Digital Rights Weekly Update: 30 October - 5 November 2026

Policy Insight

Palestine’s digital transformation was the focus of 7amleh’s new readiness assessment, which found that legal and institutional safeguards are lagging behind technological developments. Without stronger data protection, oversight, public participation and access to redress, interconnected public systems risk deepening exclusion and surveillance rather than improving access to services. Human rights safeguards must be central to the development and governance of Palestine’s digital infrastructure.

The Israeli elections also exposed the continued use of digital platforms to target Palestinians beyond election day. Anti-Arab discourse surged by 428%, accompanied by false allegations of electoral fraud and calls to deny Palestinian citizens their voting rights. This incitement seeks to discredit Palestinian political participation and legitimise their exclusion, while platforms continue to provide the channels through which it spreads.

The complicity of Big Tech in these violations is further exposed by EKO’s investigation into Microsoft’s role in hosting Al Munasseq, alongside reporting on AI-driven attempts to rewrite Palestinian history and the export of Israeli surveillance technologies. These practices must be understood within the reality of occupation, and companies must be held accountable for the technologies and infrastructure they provide.

News Digest

Digital Transformation in Palestine: A Rights-Based Readiness Assessment of Emerging Digital Public Infrastructure

7amleh - The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media  

The new report assesses the readiness of legal, institutional, technical, and governance frameworks to keep pace with Palestine’s digital transformation, alongside the safeguards needed to protect human rights when developing public digital systems and services. Authored by Dr. Mohammad Alshurafa, the report examines a range of Palestinian digital initiatives, including the “Hukumati” e-government platform, the National Data Carrier and other data-exchange systems, digital payments, electronic procurement, digital identity, cybersecurity and emerging artificial intelligence initiatives. The report draws on desk research, a structured review of Palestinian laws, draft legislation, policies and regulatory instruments, and ten interviews with stakeholders and experts across multiple sectors. It reflects the evidence available as of 1 October 2026. The report finds that technological and strategic developments in Palestine are advancing faster than the legal, institutional, and human rights safeguards needed to govern integrated digital systems. While digital systems can improve access to services and their efficiency, weak governance, oversight, and avenues for redress may increase the risks of exclusion, surveillance, errors, and opaque decision-making. 

How Israel Is Using AI to Rewrite Palestinian History

DAWN 

My mother inherited two dresses from her grandmother, who was displaced from Asqalan, now called Ashkelon, in occupied Palestine. The dresses feature patterns known as Jannah wa Nar ("Heaven and Fire") and Jiljileh ("Little Bells"), weaving traditions passed down through generations of Palestinians. Similarly, my father retained family documents stemming from our family's displacement during the Nakba, when over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes between 1947-49 upon the creation of Israel. Both inheritances tell the same story: one that is being erased and manipulated by modern tools like artificial intelligence (AI). In October 2023, Israeli bombing campaigns forcibly displaced my family from the Beit Lahia in northern Gaza to the center of the Strip. My parents' house was levelled and, with it, centuries of family history turned into ash. Israel then sealed the area as a closed military zone on Nov. 5, 2023. Like most Palestinians in Gaza, my parents could not protect this history, powerless against an Israeli state holding total authority over archiving, preservation and destruction in its occupation of Palestine.

Microsoft cloud in Ireland under fire for hosting Israeli app used to monitor Palestinians in occupied West Bank 

Euobserver 

Microsoft software plays a key part in running an app used by Israel to control Palestinian mobility in the occupied territories, a new report found. Al Munasseq, meaning ‘The Coordinator’ in Arabic, is an app launched by Israel’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (COGAT) unit in 2019 to manage the movement of Palestinians for work, healthcare, prayer, and everyday tasks. A report published on Tuesday (3 November) by global consumer group Ekō found Microsoft to be hosting key components of Al Munasseq in data centres in Ireland, effectively enabling what is feared to be mass surveillance. “For Palestinians, Al Munasseq is the gatekeeper to ordinary life. A cancer patient who needs radiotherapy in Jerusalem, a worker who needs to feed his family, a daughter who wants to sit beside her mother in hospital – all of them must ask Israel’s military for a permit to move across their own stolen land, and that permission runs through the Al Munasseq app, ” said Ekō senior campaign director, Rewan Al-Haddad.

