First, Israel is deeply suspicious of any construction projects in Palestine to the point of rigidly controlling imports of materials as prosaic as concrete. Underground tunnels for telecommunications, especially those crossing the border to Egypt, would be strictly verboten.
Second, it's in Israel's interests to supply Gaza with as much of their communications needs as possible. Internet, cable TV, cellular communications, etc.. If they have a branch similar to the NSA this makes monitoring much easier. Also, if it ever proves strategically advantageous, they have the ability to disrupt all these channels of communication and deny them to their enemy. (That they haven't so far during conflict suggests they do monitor communications.) If Israel simply refused to provide these services Palestinians would find ways to obtain them that Israel would not control and may find more difficult to monitor.
This woman's enterprise, established under the sparsest of conditions, is an example of what can be done if there were peaceful relations and if the government in Gaza were truly representative and dedicated to peaceful negotiations etc. A warlike government that caters to the militants in Hamas, Al Aqsa Martyrs, etc., is simply uninterested in economic development, nor does it have any native expertise in that area. Its only legitimacy is based on armed conflict with its neighbor and armed suppression of dissidents internally.
I would have assumed that it's via Egypt instead, as Gaza has a land border there as well.
Egypt is not as technological as Israel, plus the border with Gaza is very very far from anything much in Egypt. It would take a lot of effort to bring Internet there.
Israel also provides phone service to Gaza, both via lines to local towers and via towers located in Israel.
People assume Egypt helps Gaza, but even in the Mubarak days they really didn't care about them much at all - just lip service. And certainly not today. They are not much different from the rest of the Arab world in this regard.
Actually, I'm curious, how does Gaza get its internet? Any source/reference mentioning this?
I believe that in the case of electricity, Israel is obliged to provide power to the region under international law (since they control its borders).
My "logic" was not a value statement on whether the attack was justified - rather a suggestion that before you go posting certain events as fact, you should realize that not everything published is a definite fact.
As I said, it's via Israel. Same with phone service and postal mail.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/20/israel-gaza-interne...
But the problem for the internet in the Gaza strip is not Israel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamization_of_the_Gaza_Strip#...
Now please keep in mind that "democratization" won't help. Over half of Gazans want this (and want to kill people who try to fix it - that seems to be what sharia ("the path of islam") demands). Democracy will make it worse.
There seems to be a huge misconception here. On a large scale, and on average (NOT talking about any individuals here, just "average" human behavior), people who have been hurt don't want help. They don't want to help. They want to hurt others in the same way they were hurt. People who were beaten by their parents, on average, beat their children. People who come out of abusive homes in general, are abusive spouses. People who live in violence, become violent.
This makes sense if you consider what algorithm the human mind must be running. One quickly arrives at the conclusion can only be an imitation algorithm (ie. what you do is copied from a past experience of what you saw someone else do), probably coupled with reinforcement learning and generalization mechanisms.
This of course means something really, really bad for places like the Gaza strip. Left to their own devices, they will only sink deeper into their obsession, and become ever more abusive and restrictive until they literally start dying or at least completely stagnate. There is no way out that doesn't involve blowing up their state, and going against the wishes of the large majority of their population. Not, of course, the way Israel is doing that.
This is not the time or place for raising the political issues. I'm keeping my political opinions out of it on this forum and I wish everyone else would have the good sense do the same.
If there's ever an article about Gaza on the front page of HN it's removed within a couple of hours because people start banging on about politics. I could quite happy argue about it all day long, but not here, and not now.
May increased communication and ventures like the article mention bring Gazans the democracy they desperately need.