Bitchat for Gaza – messaging without internet
Mood
supportive
Sentiment
positive
Category
tech
Key topics
Gaza
messaging apps
offline communication
Bitchat is a messaging app that allows communication without internet, developed to support people in Gaza.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
44m
Peak period
160
Day 1
Avg / period
160
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
11/14/2025, 5:43:40 PM
4d ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
11/14/2025, 6:27:20 PM
44m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
160 comments in Day 1
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
11/15/2025, 4:21:09 PM
3d ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
EDIT: Name aside, what an awesome project.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-bitchat-app-vibe...
https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/graphs/contrib...
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.
Israelis have lighter skin Ashkenazi Jews, darker skin Mizrahi Jews(majority of hte jews in Israel now) and black Ethiopian jews. And of course 20%+ Arabs living in the country.
Gazan Palestinians skin color varies as well, some have light skin, while others have darker skin tones.
For example, does this woman have the right skin color or the wrong one:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4e/Ah...
2 off-duty soldiers assaulted after being mistaken for Arabs https://www.timesofisrael.com/2-off-duty-soldiers-assaulted-...
Live TV shows Israeli mob attack motorist they believed to be an Arab https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/13/live-tv-shows-...
Israeli soldier kills Jewish civilian in 'identity mishap' https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-34602287
3 hostages killed by Israeli soldier in Gaza were waving a white flag, Israel says https://www.npr.org/2023/12/15/1219695220/israel-soldiers-mi...
Israeli Civilian Killed by Israeli Soldier after Being Mistaken for Palestinian https://www.palestinechronicle.com/israeli-civilian-killed-b...
And from Wikipedia: > The Israeli Security Forces use racial profiling at military checkpoints and during some of the duties they perform. In August 2017 Haaretz reported that security guards working for a company which provides security at Tel Aviv's Central Bus Station said they were instructed to demand ID from people who look Arab and detain those who do not have an ID with them.
OP said that Israelis beat people up for having the wrong skin color. The one I replied to said that is wrong and is a projection of western ideology. But it does not appear to be wrong in reality - OP was correct.
Not sure what the Florida example has to do with anything though.
Here are some similar headlines:
Palestinians remove Muslim from al-Aqsa after confusing him for a Jew https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-692563
Palestinian stabs Arab Israeli bus driver thinking he was a Jew https://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-charged-over-petah...
The colonization of Gaza is entirely driven by Hamas's attack on Israel.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_the...
If there were Israeli Jews (I am not referring to the religious group, but by which side of the conflict people are on) living in Gaza, such arguments wouldn't work, just like they don't work for the West Bank (which is also getting genocided but we're not talking about it, so maybe that strategy works too).
1) Hamas started a war with Israel by invading it, slaughtering and raping hundreds of civilians at the music festival and in their homes as well as taking hundreds of civilians hostage, including as we all know an toddlers, womens and elderly.
2) Israel in order to rescue its citizens as well as protect them from future attacked invaded Gaza and attacked Hammas and its infrastructure
So yeah, it makes sense to support the country trying to rescue its hostages from an enemy government.
We can debate how Israel prosecutes the war, but its a war that Hamas started and yet in your accusation of Israel above there is no mention of role Gazan goverment -- Hamas -- played in this war.
I doubt that my country -- the US -- would prosecute the war any better, had it been invaded by thousands of Mexican federales killing 42,000 people -- an equivalent of population the city of Cupertino where Apple is headquartered -- while kidnapping 9,000 of our citizens. I doubt any country would do better as a matter of fact.
Second, that political stream is the opposition of the Zionism stream that established Israel. Picking and choosing the last two years as a proof for what Zionism is all about is like saying "Americanism is all about taking over Greenland". Somehow, when it's Zionism, people will not notice how ridiculous that sounds.
a) All land between Jordan river and mediterranean sea should be called Palestine
b) only Arabs are natives of that lands.
Here b) is plainly wrong -- Both arabs and jews continuously lived in that area for hundreds and for Jews -- thousands -- of years. and a) implies that the state of Israel does not have a right to exist.
This basically a two sentence version of "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" slogan where its clear that we are not talking about West Bank and Gaza, but rather the entire land including Israel.
THanks for clarifying it
By the way, if we're talking about tribalism, the distant descendants of the Jews who lived in that area thousands of years ago, are (largely) the Palestinians. The modern Israelis are (largely) an entirely separate group of white Europeans that immigrated from Europe after WW2.
You clearly juxtapositioned Israelis vs the natives -- who did you mean by natives if not the Palestinian arabs?
