GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Once a social media application, WhatsApp is now being used as a news tool in Palestine. Since the last war on Gaza in 2014, media outlets such as Quds TV, Felesteen newspaper and Quds News Network entered in a fierce competition to beat the other to announce the activation of WhatsApp as a free news application.
The majority of news websites and some satellite channels in Gaza are now providing this service to the public. Using WhatsApp, media outlets send news digests covering the daily events on the Palestinian and international arenas.
Seventeen media outlets are currently using WhatsApp in Gaza as a news service, including Quds News Network, Safa News Agency, Paltimes, Sawa and Media 24, among others.
Al-Monitor reached out to the majority of news organizations in the Gaza Strip. They said that the number of subscribers to the WhatsApp news service in the Gaza Strip is in the tens of thousands. According to Ezzedine al-Akhras, one of the managing directors at Quds News Network and a new media expert, this figure seems insignificant when compared to the number of WhatsApp users in Gaza, which is more than 400,000. According to information gathered by Al-Monitor, Hamas’ website has the largest number of subscribers — about 8,000 — while the number of subscribers to the remaining outlets ranges from 5,000 to a few hundred subscribers only.
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