Digital Rights Weekly Update: 13 - 19 February 2026

Policy Insight:

This week’s reporting shows how rapidly surveillance technologies are expanding, and how familiar the pattern is. For Palestinians, these systems are not new. What is often presented globally as innovation has long been developed, refined, and deployed through the monitoring and targeting of Palestinians.

Investigations this week highlight AI systems trained on massive amounts of Palestinian data to automate profiling and targeting, alongside Israeli firms exporting invasive surveillance tools worldwide, including technologies embedded in everyday tools such as your personal car. What is marketed as “field-tested” has, in reality, been tested on a population living under prolonged occupation, siege, and settler-colonial violence. At the same time, reporting reveals that Microsoft, which supported the Israeli army through providing access to cloud storage and AI tools at the height of the genocide, how now shifted its support to ICE in the US in a significant amount. Once again, the infrastructure first exposed in the context of Gaza is being exported globally.

What we are witnessing is the normalization of surveillance as governance, enabled by corporate impunity. Breaking this cycle requires moving beyond documentation toward enforceable accountability, regulatory intervention, and sustained legal pressure. Without consequences, these technologies will continue to scale, and so will the harm increase.

News Digest

Hashtag Palestine 2025: Digital Repression as a System Governed by Law, Political Pressure, and Algorithms

7amleh

February 18, 2026, 7amleh - The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media has released its annual report, Hashtag Palestine 2025, offering an in-depth analysis of how Palestinian digital rights are being restricted through an interconnected system that combines government policies, platform governance, and emerging technologies amid ongoing crises, war, and grave human rights violations. The report concludes that what Palestinians face is no longer limited to the removal of a post or the suspension of an account. Rather, it has evolved into a “structure of control” that integrates legislation, digital policing, cross-border political pressure, automated enforcement, and AI-powered surveillance. This system restricts freedom of expression, reinforces self-censorship, and systematically excludes Palestinian voices from the digital public sphere.

Israeli Firms Turn Connected Cars into Surveillance Tools – Israeli Media

Palestine Chronicle

According to an investigation by Haaretz, Israeli cyber companies are developing and selling advanced intelligence tools designed to turn modern vehicles into surveillance platforms. As the newspaper explains, contemporary vehicles have effectively become connected digital systems rather than purely mechanical machines: “Our cars have become smart devices, a collection of computers on wheels with dozens of digital systems; the vehicle cannot properly function without an internet or cellular connection.” Within the intelligence industry, information derived from vehicles is known as “CARINT,” or car intelligence. The investigation found multiple Israeli firms operating in this sector, including at least one capable of penetrating vehicle systems directly. One such company, Toka — co-founded by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak — developed an offensive capability allowing operators to monitor occupants from inside the vehicle.  According to Haaretz, the system could remotely access “the microphone of the vehicle’s hands-free system, allowing eavesdropping on the driver, and even tap into cameras installed on the dashboard or around the car.” 

Algorithms and AI have turned Gaza into a laboratory of death

MEMO

The revelations by +972 Magazine and Local Call have exposed the darkest core of the contemporary war in Gaza, in which genocide is carried out not only by bombs and missiles, but by data, algorithms and global digital platforms. The Israeli artificial intelligence system known as Lavender has confirmed what the Palestinian resistance, Lebanon, and Iran have denounced for years: Technology as an organic part of the Zionist war machine, functioning as an instrument of surveillance, target selection, and mass extermination. The liberal rhetoric of “digital privacy” collapses in the face of the facts. Applications such as WhatsApp insist on the promise of end-to-end encryption, but conceal what is essential, in which metadata are worth more than messages. Lavender assessed virtually the entire population of the Gaza Strip, comprising more than 2.3 million people, assigning automated “risk scores”. Merely being in a WhatsApp group, maintaining frequent contact with someone already marked, or displaying digital patterns considered “suspicious” was enough to be placed on execution lists.

Tested on Palestinians: Epstein, Israel’s Barak pushed spy tech in Nigeria

Aljazeera

The files detail how Israeli intelligence firms marketed their technology to Nigeria using euphemisms such as “field-proven”, a reference to systems deployed by the Israeli military against Palestinians under occupation. In 2015, Barak and a business partner invested $15m in FST Biometrics, a firm founded by the former head of Israeli military intelligence, Aharon Ze’evi Farkash. The company’s core technology, a biometric system known as Basel, was originally prototyped at the Beit Hanoon (Erez) crossing between Israel and the besieged Gaza Strip to control the movement of Palestinian workers. While the Nigerian military battled Boko Haram, Barak facilitated the sale of similar biometric surveillance equipment to Babcock University, a Christian institution in Nigeria. The project was framed as a counterterrorism measure, with a press release at the time boasting that the technology would “filter away all unwanted persons”. The emails suggest this initial foothold allowed Barak to institutionalise Israeli cyber-expertise within the Nigerian state. By 2020, the World Bank had tapped the Israel National Cyber Directorate and a startup cofounded by Barak to shape Nigeria’s national cyber-infrastructure.

ICE tripled its reliance on Microsoft in last six months, leaked files reveal

+972 Magazine

Last year, +972, Local Call, and The Guardian revealed that Microsoft’s cloud servers were used to store masses of Israeli intelligence on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Gaza, which the Israeli army used to plan deadly airstrikes and arrests. The revelations led Microsoft to revoke its cloud services from Unit 8200, Israel’s elite signals intelligence unit that had collected the surveillance data — the first known instance of a tech giant restricting Israel’s access to its services.  “We do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, said in September after the company terminated Unit 8200’s access to Azure. “We have applied this principle in every country around the world.”   When +972, Local Call, and The Guardian asked whether this applies to U.S. federal agencies, a Microsoft spokesperson stated: “Microsoft does not comment on the operational use of our technology by specific customers. What we can say is that our approach is consistent globally: We prohibit the use of our technology for mass surveillance of civilian populations, require compliance with law and contract, and use internal review mechanisms to assess and address higher‑risk scenarios.”