40+ Organizations Worldwide Urge Meta to Stop Financially Enabling Settler Violence Against Palestinians

2026/04/23

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40+ Organizations Worldwide Urge Meta to Stop Financially Enabling Settler Violence Against Palestinians

We, the undersigned civil society organizations, write to express our grave concern regarding the findings of 7amleh's new report, "Monetizing Occupation: Meta's Financial Enablement of Settlement Activity and Violent Rhetoric Against Palestinians". The report exposes a deeply disturbing pattern where Meta is not only failing to remove harmful content but is actively financially enabling illegal settlement expansion and violent rhetoric against Palestinians.

The report reveals that Meta's platforms are being used to monetize Israeli right-wing pages and accounts that:

Publish violent, racist, and inciting content against Palestinians
Directly promote illegal settlement expansion in the West Bank
Justify and celebrate settler violence against Palestinian civilians
Mock Palestinian victims and call for forced displacement and ethnic cleansing
Celebrate destruction and genocide in Gaza

This financial enablement occurs despite these pages violating Meta's own monetization and content policies, as well as international humanitarian law and human rights standards. In stark contrast, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are completely excluded from monetization programs solely because Palestine is not included in the company’s eligible countries list.

This dual system—where Palestinian digital and economic participation is suppressed while illegal and violent content is financially rewarded—creates a dangerous precedent that incentivizes harm and normalizes violations. Furthermore, this produces an unjust digital economy in which Meta is reinforcing this discriminatory structure by economically excluding Palestinians while rewarding actors embedded in the machinery of their dispossession. That exclusion cannot be separated from the broader reality imposed on Palestinians: unlawful occupation, illegal settlements, forced displacement, apartheid, and genocide.

This report documents examples of violative monetized accounts, such as pages linked to businesses within the illegal settlements, illegal settlement tourism, and violent settler movements like the Hilltop Youth, which clearly violate Meta’s own policies. Furthermore, companies have a responsibility under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights to avoid causing or contributing to adverse human rights impacts and to carry out heightened, context-specific due diligence in conflict-affected settings. The July 2024 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice also affirmed that Israel’s occupation and settlement enterprise are unlawful, and that third states and non-state actors must not recognize, aid, or assist in maintaining that unlawful situation. In such a context, the continued monetization of content linked to settlement expansion, state violence, and incitement raises serious concerns that Meta is financially enabling and benefiting from conduct that violates international humanitarian law, international human rights law, and basic corporate responsibilities not to take part in atrocity, discrimination, and dispossession.

In light of these findings, and in line with the recommendations set out in our report, we call on Meta to:

End the blanket exclusion from monetization based on geographic or national origin, including the exclusion of Palestinian creators from monetization programs. Eligibility must be determined by content compliance and creator behavior, not by location.
Ensure consistent enforcement of Meta’s Partner Monetization Policies and Content Monetization Policies across all regions. Accounts promoting violence, conducting violent activity, or otherwise violating Meta’s policies should be promptly suspended from monetization, regardless of political or national affiliation.
Establish regular, independent audits of monetized accounts, with a specific focus on conflict-affected regions, and publish aggregated findings detailing enforcement actions, suspensions, and reinstatements.
Provide creators with a clear, accessible, and timely mechanism to appeal monetization-related decisions, including suspensions, removals, and revenue interruptions.
Increase transparency around monetization and publicly release disaggregated data on monetization eligibility, removals, and reinstatements by country and region.
Conduct heightened human rights due diligence into Meta's monetization programs to identify, prevent and mitigate any risks of contributing to or being directly linked to violations of international law including forced displacement, illegal settlement expansion and the maintenance of Israel's unlawful occupation of the oPts, apartheid, racial discrimination and genocide.