Digital Rights Weekly Update: 26 June - 02 July 2026

Policy Brief:

The struggle for Palestinian digital rights is also a struggle to preserve Palestinian memory. This week's reporting highlights how digital archives, beyond being simply repositories of history, are also essential infrastructure for safeguarding identity, culture, and evidence against ongoing attempts at erasure. As physical archives, cultural institutions, and heritage continue to come under attack, building resilient digital archives is an act of preservation and resilience.

At the same time, continued revelations about platform censorship, surveillance technologies, and the growing role of AI in systems of control reinforce a broader reality on how digital technologies shape whose stories survive, whose voices are heard, and whose rights are protected. Ensuring accountability, defending digital rights, and investing in independent Palestinian knowledge, documentation, and archival initiatives are therefore essential components of protecting Palestinian existence, memory, and the right to narrate our own history.

News Digest

How Palestinians Are Building a Digital Archive That Can’t Be Erased

WIRED

Palestinian culture has been looted, destroyed and displaced for decades. Since October 2023, however, the destruction of Gaza’s cultural institutions has accelerated, prompting a team in the occupied West Bank to build something they hope cannot be seized or erased: a digital archive of Palestinian memory. “Within a week, Israel bombed two art galleries, seven museums, two main archives in Gaza and hundreds of archaeological sites,” says Amer Shomali, a prominent visual artist and general director of the Palestinian Museum. “This battle of trying to erase the Palestinian culture and Palestinian memory – it’s not something theoretical.”

Microsoft worker emails thousands of colleagues about company’s support for genocidal ‘Israel’

Canary

On his final day at the company, a Microsoft worker in Italy has sent out an email to thousands of colleagues informing them of how the corporation operates as the technological backbone of the Gaza holocaust perpetrated by ‘Israel’. The now ex-employee of the company also cited the use of Microsoft’s Irish data center for the Al-Munasseq (the Coordinator) mass surveillance program. This is an app the land thieves of the Zionist entity force Palestinians to install on their phones as part of their illegal apartheid permit system. It is used to put Palestinians under constant surveillance, violating their fundamental right to privacy.

Digital Palestine and the National Imagination

The University of Chicago Press Journals 

It seems that Palestine has found a convenient spot in the cloud, as a complex, yet seemingly cohesive, digital nation comes into being. The growing possibilities of online connectivity through social media, search engines, and streaming services, along with the newly designed features of online articulation (posting, sharing, commenting, reacting, and so forth), are intensifying the idea of a single people, a single heritage, and a single national destiny. This article presents the concept of digital Palestinian nationalism as a critical prism for examining how online political activism in support of Palestine reveals the multiple, somewhat conflicting, layers of present Palestinian temporality.

Upstream Harms: OSI, AI Militarism, Big Tech, and Gaza

Opinio Juris

OSI practices have been key to human rights-focused investigations into the ongoing killing and destruction in Gaza (which the International Court of Justice has ruled as a plausible genocide), particularly as Israel has maintained a near-total ban on independent foreign journalists and international human rights investigators entering the territory. To date, most of this OSI work has focused on retrospectively documenting civilian deaths, destruction, and human rights violations. For example, a statistical study published in The Lancet estimated: “75200 violent deaths (95% CI 63 600–86 800) between Oct 7, 2023, and Jan 5, 2025, representing approximately 3.4% of the Gaza Strip’s pre-conflict population.” The scale of killing in Gaza has been rapidly accelerated through the utilisation of AI targeting systems employed by the Israeli military. Investigative reports from late 2023 to early 2024 detailed several AI-driven systems (‘Habsora,’ ‘Lavender,’ and ‘Where’s Daddy?’) that were being used by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) for target identification.