Guess which building first demolished to the ground by Israel military in Gaza at the beginning of the conflict?
No price of getting the right answer, it's the Watan Tower building that also hosted most of Gaza Internet Sevice Provider (ISP) companies including Paltel and Jawwal and their infrastructure.
It was also a hub for several international media outlets, including the Associated Press and Al Jazeera [1],[2]. We are somewhow supposed to believe by Israel propaganda that the demolition of the Watan building is necessary to cripple the resistance but in war, truth is always the very first casualty that further leads to countless human casualties.
[1] Israels warns Palestinians on Facebook but Israel bombing decimated Gaza Internet Access:
I imagine Gaza may currently be one of the most difficult environments to write software code in. I happily admit that I would not be able to be productive in such an environment - my environment here in Europe is really quite sheltered (guess this also depends on where one lives; areas close to Russia may not feel as comfortable as in central Europe or Western Europe). The only distraction I have here is youtube music playing in the background - that's about it. My brain wouldn't be able to operate well in any high risk high danger environment or any non-standard environment in general.
I taught myself to write an original software application in JavaScript while living in Afghanistan about 16 years ago.
I suspect Gaza is maybe 10x, or much more, challenging environment. I often didn’t have access to internet, but in Gaza I suspect electricity is universally hard to find. I was only out of pocket on electricity while waiting for flights, which is a lot more time than you would imagine. I also had reliable access to food and water even when my travel and living situation was completely mysterious.
Based on my own experiences danger is far less distracting than hunger and fatigue. You can generally get through danger and still be interested in learning, but it’s hard to learn if your brain doesn’t have the rest and resources it needs.
Even in Ukraine it's quite possible to code. I worked at Google with people who stayed in Ukraine after Russia started the war. I can't say they were unaffected - there was stuff like meetings interrupted by missile alerts - but they managed to do normal work despite the ongoing war.
Comparing it to the war in Ukraine ("Even in Ukraine") isn't really helpful or informative, to understand the condition under which Palestinians are surviving.
I have a couple of programmers currently in ukraine. Unless you are in a war zone there is low risk and life is mostly normal. Only risk right now is no electricity or getting snatched on the street to be sent to war.
To be more precise — in the UN's analysis using satellite imagery they estimated 81% to 84% of all buildings have been damaged or destroyed as of October 2025. That percentage also includes 90% of all residential buildings
I looked into Meshtastic a while ago and they use AES with no authentication tags. Also decryption happens on the LoRa device, which is a lot easier to crack with physical access compared to my phone. Even if you delete the messages it's still possible to decrypt sniffed LoRa traffic if, at some point in the future, one device gets captured.
I'd rather the protocol gets updated so the crypto key can stay on the phone.
There's a few issues that have been brought to light in the last couple years at Hackfest and other events related to LoRaWAN / Meshtastic (and derivatives). I think most notably was the failure in entropy generated during the flashing process, detailed here - https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-52464
I think we're a bit past the initial AES issues, at least the Meshtastic project promptly alerted people to their crypto issues and encouraged everyone to update firmware asap.
It's not too hard to use, as long as the hardware is flashed and ready. For the end user, it's an app that connects to a bluetooth connection. I think it would very trivial to have a few good LoRaWAN ops in the community, flashing nodes en masse and handing them out to peers.
Agreed – and MeshCore follows a similar "security on the radio" design.
With the "cell phone + companion radio" setup which is currently very popular, it would seem the correct solution is to perform encryption on the phone – using the Signal protocol – and use the companion radio only to send/receive these blobs.
This has the added benefit that you can pair with _any_ arbitrary companion radio, rather than your identity being tied to one specific radio you own.
This will be very interesting if they can conquer the distribution issue.
During the Hong Kong protests I recall several such solutions were created, but the dominant thing ended up being airdrop because it is what so many people already had locked and loaded.