Regarding descendants of Jews being Palestinains -- I find the way you present this interesting genetic fact quite misleading, making it sound that modern day palestinians have exclusive genetic connection to the land, whereas all genetic studies done in modern years show that modern day palestinian arabs AND ashkenazi jews AND mizrahi(middle-eastern) jews have clear genetic ties to people who inhabited that land in the bronze age(aka Moses era).
Lastly, its not true that modern israelis are LARGELY a group of europeans migrated from europe. Mizrahi jews(middle east and north africa) are the largest ethnic group in Israel. Not descendants of Ashkenazi europeans. Thank Iraq and Yemen for ethnically cleansing their countries of jews in 1948 for that.
Of course
It is crazy how we have dehumanized Palestinians to the point that just hinting on the fact that they might have a right to resist it completely taboo. Like you don't have to agree with their methods but expecting them to do nothing while Israel murders them and the world looks away is such a cruelty that is hard to comprehend.
Soldiers of 'a government' committing murder, rape and hostage taking on a music festival is going to earn you a bit of looking away to the consequences.
I don't expect them to do nothing, I expect them to come to a deal not sacrifice everything in an eternal and vain attempt to remove Israel from the map.
Well that is what they did. People like you told shite like "The war ends if they release the hostages".
They agreed to the first step of the peace plan. They released the hostages. They are keeping the truce. (Israel claims they killed a few soldiers but that seem to be a lie, they probably died from explosive that were already lying around).
So what did it gain them? Israels keeps murdering them. People are still starving in Gaza because Israel refuses to let food in.
> committing murder, rape and hostage taking
This is what Israel has been doing for decades. We just call the hostages prisoners.
While the Palestinians have treated their hostages as well as they could even when Gaza was starving, the bodies of the dead political prisoners Israel gave back were so mutilated from systemic torture that not even family members are able to recognize them.
As for the accusation of the resistance committing systemic rape, that is just racist propaganda. Same when they justified the lynching of black people in the US with saying they raped white women. We would have video evidence if something like that had happened.
82 of the 251 hostages taken by Hamas on Oct 7th were killed.
Give ‘em hell Netanyahu.
Netanyahu cares more about murdering Palestinians than saving his own people.
The international criminal court has an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. He is a war criminal. Get your facts straight.
The deal included remains of deceased hostages, most of which were not released at the agreed 48 hour point.
> they probably died from explosive that were already lying around
The source behind this theory seemed to be a tweet claiming "I’m told by a source familiar", and another tweet which was explicitly speculating ("most likely due to an explosive device ..."). No evidence was offered.
> While the Palestinians have treated their hostages as well as they could even when Gaza was starving
A UN envoy found "clear and convincing information that some [hostages] have been subjected to various forms of conflict-related sexual violence including rape and sexualized torture and sexualized cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment".
Evyatar David also appeared to be the most severely malnourished adult in Gaza, while being forced to dig his own grave.
But Israel's not murdering them. The war has a very low civilian to combatant death ratio.
There are children with sniper bullets in their bodies.
This is not war, this is ethnic cleansing.
https://www.972mag.com/israeli-intelligence-database-83-perc...
(Journalist from Israel)
How do you define this?
Killing Israel soldiers.
Or killing hundreds of civilians at a concert and parading the dead body of a young woman around like a hunting trophy like Hamas did on Oct 7 2023?
The main problem is that Palestinians think they can defeat Israel with force but they can't.
Would you not try to resist if you were to live in an open-air prison like Gaza?
What if you lived in the West Bank and someone came to knock on your door and tell you that settlers were now taking over your land your family has lived in for hundreds of years and the bulldozer was coming the same afternoon to destroy your house, how would you react?
I never condone attacking civilians, but i can't reasonably understand what those people had to live through for decades while their neighbour get to go to the beach every weekend.
ALL of the problems in Gaza are caused by Palestinians trying to defeat Israel with force when they simply can't.
What are you talking about? I'm also German but nobody is getting arrested here for that. I literally walked past a pro Palestine protests 1h ago.
> Irish officials express 'concern' after Irish protestor left bloodied by police in Berlin
https://www.irishpost.com/news/irish-officials-express-conce...
> Footage circulating on X shows police using brute force to push back protesters, with at least 28 people arrested, according to police reports.
https://www.humanrightsresearch.org/post/crackdown-on-pro-pa...
> Udi Raz, 34, is sitting in a cafe in Berlin, where he lives, reflecting on a turbulent six months. Since Israel’s war on Gaza began following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October, Raz, an Israeli Jew raised in Haifa, has been fired from his job and had the activist group he’s part of labelled antisemitic by Germany’s official antisemitism commissioner.
