Money & Access
Israel keeps Gaza on 2G as mesh messaging spreads elsewhere
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The Newsdesk gathers reporting from wire services and primary sources and rewrites every story in-house before publication. How our journalism is made →
Mesh messaging — phone-to-phone relay over Bluetooth, with no towers and no servers — has been adopted at scale in at least four countries since mid-2025, and almost all of the download figures in circulation come from the developers of the apps themselves rather than from independent measurement.
The demand is not in doubt.
Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition, in a report titled "Rising repression meets global resistance: Internet shutdowns in 2025" released on 31 March 2026, documented more than 313 shutdowns across 52 countries, surpassing the 2024 record of 304 shutdowns in 55 countries, and found that for the third consecutive year conflict was the leading trigger.
The report states that in 2025 it documented 70 shutdowns coinciding with grave human rights abuses in 21 countries, including airstrikes on homes, hospitals and schools and the blocking of entire populations from humanitarian aid.
“Rising repression meets global resistance: Internet shutdowns in 2025”
TechRadar, reporting on the same publication in April 2026, noted that not a single day of 2025 passed without at least one shutdown and that seven countries appeared on the list for the first time.
Iran produced the largest single episode. Chatham House recorded that on 8 January 2026, amid protests and a violent crackdown, Iranian authorities shut off all internet services, beginning one of the most extensive shutdowns ever documented.
By early April, The National reported the blackout had run 37 days with less than one per cent of users able to connect, and that according to NetBlocks the authorities had reverted connectivity to a national network.
Uptake figures from that period are partial. Bitcoin.com News reported on 11 January 2026 that app analytics indicated more than 1.5 million aggregate Bitchat installs and 226,000 downloads in the preceding week, roughly 11,000 in the latest 24 hours, while noting that country-specific figures are not publicly available.
Bitcoin Magazine reported that Noghteha, a closed-source fork of Bitchat adapted for Persian, recorded more than 70,000 Google Play downloads in three days before the full shutdown. Independent Arabia reported on the eleventh day of the total blackout that Bitchat had become a central communication tool in protest squares.
Nepal's figures trace back to the app's own developers. Tempo reported that on 8 September 2025 downloads surged to 48,781, citing Cointelegraph; BeInCrypto put the same day's total at 48,781 in Nepal, about 39 per cent of global downloads, against fewer than 3,500 before the unrest, and 11,324 during Indonesia's earlier protests.
Those comparisons were published on X by Cashu founder and Bitchat contributor "calle", who wrote that a spike had been observed from Indonesia during nationwide protests the previous week — the publisher and the beneficiary are the same party.
Reported death tolls differ: BeInCrypto said the crisis left at least 30 people dead, while Bitget News, citing the New York Times, reported at least 19 dead.
In India, Open Magazine reported in July 2026 that protesters at Jantar Mantar in Delhi coordinated using offline mesh apps including Bitchat, Bridgefy and Meshtastic, and that Briar is now in maintenance mode.
The security record is weaker than the adoption curve.
Bitchat's GitHub page carries the warning that the software "has not received external security review and may contain vulnerabilities", advising users not to rely on its security until reviewed — a disclaimer added, TechCrunch noted, after launch and after researcher Alex Radocea demonstrated impersonation through what he called broken identity authentication.
Trail of Bits, in July 2025, described Radocea's man-in-the-middle attack as legitimate and concerning.
A January 2026 assessment by the Bloomsbury Intelligence and Security Institute found the app lacks robust forward secrecy, with keys static for whole sessions, and cited former Iranian political prisoner Ziya Sadr on phishing campaigns, fake download links and paid influencers pushing compromised versions — risks that rise when blackouts force users to sideload.
Install only from the official iOS App Store listing or the project's own repository: TechTarget reported that several copycat apps on Google Play are not the official Bitchat app.
For Palestinians the constraint is not the app. It is the network underneath it.
7amleh reported that Gaza's June 2025 blackout began on 10 June with the targeting of the main fibre backbone serving Gaza City and the north, and that by 12 June the outage had spread to the central and southern governorates after the last remaining fibre route was destroyed, as confirmed by the Palestinian Telecommunications Regulatory Authority.
7amleh said internet and fixed lines were fully down across the Strip, mobile service was barely operational, and no redundancy remained. EFF, citing 7amleh, dated the outage to 11 June and recorded it as the third near-total blackout since October 2023, affecting more than two million people — the two accounts differ by a day.
The Emergency Telecommunications Cluster warned on 16 June 2025 that severely degraded mobile networks were at imminent risk of shutting down within days.A March 2025 study published by the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute found that licensed West Bank operators were permitted only 3G and Gaza operators only 2G
, and that Israel had repeatedly ignored Palestinian requests for additional frequencies. The World Bank has stated that Israel holds decision-making power over the frequency spectrum and had refused to allocate spectrum for 4G.
The Times of Israel reported on 6 January 2026 that the Israeli Communications Ministry had ratified agreements with Palestinian and Israeli telecom firms to move West Bank networks from 3G to 4G, a process officials expected to take four to six months, and that the upgrade would not extend to Gaza.
What a Bluetooth mesh carries is what fits between nearby handsets. Bitchat's own release notes say global private messaging runs over Nostr relays "if internet is available", switching back to Bluetooth when it is not — meaning anything addressed beyond the local crowd still needs a working upstream link.
EFF's May 2026 guide to circumventing shutdowns describes Briar routing messages device to device over Bluetooth, and notes ham radio reaches considerably farther than Meshtastic; it urges people to set up such channels before a crisis.
That is the gap for a hospital seeking a referral out. None of the 2025 and 2026 assessments published by 7amleh, the Emergency Telecommunications Cluster or EFF that were reviewed for this report records mesh messaging functioning as a substitute inside Gaza. 7amleh reported that providers could not carry out essential repairs for lack of replacement materials under the blockade, and that no humanitarian response can succeed without connectivity.
Whether the 4G equipment is delivered on the timeline Israeli and Palestinian officials gave in January, and whether any spectrum is released for Gaza, remains unsettled. So does the basic measurement problem: no independent monitor has published country-level active-user data for any mesh app, and installs are not users.
%20(cropped).jpg?width=640)