It’s different situation in Gaza tho, unlike protests where you might need to hide your identity going there to participate so having that app will expose you, in gaza it’s more of a concentration camp where the main resources are controlled but on the ground, not really, so no police will stop you there because you have an app, bitchat might be the perfect solution.
I think in these kinds of places they beat you dead for being the wrong skin colour if they're in a bad mood. I'm not sure how much your installed apps are relevant to the decision.
Too often the results of these efforts (like the HK protests just using Airdrop) are never really called out anywhere so these tools become nerd catnip and nerds continue to build solutions that nobody ends up using. It would be cool to maybe collect a list of situations where comms infra was disturbed and what ended up being used (if anything) in those situations to help guide future efforts.
This is a great point. Being able to run in a browser with airdropped code makes sense. Using Bluetooth and no central server does this mean getting messages out to a world wide audience isn't possible with the app?
Other than the cold start problem which isn't discussed (what's the userbase size in Gaza?), the main argument for Bitchat (or any other off-grid network such as Meshtastic, Briar, etc.) in Gaza when mainstream E2E encrypted messaging apps already exist and are widely used, is to not be dependent on Israel for cell service.
While I do really like the idea of off-grid networks in general but for this use case, is it really that hard for a state actor to jam Bluetooth (or all ~2.4GHz communication) on a large scale?
I feel like the idea here is cute; but does it realistically work at scale? Of course, a messaging app like this—if it's going to work anywhere, is going to work in Gaza, one of the (at least formerly) most densely populated areas in the world. But bluetooth was not designed for this type of communication whatsoever; phones can only establish bluetooth connections between devices at the very most 100ft under the most ideal conditions; and is probably much lower than that in practice.
Even if people are living in open-air conditions I can imagine messages getting stuck or being delivered very late; especially at night when there may not be a lot of human movement. How well does this actually work in practice?
A disaster, cyberattack, or prolonged blackout could take down cell towers in a broad area, this could be useful in that case. And in a civil emergency a government may be able to shut down cell towers centrally, but not have the resources to jam the entire country.
Tens of thousands of users? Globally you mean? I doubt it's the user base size in Gaza but if that is actually what you meant, where did you pull that estimate from?
I guess if a serious audit is done then it could be a nice solution. I would love to read more technical details about it, especially how it can be sure the messages are transmitted to the good person.
What an awesome piece of technology. I've been wanting to create something similar, just on the technical merits. We have some pretty amazingly capable technology these days, but so much of it relies on IP infrastructure, which is fine when things work and you are either aligned with your government, or live in a society where there are strong checks and balances on government overreach.
Exactly. With Chat Control being revived again in the EU, various VPN bans being proposed in US states, and ID verification rolling out seemingly everywhere, this kind of tech may end up being more useful than people expect. If it works in the extremely adversarial environment of a warzone, it should work fine here.
How is this a solution to Chat Control and EU law? If this is used, governments will simply demand Apple and Google get the app declared forbidden, which both have done to apps for many reasons.
Worse: they might demand a list of people who have it installed (and this violates the Chat Control law of course).
Even worse: this app turns out to be written by a security agency or scammers and starts exploiting people.
Why is chat control controversial? It seems like the same people afraid of this are the same people outraged when people then use private chat to do bad things.
The thing that I really like about the approach taken by OP is that it AFAIK is broadcast-only, up to a certain radius. The hard part in mesh networking is routing, and broadcast sidesteps that
BitChat can send messages over Bluetooth, and it uses a mesh network to relay messages across nearby devices. This allows messages to hop from one phone to another, extending coverage beyond the normal Bluetooth range, though the number of hops is limited and depends on nearby devices. When a device in the mesh has an internet connection, certain messages can be published to Nostr, allowing them to move from the local mesh to the global network. Not all messages are automatically sent online, and purely mesh-local chats remain local. Messages sent via Nostr can also be accessed through clients like NYM (Nostr Ynstant Messenger). BitChat combines offline mesh networking with a decentralized protocol to enable both local and global communication.
