"Throughout 2023, a wide range of social and political developments both locally and globally, had a profound impact on the digital spHere In 2023, Israel’s constant assaults on Palestinian communities in the West Bank, coupled with unprecedented levels of aggression inflicted on Gaza have led to ... an alarming escalation in human rights violations against Palestinians living in the occupied Palestinian territory and Palestinian citizens of Israel. This rapid deterioration has coincided with a simultaneous targeting of digital rights, not just for Palestinians but also those who advocate for Palestinian human rights. During the same period, Israeli authorities cracked down on digital rights by persecuting Palestinians for simply expressing their views or opinions on various online platforms, through a variety of measures including censorship, surveillance and arrests. Furthermore, Israel persistently and intentionally disrupted communications and internet infrastructure in Gaza. In addition to introducing draconian legislation to restrict freedom of expression and criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza. This included vague and discriminatory legislation such as the ninth amendment to the anti-terrorism law, which refers to the alleged consumption of what Israel deems as terrorist publications. These violations occurred within the broader framework of government policies to expand surveillance and digital repression of Palestinians, including the deployment of mass surveillance tools and mobilization of a vast voluntary movement to report individuals expressing criticism of Israeli policies. Social media platforms played a key role in facilitating Israel’s oppressive measures. While social media companies, especially Meta’s online platforms, have long been accused of restricting Palestinian content, the evidence shows that these policies intensified in 2023, despite prior commitments to address these discriminatory policies. The most notable measures included mass content removals and extensive “shadowbanning” of users criticizing Israel or posting in support of Palestinians. During Israel’s war on Gaza, these content restrictions and removals soared to unprecedented levels. Users of Meta’s platforms, including journalists, activists, media pages and those simply documenting reality on the ground or posting in support of Palestinian rights were subject to account banning, content removal and other restrictive measures. Such policies appeared to explicitly target those in support of Palestinian rights, with the purpose of restricting freedom of information, and censoring the Palestinian narrative." (Executive summary) more

"Over the past two weeks, 7amleh - The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media has worked to document and respond to the digital rights violations occurring during the 2021 Israeli attacks on Gaza, Palestinians in mixed cities in Israel and forcible displacement of Palestinians in East Jerus ... alem as a part of ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. There has been a dramatic increase of censorship of Palestinian political speech online, coupled with increasing examples of hate speech and incitement against Palestinians including organizing of violent Israeli lynch mobs online. This pattern of censoring Palestinian and Arabic political speech, while allowing hate speech directed towards Palestinians and Arabs to remain online, is exasterbating the human rights violations already occuring on the ground and is preventing people from exercising their fundamental rights and documenting violations." (Page 2) more

"The results of the questionnaire showed that most Palestinian organizations do think about and deal with media work in general. Since ninety-three percent of the organizations surveyed were already dealing with media, while 58% employed at least one person in a specialist position. Only 32% had a s ... pecialized department dedicated to media work. In terms of a specific strategic approach to media, 61% of the organizations who took part in the questionnaire had a strategic plan for dealing with media; 51% had an annual work plan. However, only 42% stated that they allocated an annual budget for media. In other words, they used funds which are not deducted from project grants. Turning to social media usage, we found that 70% of the organizations tried to finance content through their networks at least once, whereas fifty-four percent of the organizations launched digital awareness campaigns on social media platforms; forty-nine percent of these digital campaigns were part of a media plan. Looking at the prevalence of social media platforms and how they are most widely used, we found that all organizations, even the ones with no website, usually had a Facebook account. In fact, 100% of the organizations surveyed had a Facebook account, hence this was not subject to testing in relation to the other influencing factors. YouTube followed with 75% of the organizations having an account. Fifty-one percent of the organizations had a Twitter account, while 27% had an Instagram account and 18% had a LinkedIn account. Two of the organizations used Soundcloud and two others used Flickr. Vimeo and Google+ were only used by a single organization for each one." (Results and conclsions, page 56-7) more

"The first part of the report provides a general introduction to the definition of digital rights and what they entail, and surveys key UN resolutions that recognise the impact of the internet on human rights. The second part of the report examines the accessibility of the internet by Palestinians a ... s a basic human right, taking into consideration their geographical, judicial and administrative fragmentation and how this affects their access to the internet and information and communications technologies (ICTs). The third part maps the recent restrictions and violations of Palestinians’ digital rights by three governments: the Israeli government, the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and the de-facto Hamas administration in the Gaza Strip. It also looks into practices and policies of private tech companies and their impact on Palestinian digital rights. The fourth part pays special attention to the issue of gender and the internet, examining in particular Palestinian women's use of the internet and the threats of cybercrime and gender-based violence online." (Introduction) more