Digital Rights Weekly Update: 6 - 12 June

Internet, phone services completely cut off in Gaza after Israeli strikes

Anadolu Agency

Internet and phone services collapsed across the Gaza Strip on Thursday following Israeli strikes on telecommunications infrastructure, the Palestinian Telecommunications Regulatory Authority said. In a statement, the authority said the digital isolation of Gaza had deepened due to Israel’s "systematic targeting" of telecom infrastructure, despite repeated attempts to repair damaged and alternative routes over a prolonged period. It said that the southern and central areas of the territory had now joined Gaza City and the northern region in a total communications blackout for a second consecutive day. The authority accused Israel of deliberately targeting key telecom networks and main fiber-optic routes, warning that the telecom blackout threatens to disconnect Gaza from the outside world completely, and cut off access to critical services such as emergency aid, healthcare, media coverage, and education.

US Tech and Finance Have Become Israel’s Greatest Allies

Jacobin

America’s tech sector has also played a major role in the ongoing genocide. Amazon and Google, for instance, have both furnished Israel’s army and leading arms manufacturers with cloud services across the past twenty months. Since October 2023, Google and Microsoft have also provided Israel’s army with their leading AI models, earning themselves public commendations from Colonel Racheli Dembinsky, the commander of the Israeli army’s Center of Computing and Information Systems Unit, in the process. Furthermore, capital from Silicon Valley has served to bolster the macroeconomic stability of the Israeli economy. The March 2025 acquisition of an Israeli cloud security firm (Wiz) for $32 billion by Alphabet, the parent holding company of Google, was the largest acquisition in the company’s history and a significant life raft to the Israeli economy.

As big tech grows more involved in Gaza, Muslim workers are wrestling with a spiritual crisis

The Guardian

Before Ibtihal Aboussad was fired by Microsoft for protesting the company’s work with the Israeli military during a celebration of the firm’s 50th anniversary, she sent two emails. The first went to all of her colleagues. She appealed to their universal humanity and urged them to stand against Microsoft’s contracts to provide cloud computing software and artificial intelligence products to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). She sent the second to the “Muslims at Microsoft” email list. Its subject line read: “Muslims of Microsoft, Our Code Kills Palestinians.” With her email, Aboussad told the Guardian, she wanted Muslim staff of companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon to stop regarding the question of whether they organize against their employer’s work with the IDF as an issue of secular or professional ethics. It was a question of Islam, of their faith, she argued.

Google takes down academic petition “STOP European Funding for Israeli Institutions – Stop Complicity in Genocide, Occupation and Apartheid”

AURDIP

In the early hours of 5 June, Google took down our running petition “STOP European Funding for Israeli Institutions – Stop Complicity in Genocide, Occupation and Apartheid” from its platform Google Drive, and blocked the associated account without prior notice. There was no element in our petition that violated their terms of service or stated policy. Amidst the ongoing genocidal war Israel is waging against the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, EU funding is still flowing into Israel including institutions and companies directly involved in the Israeli military/security industrial complex. This is in direct contradiction to Horizon Europe’s own regulation stating, “Participation of third countries is conditioned on the respect of human rights” and “Beneficiaries must commit to upholding EU values”. The cumulative funding given to Israel since 2007 amounts to over 3 billion €. Our current petition is addressed to the EU institutions, demanding: End all academic and research cooperation with Israeli institutions Revoke Israel’s Horizon Europe status Rebuild Palestinian academic institutions Investigate the human rights impact of past and future EU research funding to Israel