Case Study: AI Accountability in the Context of Genocide and Occupation: “Larger than just AI itself”

Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) feel the impact of AI technologies deployed by Israel to control and subjugate them. Israel deploys biased and flawed algorithms to monitor what Palestinians are saying online under the pretext of preventing terror attacks,¹⁷³ and thereby criminalising Palestinians’ calls for resistance to the occupation and an end to the genocide.¹⁷⁴ In the West Bank, networks of facial recognition track and monitor Palestinians,which hinders their freedom of movement, association, and right to peaceful assembly. The surveillance can also restrict their rights to access health services, engage in entrepreneurial activities, and worship freely. .¹⁷⁵ In the genocide in Gaza, the Israeli military has used machine learning tools that rely on mass (biometric) surveillance to track, generate, and bomb targets,¹⁷⁶ in gross violation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), in particular military necessity, proportionality, distinction between combatants and civilians, and precaution.¹⁷⁷

The private sector, including tech companies, has been benefiting from the Israeli occupation and the genocide in Gaza.¹⁷⁸ For example, Israeli military and the apartheid regime rely on cloud storage provided by tech giants, including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, to collect massive amounts of data on Palestinians through surveillance and privacy-infringing practices.

Local, regional, and international civil society has engaged in different tactics and strategies to investigate and document the impacts of these technologies on Palestinians and hold the developers, deployers, and enablers to account.

“We are looking at a situation where Israel is using AI tools in a horrendous, horrifying way and we are calling for accountability for any company or anyone who is providing them with this assistance. It is how we attempt to hold Israel accountable for war crimes and especially if we are able to impact the private companies who are involved in providing assistance to power Israel’s AI systems and tools”, said Jalal Abukhater, Policy Manager at 7amleh, regarding his organisation’s approach to AI accountability in the OPT.

He added that, “targeting Israel is not an easy task. We do not do that. We do not engage Israel. Israel is committing war crimes. We are engaging the companies who are seen to be complicit in those war crimes by providing assistance when it comes to AI”. The organisation has also advocated at the EU level to call for stricter controls on exports of EU-manufactured technologies to Israel, which are then deployed against Palestinians.

Tech workers also have been organising through campaigns such as No Azure for Apartheid¹⁷⁹ and No Tech for Apartheid to demand that Microsoft, Google, and Amazon end their cloud storage contracts with the Israeli government. Campaigns include internal petitions, sit-ins, walk-outs and public pressure. In some cases, employees have faced retaliation¹⁸⁰ for their activism, including termination, doxxing, and surveillance.¹⁸¹Activists have also protested at events such as the United Nations AI for Good Summit in Geneva in July 2025, calling out those actors that have enabled Israel’s AI-assisted genocide against Palestinians in Gaza”¹⁸² as well as at a Google event¹⁸³ at the AI+ Expo in Washington D.C.¹⁸⁴

Sustained pressure has paid off, in some cases, with Microsoft announcing in September 2025 that it had terminated an infamous Israeli military unit’s access to “specific cloud storage and AI services and technologies”, although the company still provides other services to the Israeli military.¹⁸⁵ The unit in question, Unit 8200, runs a massive surveillance program that has “collected, stored, replayed and analyzed millions of civilian phone calls from Gaza and the West Bank”, as documented by a joint investigation between the Guardian, Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language media outlet Local Call.¹⁸⁶

In addition, civil society groups and researchers successfully pushed for a ban on fully autonomous weapons at the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons,¹⁸⁷ with the UN Secretary-General calling for Member States to set clear regulations and prohibitions on such systems by 2026.¹⁸⁸ Strategic litigation has been used as a path of resistance against European governments for their exports of weapons to Israel, for example, in the UK¹⁸⁹ and the Netherlands.¹⁹⁰

Despite these efforts, and evidence of the impacts of these technologies, accountability remains elusive. Globally, amid an unchecked AI race, there is a lack of willingness to institute protections from AI’s most salient harms. For Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the occupation deprives them of the most basic protection, including due process and self-determination. AI accountability starts with holding Israel to account for its occupation and war crimes, as Abukhater reiterated:

“There is no infrastructure to protect people, to regulate the use of AI tools. A big obstacle is that we are under occupation, there is no sovereignty, there is no self-determination. People are not able to just go to a court and say that my rights are being violated by the use of this AI system, and this court would listen to us, there is no such thing. The AI in Palestine is being used to commit crimes against humanity in a systematic and regular way. So, for us, accountability starts with accountability for Israel not just on AI, but to hold Israel accountable for the illegal occupation of occupied territory. We call on countries to respect their obligations and duties towards not supporting Israel’s occupation, and there is an ICJ court ruling that ordered Israel to cease or end the occupation, and third countries have a responsibility to respect the ICJ orders. So for us, the issue of accountability is much larger than just AI itself”.

The AI technologies of repression that Israel deploys to subjugate and control Palestinians and commit genocide in Gaza have even wider repercussions for the entire world. Israel’s military industrial complex, a leading exporter of military and surveillance technology around the world, has long made Palestine a testing ground for its latest weapons and technologies of repression, including border and surveillance systems, and spyware and attack drones. Palestine is “Israel’s workshop, where an occupied nation on its doorstep provides millions of subjugated people as a laboratory for the most precise and successful methods of domination”, wrote Antony Loewenstein in his book, The Palestine Laboratory.¹⁹¹

As Dima Samaro, a Palestinian lawyer and researcher, and director of Skyline International for Human Rights, told CIVICUS in an interview in July 2025, “Gaza serves as a warning”.¹⁹² “As militarised AI becomes normalised, the language of ‘precision’ and ‘efficiency’ masks atrocity. The lesson from Gaza is clear: when AI-powered machines control who lives, human rights die. This transcends Palestine’s tragedy – it foreshadows everyone’s future”, she added.

Despite the obstacles and the lack of resources, civil society groups and activists in Palestine and beyond continue to demand accountability and justice through public campaigns, strategic litigation, disruptive actions, worker campaigns and boycotts. The different campaigns and coalitions that have emerged from this fight need sustained support in the face of powerful governments that refuse to regulate dangerous AI systems and an industry with the resources and influence to undermine any form of regulation that could reign in their technologies and therefore affect their profits.

“The obstacles we are facing is that we are going up against very big, large companies, huge companies. And our concerns are not really backed up by institutions or a regulatory body that is actually influential or powerful. We are talking as a civil society with very limited resources on those big issues, but we are facing a larger problem when it comes to lack of regulation, lack of infrastructure and lack of capacities to influence the policies on the AI tools that are used here”, said Abukhater.