Digital Rights Weekly Update: 2 - 8 October 2026

Policy Insight

As we continue to navigate an increasingly challenging digital environment, the questions we are raising at 7amleh extend far beyond Palestine. Our latest quarterly report documents 308 digital rights violations between July and September, while developments around Palantir, the UK’s NHS and the continued scrutiny of technology companies’ role in Israel’s war on Palestinians show how questions of data, surveillance and AI are increasingly entering everyday institutions and public service providers.

This is why our work matters beyond documenting what happens to Palestinians. We are committed to producing and sharing critical knowledge about the technologies and systems shaping our lives, from AI governance and information integrity to corporate accountability and digital rights. Palestine offers an urgent context for understanding these developments, but the questions they raise are increasingly global.

News Digest

July - September 2026 Quarterly Report

7amleh 

7amleh publishes its quarterly report which examines the state of Palestinian digital rights during the third quarter of 2026, providing an analysis of key patterns of censorship affecting Palestinian content and accounts, as well as the circulation of violent and inciting content and hate speech across social media platforms, based on data collected through 7amleh’s “7or” Digital Rights Violations Observatory. During the period from July to September 2026, 7amleh documented a total of 308 digital violations.

Digital hopes, real power: From connection to collective action

Global Voices 

While in the early days, the digital rights movement attracted specialists, today, people from other fields have recognized how digital rights intersect with their work, and the digital rights community has embraced them. Conferences like Bread and Net, first held in Beirut in 2018, and the Palestine Digital Activism Forum (PDAF), first held in Ramallah in 2017, bring activists, academics, journalists, and other practitioners together to network and learn about each other’s work. The pandemic, conflict, and other barriers haven’t stopped either conference from carrying on: PDAF has become an annual virtual event that draws big-name speakers, while Bread & Net has spaced out its meetings but continues to draw bigger crowds each time.

Public sector risk and double standards over occupied Palestine

Computer Weekly 

The UK bans cloud and software for Russia, but sanctions illegal Israeli settlements only narrowly – while AWS, Google and Microsoft run the IT infrastructure for the occupation. In September 2026, the UK government declared the occupation of the West Bank unlawful and announced what foreign secretary Ed Miliband called a “step change” in its treatment of Israeli settlements. A new sanctions regime will stop UK companies assisting in settlement construction, and a trade ban will target settlements while leaving Green Line Israel untouched. Miliband says the government should have acted earlier, and that it took “a new prime minister to come in” to do so. The measures are real, but they are deliberately narrow. The new powers reach only companies that “provide services such as construction, infrastructure, financing, or real estate for settlement expansion”. They do not touch technology. There is no software ban, no cloud ban, and no prohibition on supplying the checkpoints, population registries and permit systems that administer the occupation itself.

As NHS workers we will not stop speaking out til Palantir is out

The New Arab 

Last Wednesday, a group of health workers stood outside Palantir's London office beside a replica of a destroyed Palestinian ambulance. A coalition of health worker organisations, in collaboration with Amnesty International, had parked it there to send a clear message. Palantir, the company running the NHS's patient data platform, is the same company whose CEO, Alex Karp, has publicly declared he is “the most publicly supportive CEO of Israel”. That is a state that has decimated the healthcare system across the Gaza Strip and is steadily crippling it across the West Bank. But Palantir's ties go far beyond words. In January 2024, it signed a strategic partnership with Israel's Ministry of Defence to support its war effort. The UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory has named Palantir as a supplier of AI tools used by the Israeli army in Gaza. The Nordic investor Storebrand dropped the company over concerns that its predictive policing systems help Israel flag Palestinians as potential "lone wolf" attackers so they can be arrested preemptively.

Cloaked in anonymity, Israeli soldiers describe mass civilian killings in 'NAZA'

OPB

For most of the shattering and damning new documentary NAZA, we are on a series of rooftops in Tel Aviv, watching the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham conduct one-on-one interviews with Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel. The rooftop footage was filmed at night, mostly by Abraham’s co-director, Rachel Szor, and their interview subjects — 24 of them in total — are all cloaked in darkness. We’re told that their appearances and voices have been digitally altered to protect their anonymity. In precise detail, they speak about their role in launching the airstrikes that have killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza since the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, when around 1,200 people were killed and 250 hostages were taken.