Weekly Update April: 17 - 23, 2026

Policy Insight

This week’s updates reinforce a growing global accountability gap, where regulation exists on paper, but harm continues in practice. While the EU positions itself as a leader in AI governance, our reporting shows that its safeguards largely stop at its borders, enabling EU-funded and exported high-risk systems to fuel surveillance, discrimination, and warfare across the region, including in Palestine.

At the same time, 7amleh’s latest findings deepen the case against Meta: not only failing to moderate harmful content, but actively monetizing and incentivizing settler violence and extremist rhetoric, while structurally excluding Palestinians from digital economic participation. Coupled with ongoing disinformation campaigns and the deliberate dismantling of Gaza’s digital infrastructure, the pattern shows technology being deployed without any meaningful accountability. Closing this gap demands enforceable obligations that follow companies, funding, and infrastructure wherever they operate.

News Digest

How EU funding and exports of high-risk AI systems exacerbate severe human rights violations in Palestine and the broader region

United Nations

In 2024, the European Union (EU) adopted the world’s first most comprehensive legislation regulating Artificial Intelligence (AI), the EU AI Act. The Act bans AI systems that pose “unacceptable risk” such as those that deploy “subliminal” or “purposefully manipulative or deceptive” techniques, social scoring, and those that exploit “any of the vulnerabilities of a natural person or a specific group of persons.” Further, it imposes a number of requirements including risk management, transparency, and human oversight for developers and deployers of high-risk AI systems such as those used in migration, border control, law enforcement, and the provision of public services. However, as the EU moves to regulate high-risk AI systems to prevent harm to fundamental rights within its borders, beyond its borders, and specifically in the Arab region, EU-origin and EU-funded high-risk AI systems particularly those used in migration control, predictive policing, biometric identification, and warfare are exacerbating surveillance and rights violations, hindering democratic participation, and reinforcing discrimination.

Why we must demand accountability from Meta over Palestine

The New Arab

Over the past several years, 7amleh has documented and shown repeatedly how Meta platforms have failed to uphold even the most basic standards of human rights. From enabling the spread of incitement and hate speech in Hebrew to disproportionately censoring Palestinian voices, the pattern we observed was confirmed. At its core, the issue with Meta’s failures was structural: discriminatory policies and unfair enforcement practices were at the centre of the problem. Building upon our mountain of already established evidence, 7amleh’s recent findings pointed to something even more alarming. Our latest research showed that Meta is not only allowing harmful content to circulate but also financially rewarding it. Through its monetisation programs, Meta enabled pages that promote settler violence, extremist incitement, and illegal settlement activity in occupied Palestinian and Syrian territories to generate profit. This includes content that, by the company’s own policies, should be ineligible for monetisation.

Research reveals that EU AI rules stop at its borders with little accountability for human rights impacts abroad

Global Voices

The European Union (EU) presents itself as the world’s most ambitious regulator of artificial intelligence (AI). With the AI Act, the Digital Services Act, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) or the Dual-Use Regulation, Brussels has built an elaborate architecture of rules designed to ensure that technology serves human rights. What that architecture does not do is follow the technology when it crosses a border. Our research at 7amleh, the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, traces what happens when it does. What we found is not a series of isolated procurement mistakes or funding oversights. It is a pattern. A structured, largely opaque system through which European money flows into high-risk AI and surveillance technologies, which then reach governments and militaries in the West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region, including Israel, with no binding obligation to assess what those technologies will be used for, against whom, and at what human cost.

From collapse to coordination: Gaza’s informal digital economy and the future of Palestinian socio-economic resilience

MEMO

By the time Gaza entered 2026, the numbers told a story that headlines could not contain. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported that 64 per cent of mobile towers were out of service. Paltel, the territory’s largest operator, had lost roughly 80 per cent of its more than 500 cell towers. The telecommunications sector’s market value collapsed by 89 per cent in a single year, from 13 million dollars in 2023 to just 1.5 million in 2024. In Rafah, mobile coverage sank from near-universal access to just 27 per cent. Reconstruction of the sector alone is now estimated at a minimum of 90 million dollars, with total losses exceeding half a billion. These figures describe a deliberate, systematic dismantling of Palestinian connectivity. They do not describe collateral damage.