> Last Friday, German authorities arrested Raz, a board member of Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, after they cancelled and then banned the group’s three-day conference on Palestine.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/germany-crackdown-israel-...
Yes, even Jewish people are labeled anti-semites, it is that insane.
> as O'Brien is seen calling officers 'genocide supporters' and accusing one of 'acting like a Nazi'.
If you scream at peoples faces and insult them, you risk getting punched in the face. Police or not. Would be more professional to ignore that. But this is not a state systematically coming after you for voicing opinions. If you want to see a real example of that, look no further than Hamas.
Have you considered getting a gun? Why or why not?
In such situations though encrypted messaging becomes crucial, but it’d be hard to hide.
Note: links are rather disturbing.
1: https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/15/world/video/hamas-killings-ga... 2: https://x.com/afalkhatib/status/1979752415973834965
But anyways, great submission and great work. Remember though, your cell phone signals will earn you a JDAM, because you might be a terrorist for using a cell phone. So stay on the move.
Warning: links are very disturbing:
0: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
1: https://www.npr.org/2024/11/19/nx-s1-5195171/witnesses-say-i...
2: https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/08/1165552
3: https://theintercept.com/2024/08/09/israel-prison-sde-teiman...
4: https://www.btselem.org/publications/202408_welcome_to_hell
The critic can pretend to be as offended as much as they want, but since they're supporting israel's terroristic raping, torturing, killing, and genocide of innocent civilians (an act far worse than the one they're criticizing), the criticism rings hollow: they don't actually care about innocent civilians, only about their "side" getting everything it wants.
You can see that in Russia (as one example of many more, mind you), where officials search through your apps on the smartphone, or worse, people being carried away by cops merely for holding up a blank piece of paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbzV1it1YPY
But even worse, you can install it from App Store or Google Play! Israeli territory or Israeli territory! What will these dipshits do next? Send the Palestinians some more pagers out of Budapest?
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?
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!
Not that. But it should be someone’s job to monitor if Hamas adopts it.
Not really. If it becomes a tool of terrorist communication, it will get shut down. Legally, technically and/or kinetically.
You mean like how they shut down cell phone networks?
At this point, it's probably worth abandoning 802.11ah as an idea and trying some different RF standard.
bit-chat is a piece of software, it's not a hardware device
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.
>”Forty-eight percent of the people who died from blast injuries among our colleagues' households were children and 40 percent were under 10 years old.”
That is quite different from saying that “ 40% of the bombing victims in Gaza are under 10 years old”.
48% of bombing victims/people who died from blast injury are children
of those children 40% were under 10 years of age
so .48 * .4 = 0.192 meaning roughly 20% of bomb deaths were under 10.
But like if you're having this conversation you've already lost. There's no way to frame it so it's not horrific.
Why not?
40% of bombing victims in Gaza are under 10. What fraction of the population is? How does that compare to Ukraine’s demographic and bombing victim distributions?
These are valid questions for contextualising a conflict.
And Ukraine is a massive war with over a million casualties, so imagine that.
One child missing two years of school is already a tragedy. A whole generation missing school, starving, under constant risk of violence and death, this is the first thing I think of when I think of Gaza.
I'm not even a Palestine "supporter" but I will not longer support the state of Israel for any reason, even if the "good guys" come to power.
(.39 + .05) * .25 = .11
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn5wel11pgdo
[2] https://www.ohchr.org/en/meeting-summaries/2023/07/ukraine-c...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain...
Sure. This is how "comparing it to the war in Ukraine" is both helpful and informative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_Center_of_Recruitm...
That you think this says a lot about our news environment. I can think of a dozen places in Africa.
No shit. 80%+ percent of the country is rubble.
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.
I once worked in an Information Operations group. It has left me deeply suspicious of the verisimilitude of online personae. One of the things I appreciate about HN is the ability to check whether I'm talking to a human, and whether they have a cohesive sentiment.
not sure how important that is next to not dying of hunger, being blown up, loosing friends, family and strangers, being erased and treated like an animal, but, you know. it's a start...
I assume to unset it just have to use /pass without arguments?
https://github.com/TechForPalestine/boycott-israeli-consumer...
How does that translate to local vernacular?
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.
Ask HN: Does Anyone Use Bitchat? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44944414 - Aug 2025 (5 comments)
Testing Bitchat at the music festival - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44815164 - Aug 2025 (55 comments)
MitM Flaw in Bitchat: Identity Is a Bitchat Challenge - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44497622 - July 2025 (6 comments)
Bitchat – A decentralized messaging app that works over Bluetooth mesh networks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44485342 - July 2025 (424 comments)
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