I guess if even one or two people use it that's a good thing. BUT. It probably would struggle with RTL and LTR stuff regarding arabic script vs latin script (and people across the world are forgoing traditional scripts for latin characters ... seems bad)
Readit News
No price of getting the right answer, it's the Watan Tower building that also hosted most of Gaza Internet Sevice Provider (ISP) companies including Paltel and Jawwal and their infrastructure.
It was also a hub for several international media outlets, including the Associated Press and Al Jazeera [1],[2]. We are somewhow supposed to believe by Israel propaganda that the demolition of the Watan building is necessary to cripple the resistance but in war, truth is always the very first casualty that further leads to countless human casualties.
[1] Israels warns Palestinians on Facebook but Israel bombing decimated Gaza Internet Access:
https://theintercept.com/2023/10/12/israel-gaza-internet-acc...
[2] #KeepItOn: Telecommunications Blackout In The Gaza Strip Is An Attack On Human Rights:
https://m.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO2310/S00117/keepiton-telecom...
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I suspect Gaza is maybe 10x, or much more, challenging environment. I often didn’t have access to internet, but in Gaza I suspect electricity is universally hard to find. I was only out of pocket on electricity while waiting for flights, which is a lot more time than you would imagine. I also had reliable access to food and water even when my travel and living situation was completely mysterious.
Based on my own experiences danger is far less distracting than hunger and fatigue. You can generally get through danger and still be interested in learning, but it’s hard to learn if your brain doesn’t have the rest and resources it needs.
https://msf.org.uk/article/gaza-msf-survey-shows-almost-half...
Comparing it to the war in Ukraine ("Even in Ukraine") isn't really helpful or informative, to understand the condition under which Palestinians are surviving.
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No shit. 80%+ percent of the country is rubble.
https://theconversation.com/--267431
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That you think this says a lot about our news environment. I can think of a dozen places in Africa.
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Repeaters/Router can, if you put a bit of love in to highly efficient 3.3V generation, forever an a 6V solar cell and a 18650 LiPo.
I've tested 60km with a 868MHz LoRa station using a shabby 5dBi omni antenna. Just run out of hills to test more.
But not as easy to use as BLE(+BLE Meshing) which is basically integrated into every smartphone.
I'd rather the protocol gets updated so the crypto key can stay on the phone.
I think we're a bit past the initial AES issues, at least the Meshtastic project promptly alerted people to their crypto issues and encouraged everyone to update firmware asap.
It's not too hard to use, as long as the hardware is flashed and ready. For the end user, it's an app that connects to a bluetooth connection. I think it would very trivial to have a few good LoRaWAN ops in the community, flashing nodes en masse and handing them out to peers.
With the "cell phone + companion radio" setup which is currently very popular, it would seem the correct solution is to perform encryption on the phone – using the Signal protocol – and use the companion radio only to send/receive these blobs.
This has the added benefit that you can pair with _any_ arbitrary companion radio, rather than your identity being tied to one specific radio you own.
During the Hong Kong protests I recall several such solutions were created, but the dominant thing ended up being airdrop because it is what so many people already had locked and loaded.
While I do really like the idea of off-grid networks in general but for this use case, is it really that hard for a state actor to jam Bluetooth (or all ~2.4GHz communication) on a large scale?
Even if people are living in open-air conditions I can imagine messages getting stuck or being delivered very late; especially at night when there may not be a lot of human movement. How well does this actually work in practice?
I guess if a serious audit is done then it could be a nice solution. I would love to read more technical details about it, especially how it can be sure the messages are transmitted to the good person.
Worse: they might demand a list of people who have it installed (and this violates the Chat Control law of course).
Even worse: this app turns out to be written by a security agency or scammers and starts exploiting people.
My problem is that when you are actually locally near someone you don't really need live chat; and if you're far, it might become too unstable to use.
But I might be wrong!
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