Digital Rights Weekly Update: 4 - 10 July

7amleh Releases New Position Paper: “The War on Gaza: How Social Media Constructed Narratives and Solidarity among Gazans”

7amleh

July 8, 2025, 7amleh - The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media has released a new position paper titled “The War on Gaza: How Social Media Constructed Narratives and Solidarity among Gazans,” which sheds light on the discursive and social transformations in the use of social media platforms by Palestinians in Gaza since the outbreak of the genocidal war in October 2023. Published amid a heavily restricted and underdeveloped digital environment, the paper contextualizes these shifts within the near-total collapse of Gaza’s digital infrastructure. In the early weeks of the war, 50% of Gaza’s communications network was completely destroyed, while an additional 25% sustained partial damage. According to estimates from Paltel, the overall network outage reached approximately 80%.

Data-driven deaths: How Israel's AI war machine pinpoints Palestinian victims

The National News

In an investigation into these Gaza deaths, The National found: Israel operates a 20-second decision review known as a TCT (time constrained target) once a potential victim is picked up by the AI. These strikes are conducted on known Hamas operatives but also involve civilians. Israeli’s state-of-the-art AI system uses data harvesting to give Gazans a high “suspicion score” that sets up a battlefield hit. Israel operates a series of AI systems that are routinely run with a level as low as 80 per cent confidence of confirming a legitimate target. Its known AI systems are Lavender, which raids data banks to generate potential confirmation of the target as a percentage; Gospel, which identifies static military targets such as tunnels; and Where’s Daddy?, which computes when a person is in a certain place. The target acquisition relies on facial recognition and other tools, including mapping a person’s gait and cross-checking identities

The target set includes as many as 37,000 Palestinians – compete with their photographs, videos, telephone and social media data – profiled in the systems.

Palestine Action isn’t a danger to British democracy – but Yvette Cooper is

The Guardian

As security sources explained to +972 magazine in April 2024, Israel’s Lavender AI program had marked about 37,000 Palestinians as suspected “Hamas militants”, selecting them as potential targets for assassination. A further program, with the sinister name of Where’s Daddy?, was tracking them to their homes so that they could be bombed at night, often killing not only their families but many other people in the same block. “Once you go automatic,” one of the sources told the journal, “target generation goes crazy.” Almost everyone in Gaza had been given a Lavender rating of between 1 and 100. As soon as the number in the AI system was high enough, the name would be added to the kill list. That would be treated as a military order, even though the operators knew that at least 10% of the targets were misidentified.

Israel's Tech Boom & the Economy of Genocide

Zeteo

Volvo, Airbnb, Booking.com, Palantir. What do these companies have in common? They, and many others, are all part of what UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, in a new groundbreaking report, calls the “economy of genocide.” It describes how major corporations have been profiting off of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its occupation in the West Bank. Albanese has spent the past week facing major backlash from corporate America, the pro-Israel lobby, and even the Trump administration, which has called for Albanese’s removal and is also reportedly preparing to place sanctions on her. In this episode of ‘Unshocked,’ Naomi Klein brings on Albanese to discuss her key findings, what Klein describes as “an economy that is booming off of annihilation.” As Klein explains, Israel is known as a startup nation. And the tech part of Israel's economy is central to why the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange has boomed since the October 7th attacks. But there is a dark side that needs to be discussed.

Lavender, Where’s Daddy and the ethics of AI-driven war

Down To Earth

There have been multiple evidences which indicate that Israeli forces have deployed novel AI-driven targeting tools in Gaza. One system, nicknamed “Lavender” is an AI-enabled database that assigns risk scores to Gazans based on patterns in their personal data (communication, social connections) to identify “suspected Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives”. Lavender has flagged up to 37,000 Palestinians as potential targets early in the war. A second system, “Where is Daddy?”, uses mobile phone location tracking to notify operators when a marked individual is at home. The initial strikes using these automated generated systems targeted individuals in their private homes on the pretext of targeting the terrorists. But innocent women and young children also lost their lives in these attacks. This technology was developed as a replacement of human acumen and strategy to identify and target the suspects.