This activist found a way to get Palestinians back online, when Gaza lost telephone and internet connection.
Mirna El Helbawi sits on a Cairo rooftop, her face illuminated by the moonlight and a phone in her hands, as she texts a terrified father whose wife and children are trapped in Gaza.
“I don’t want a single thing from this world right now,” he writes to her in Arabic, “except to be able to talk to them, even if it’s for the last time, let me tell them goodbye.”
El Helbawi, more than 200 miles away, can’t shield his family from the Israeli missiles raining down. But she can provide them with the chance to say one more “I love you.”
El Helbawi
The Egyptian writer and activist is the founder of Connecting Gaza, a grassroots initiative that uses eSIMs – or virtual SIM cards – to help Palestinians skirt telecommunication blackouts amid Israeli airstrikes across the territory.
El Helbawi, along with a small group of volunteers and a legion of international donors, says they’ve restored telephone and internet connection to more than 200,000 Palestinians in Gaza, and will continue the effort until the devastating war between Israel and Hamas is over.
“The right to telephone and internet access is a basic human right just as important as food and water,” El Helbawi, 31, told CNN. Without the ability to communicate, Palestinian civilians caught in the line of fire are unable to check on each other or call for help; emergency and medical workers can’t coordinate their responses; and journalists can’t document atrocities on the ground, including possible war crimes, she says.
“After all this pain, they can’t even share their grief with the world or scream for people to demand a ceasefire. They have to endure bombardment and attacks in absolute silence,” El Helbawi said.
“It’s like being murdered while someone is putting a hand over your mouth, so you can’t even scream for help.”
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