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Article

7 Jul 2021

Author:
Sahar Amer, The New Arab

Israel is using biometric technology to facilitate military occupation, incl. digitizing movement restrictions & surveillance

“How Israel is automating the occupation of Palestine”, 7 July 2021.

The deployment of new technologies by Israel to maintain control over Palestinians is by no means a recent phenomenon, but rather a shift from traditional surveillance and intimidation practices to ever-increasingly digitised ones.

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Israel has long been accused of using the occupied West Bank as a testbed for developing new technologies before marketing them overseas, which includes performing invasive digital operations such as mobile and internet monitoring, social media blocking and censoring, and biometric data collection.

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There is approximately one camera per 100 people out of the total population of 40,000 covering only 0.9 square kilometres.

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Israel has also been known to station drones at Palestinian protests to surveil the crowds or drop large amounts of tear gas.

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The infamous Israeli Cyber Unit has systematically worked with big tech companies including Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, requesting content by or for Palestinians to be removed from the platforms.

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Although Israel prides itself as a country with an array of legislation surrounding data protection and privacy...Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem don’t hold Israeli citizenship and are therefore not protected by these laws.