Apartheid in Your Pocket: How Microsoft powers Al Munasseq, Israel’s permit app 

Eko

For millions of Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT) the way to a hospital, a job, a relative or a mosque in Jerusalem is run through a single app. It is called Al Munasseq – Arabic for “the Coordinator". It was launched by Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the Israeli Ministry of Defence body that administers Palestinian life under occupation. 1 And according to research from Who Profits as well as whistleblower evidence that Ekō was able to obtain as part of a GDPR complaint, it runs on Microsoft’s cloud. 2 Al Munasseq is the digital front end of Israel’s permit regime, the bureaucracy that decides which Palestinians may move, where, when, for how long and for what purpose. By April 2026 it had been downloaded more than one million times from the Google Play store alone. 3 Palestinians interviewed for this report described having no real alternative. As one put it: “we are controlled and not free to choose. ” Through Al Munasseq, Palestinians apply for permits to work, receive medical treatment, trade or pray. They book appointments for their biometric scan, at which Israeli authorities fingerprint and photograph them for the biometric cards they need to pass checkpoints. They learn whether they have been approved or rejected — usually without being told why — and many discover through the app that they are subject to a “security ban” they cannot see the evidence for and have no effective way to challenge. Since 2024, holders of several types of permit have had to prove they returned to the West Bank on time, either at a checkpoint kiosk or by submitting a selfie through the app with their phone’s location switched on. 4 

EU and UK spent millions on Israeli phone cracking tech despite risks

State Watch 

Controversial phone extraction systems made by Israeli company Cellebrite have become a go-to technology for law enforcement across Europe. Statewatch has mapped more than 150 public contracts worth a total of €69 million since 2023, including purchases funded by the EU.1 During a months-long investigation, we found Cellebrite tools used across Europe to profile journalists, racialised people and activists, raising serious concerns about fundamental rights and freedoms. This is the first article in a five-part investigative series on the use of Cellebrite’s phone extraction services in Europe. In this first part, we dig into the public money, including EU and UK funds, paying for data extraction, and Cellebrite’s track record as a key tool for authoritarian and oppressive regimes in quashing dissent. Cellebrite was founded in 1998 as a backup and phone-to-phone data-transfer service. The company soon became a leading actor in Israel’s industrial tech complex, where private research supports security and defence bodies, and vice versa. Cellebrite’s systems – from its flagship phone extraction tools to most recent AI-enhanced data analysis platforms – are used by both internal security bodies and armies. The company has a total of 5,300 clients in law enforcement in about 100 countries, according to its 2025 filings.

Israel-linked entities tied to global anti-Muslim disinformation campaign: Report

Anadolu Ajansı  

An influence operation linked to entities based in Israel spent an estimated £6.12 million ($8.2 million) promoting anti-Muslim conspiracy theories across more than 30 countries, according to a new report. The report, Manufacturing The Great Replacement, found that the campaign ran from October 2023 to October 2026, generating an estimated 800 million advertising exposures across Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Middle East. Researchers Marc Owen Jones and Sohan Dsouza described the operation as "one of the largest influence and disinformation campaigns ever documented. " According to the report, the campaign spread racist, anti-Muslim, anti-migrant, anti-Qatar and anti-Iran narratives through social media advertisements, AI-generated videos, music, video game parodies and repurposed footage. One campaign, titled Grand Theft Qatar, depicted Emiratis buying European buildings and converting them into mosques.Other advertisements featured slogans such as "THIS IS AN INVASION" and "QATAR IS ISLAMISING EUROPE. " The campaign promoted the Great Replacement, a debunked white nationalist conspiracy theory claiming that migration and demographic changes are deliberately replacing white Europeans with nonwhite populations.