media outlets including Associated Press, AFP, Reuters and Al Jazeera, Elie’s employers. They were all clearly identifiable as media and were all wearing flak jackets and helmets marked with Press badges.

One of the vehicles parked right next to the group had press markings too. They positioned themselves where they could clearly be seen on the hilltop. “People could see us for miles around,” Elie says.

He says drones had been circulating for most of the time they were there as well as Israeli Apache helicopters. Several of the group had done live broadcasts from the position and they’d been there for more than an hour.

Issam had posted on his social media account, wearing his press-marked body armour. Elie took a selfie of the two friends together, again wearing their press-marked body armour.

“It was the last picture of the two of us,” he says. The group of journalists, he says, was relaxed and just going about their work when the strike hit.

“There was no whistle of anything coming from behind us,” Elie says. “We are experienced but not experts but it felt like it came from in front and above us.

“I saw straight away Issam was dead,” he adds. “He took the direct hit.”

Several of the journalists were badly injured and the friends raced around trying to help each other. Live streams of several cameras recorded the blast and the immediate reaction.

One, a young journalist from AFP, can be heard on camera shouting she couldn’t feel her legs. They feared a quick second strike, so time was precious. “There’s always a second strike,” Elie says. He ran to his vehicle to try to locate some tourniquets to help his colleagues when the second strike happened just in front of his vehicle.

The whole of his left side was hit by the blast and he feared he’d lost his shoulder entirely.

“When I looked I couldn’t see my shoulder,” he says. The helmet he was wearing was blown off entirely and his left ear was rendered deaf immediately.

On his right hand, his thumb was blown off and he remembers gathering it up and holding it to his body.

His legs had been showered with dozens of shrapnel and he couldn’t move. He realised he was under his car which was already burning. “Then someone pulled me out from under the vehicle and I just saw it burst into flames,” he tells us.

Read more:
Lebanese village caught in crossfire ‘could turn into battlefield’
At Hezbollah’s Martyrs’ Day commemoration, their leader threatens escalation
Lebanon on verge of war with Israel

When Elie’s friends later visited him in hospital, they apologised to him because he was so covered in blood they didn’t recognise him at the time and thought they were pulling a corpse from under the vehicle.

He checked the timecodes on his camera later and found there were 37 seconds between the two strikes.

“We were targeted, for certain,” he says. “There’s no chance we weren’t. Everyone could see us with our row of five tripods for miles.”

Lebanon blames Israel for double attack

The Lebanese military, which carried out an investigation into the incident, the Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati and Reporters Without Borders agree with him and blame the Israelis for the double attack.

“We’re not kids. We are professionals. We know what we are doing and what to do and where to go. This is our job,” Elie says.

“We know there are dangers. Of course, there’s a price you have to pay… we are paying our share but there’s a responsibility about this and there are international laws which should protect us.”

Astonishingly he says this was the second attack within a few weeks that he and his team have come under in Lebanon. Nobody was hurt in the first instance.

In a third attack on journalists (which he was not involved in), again the cameras were rolling live while a group of journalists in Yaroun on the southern border with Israel broadcast.

Again, it was a double hit with seconds to spare. Despite vehicles being set alight, remarkably only one of the group was injured.

The Lebanese authorities have said they intend to file a complaint with the UN Security Council over what they call Issam’s “deliberate killing” by Israel.

Lebanon’s National News Agency says the foreign ministry has instructed Lebanon’s permanent mission to the UN to submit a complaint.

These acts, the agency attributed to the foreign ministry, “constitute a blatant attack and a crime against freedom of opinion and the press, human rights, and international humanitarian law, by easily killing unarmed journalists who are victims of their desire to convey the truth, defend it with the lenses of their cameras and pens, and transfer them to the tape of the repeated Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon”.

Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) has sued the watchdog group Media Matters alleging it manufactured a report to show advertisers’ posts alongside neo-Nazi and white nationalist content.

