On Sun, 7 Apr 2002, John Palmer (NANOG Acct) wrote:
Looks like www.gov.ps is offline. Wasn't someone in Norway operating a backup site for this? IP address resoves to 212.14.253.243 which is not routed at this time.
Doing a little research, it appears a substantial part of physical facilities used by PalTel (the Palestine Telecommunications Company) are still inter-twined with Bezeq (the incumbent Israeli telephone company). All the communication links I found seem to transit an Israel at some point. A few official networks registered to the Palestine Authority are offline (gov.ps). Most of the research and education networks registered to Palestinian institutions are operating. Several commercial Palestinian ISPs are still reachable. There seems to be a lot of wireless activity in the region, at least among the ISPs still operating. Neither the Palestinian nor Israeli telecommunication companies seem very happy about ISPs using wireless though. I haven't been able to discover if this is a political problem or a technical problem. Consider the US Department of Interior has been operating under a court order for four months.