In a significant turn of events, Pavel Durov, the founder of the messaging app Telegram, revealed on Sunday that hundreds of thousands of new users from Palestine and Israel have joined the platform for the first time.
This influx of users comes in the wake of increased demand for secure and relatively unrestricted information-sharing platforms, given the constraints imposed by platforms under the Meta umbrella, such as WhatsApp and Facebook, and the now-defunct Twitter platform, formerly known as X.
Durov emphasized through his channel that “all affected individuals should have reliable access to news and communication, especially in these challenging times.”
The founder of the instant messaging platform also pointed out that the platform’s interface, which already supports Arabic, now also includes support for Hebrew. This development is seemingly a response to the influx of new accounts registered in recent days.
It is worth noting that the armed wing of the Palestinian Hamas movement, the “Al-Qassam Brigades,” has consistently utilized the Telegram platform to disseminate its statements and leadership speeches since Facebook and Twitter administrations deleted and blocked the Palestinian faction’s accounts prior to 2016. In response, the Israeli administration has opened multiple accounts on Telegram for similar official messaging purposes.
Telegram recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, with an estimated 8.7% of the world’s population now using the platform, according to statistics from “Statista.” Egypt and Saudi Arabia have topped the list of countries with the highest recent downloads of the application.
In the early hours of last Saturday, an unprecedented operation, named “The Al-Aqsa Storm,” claimed by the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian Hamas movement, took place. It was described as a response to “settler attacks” in Jerusalem and the ongoing Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. The operation went beyond the launching of thousands of rockets from Gaza into Israel, as hundreds of Palestinian militants crossed the border fence between Gaza and the surrounding settlements.