Major US companies including Disney, Warner Bros and Sky News’ parent company Comcast pulled advertising from X over concerns about their ads showing up next to hate speech on the site, while Musk has inflamed tensions with his own posts endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

In a lawsuit filed in the US District Court in Texas, X said Media Matters “knowingly and maliciously” portrayed ads next to hateful material “as if they were what typical X users experience on the platform”.

It claims the watchdog manipulated algorithms on the platform to create images of advertisers’ paid posts next to racist and pro-Nazi content, with X saying the juxtapositions were “manufactured, inorganic and extraordinarily rare”.

It said Media Matters did this by using X accounts that just followed users known to produce “extreme fringe content” and accounts owned by X’s major advertisers, which it says led to a feed aimed at producing side-by-side comparisons Media Matters could then screenshot in an effort to alienate X’s advertisers.

“Data wins over manipulation or allegations. Don’t be manipulated. Stand with X,” CEO Linda Yaccarino posted on Monday.

Media Matters said it stands by its reporting, with its president Angelo Carusone adding: “This is a frivolous lawsuit meant to bully X’s critics into silence.”

Musk had also sparked an outcry when the Tesla chief agreed with a post falsely claiming Jewish people were stoking hatred against white people, saying the user who referenced the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory was speaking “the actual truth”.

His remarks were met by a stinging rebuke from the White House, which accused him of “abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate” that “runs against our core values as Americans”.

Advertisers flee X

Advertisers have fled the social media site since Musk purchased Twitter for $44bn (£35bn) in October 2022 over his controversial posts and layoffs of employees who moderated content.

The platform’s US ad revenue is down by at least 57% each month compared to the same month last year since Musk’s takeover, according to Reuters.

It was a little after 10 pm when Ahmad* was called by the Network Operation Centre at the Palestine Telecommunications Company (PalTel). It was the third week of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the main data centre in the Sheikh Radwan district of Gaza City had lost power, threatening to shut off all communications in the area.

To check on the centre, the PalTel electrician would have to make his way across the city during intense Israeli aerial bombardment, putting his life in danger. But he did not hesitate. He flagged down a passing ambulance, hoping it would provide him with a degree of safety from Israeli attacks.

“I told the driver that if I could not restore the generator, people like him wouldn’t be able to reach injured civilians. We are no better nor less important than medical staff – a phone call can save lives,” Ahmad said.

Once at the centre, Ahmad set to work. By 2am, he had repaired the generator, allowing the telecommunications network to keep operating. He decided to stay in the building until dawn, slipping out around the freshly fallen debris to go home during a lull in Israeli bombing.

“Thank God my family was OK and I lived to see another day. This is my work and my life. … I do this every day,” he said.

Ahmad’s tale has become almost routine among the 750 PalTel staff in Gaza who, despite living through bombing, displacement and death, risk life and limb to keep the telecoms network running.

The cost of keeping Gaza connected has been high. At least five PalTel staff members in Gaza have been killed in Israeli attacks while many other staff members have lost family members, including wives and children.

Samir*, one of the staff members killed, had spent 10 hours shuttling fuel between data towers before returning home. Just 15 minutes later, Samir and his brother were killed in an Israeli air raid on their building.

Humanitarian workers and journalists have said the operation of communication networks in Gaza is essential for rescue services and for documenting the reality of conditions on the ground to the outside world.

More than 13,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7. Videos of desperate family members and civil defence scrabbling through the rubble of bombed-out buildings to rescue civilians trapped underneath have inspired shock and horror the world over.

Preparing for war

On the first day of its offensive on Gaza on October 7, Israel cut electricity to the territory. Despite the lack of power and the constant bombing, Gaza’s telecoms network stayed operational for almost six weeks.

The CEO of PalTel said this is because the company has been preparing for war for “over 15 years”, embedding emergency contingencies in its Gaza infrastructure at every step.

“We have faced a lot of different incidents during the previous wars. We’re doing more protection than any other operator,” CEO Abdul Majeed Melhem told Al Jazeera.

