Iranian state media and global monitors report severe disruptions to internet and mobile networks across Iran, with Palestinian and Resistance-aligned channels attributing the blackout to suspected Israeli cyberattacks.
On February 23, 2026, widespread internet and telecommunications blackouts were reported across the Islamic Republic of Iran. Initial alerts stemmed from Iranian state media and were rapidly amplified across the broader Middle Eastern media landscape. According to Al Jazeera, local Iranian media confirmed the "severance of international internet services across all parts of the country." Concurrently, the Iranian state-affiliated Mehr News Agency reported targeted cellular disruptions, noting a loss of mobile phone services in parts of Tehran.
Independent global internet monitors corroborated the state media reports. Naya, an Iraqi channel, cited live data showing that connectivity in Iran had plummeted to "54% of its usual levels." Al Araby TV also quoted the internet monitoring group NetBlocks, confirming a "near-total internet blackout in Iran."
While mainstream pan-Arab and Iraqi state outlets—such as the Iraqi News Agency (INA), Baghdad Today, and Jordan's Al Mamlaka TV—maintained a strictly factual and neutral tone by simply relaying the statements from Mehr News and Reuters, a distinct narrative emerged among Palestinian and "Axis of Resistance"-aligned channels.
Rather than treating the blackout as a domestic infrastructural failure, anti-Israel and pro-resistance channels explicitly framed the event as an act of geopolitical warfare. Palestine Post actively linked the outage to foreign sabotage, reporting that the increasing internet disruptions in Iran coincided "with Israeli media reports stating that cyberattacks were carried out against Iran."
In pro-resistance community discussion channels, users actively debated the severity of the outages. While some users in the Axis of Resistance Discussions group believed the internet was entirely disabled, anecdotal reports suggested the impact may have been uneven or temporary. In the Rasd Al-Ado Discussions channel, a participant noted that while there was "weakness in some areas," the connection eventually "returned to normal."
The prompt requested a cross-narrative analysis between Hebrew and Arabic sources; however, the provided dataset exclusively contained Arabic-language Telegram channels. The analysis was therefore adapted to highlight the narrative divergence within the Arabic-language media landscape itself—specifically contrasting the neutral, fact-based reporting of pan-Arab and state-affiliated media against the geopolitically charged, conflict-oriented framing provided by Palestinian and pro-Resistance channels.