PalTel’s Gaza network was built during Israel’s siege of the enclave, which requires that each piece of equipment be approved by Israeli authorities before entering Gaza, making repairs difficult.

Recurrent wars on Gaza and frequent bombing campaigns by Israel have damaged civilian infrastructure, so to brace itself for a sustained conflict like the current one, the telecoms network is built like no other.

While most telecom networks bury their cables 60cm (about 2ft) underground, PalTel buries its cables up to 8 metres (26ft)  deep. In case the Israelis cut off electricity, its data centres in Gaza also have three layers of redundancy: generators, solar panels and batteries.

The company has also developed emergency protocols to direct workers remotely from the occupied West Bank, and if severed communications make this impossible, Gazan staff are empowered to act autonomously.

Despite all the redundancies and preparations, the sheer scale of bombings these past weeks has still crippled the network. About 70 percent of the mobile network has been taken offline. Solar panels have been rendered mostly useless either by being destroyed in attacks or covered in dust and debris.

The relentless nature of the conflict is also weighing on staff, who are dogged by danger from their house to the field.

Rabih*, a fibre optics technician, was called to repair a cable just metres from the border on October 15. Prior to going, he had to give an exhaustive list of the repair team’s names, the colour of their cars and registration numbers to the Israelis, because “a mistake could be deadly”.

As Rabih and his team laboured for two hours to fix the cable, the buzz of a drone above him and the sounds of shelling intermingled with the sound of their excavator.

“Any wrong move could mean being targeted. I cannot explain to my wife and kids why I do that or why I volunteer to go out during the war. My company doesn’t oblige me, but if someone can do it, it has to be me,” he said.

Staff in the West Bank watch their colleagues in Gaza from afar with bated breath, hesitant to ask them to check on damaged equipment, knowing that a simple repair trip could cost them their lives.

Gaza-based staff are under no obligation to go into the field, but most have been eager to volunteer despite the dangers.

“It is very difficult to call my colleagues who are under bombardment and ask them to go out. I feel afraid that if one of them gets hurt, I will never forgive myself,” said Mohammed*, a worker in the Network Operation Centre in the West Bank.

Mohammed’s role at the centre requires him to monitor problems in the network, ask workers to volunteer to repair them and stay on the phone with them to provide feedback on the repairs. The calls are nerve-racking, and both Mohammed and the worker in Gaza want the field visit to be resolved as quickly as possible.

“I cannot imagine how these people have the courage to go out. Maybe if I were there, I wouldn’t do it. I don’t know if I would,” Mohammed said.

At the mercy of Israel

No matter how many metres deep they dig or the number of solar panels they install, Gaza’s connections to the outside world ultimately relies on the Israelis.

The cables that connect Gaza to the outside world run through Israel, and the country on at least two occasions has deliberately cut off the strip’s international communications.

“It’s clear for us that it was cut off by a decision. What proves this is that we didn’t do anything to get it back,” Melhem said.

Israel also controls fuel to Gaza, allowing a small trickle into Gaza on Friday after weeks of pressure from the United States.

Described as a “drop in the bucket” by humanitarian groups, Israel announced that 120,000 litres (31,700 gallons) of fuel would be allowed into the territory every two days for use by hospitals, bakeries and other essential services.

PalTel will also be given 20,000 litres (5,283 gallons) of fuel every two days for its generators.

On Thursday, the company had announced it would go into a full telecoms blackout because its fuel reserves were exhausted for the first time during the current war.

According to Mamoon Fares, the corporate support director at PalTel, the 20,000 litres provided “should be enough to operate a good part of the network”.

However, Gaza’s telecoms network will still be at the mercy of Israel should it decide to cut off fuel deliveries or network services that run through its territory.

Without the ability to communicate, the already dismal situation in Gaza would only further deteriorate.

“No ambulances, no emergency services, no civil defence or humanitarian organisations can work without telecommunications,” Melhem said.

* Names have been changed to protect the individuals’ safety.