Despite ICJ Sanctions – Meta Allowed Israeli Settlers Book Profits From Terror Attacks Against Palestinians.

Tel Aviv; May 2026: Meta Platforms, the American company that runs and owns social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, has allegedly allowed Israeli settler groups to profit from anti-Palestinian’s content, while blocking monetisation for the accounts of Palestinians and limiting their reach, a report says.

A new investigation by the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media (7amleh) found that extremist Jewish groups such as the Hilltop Youth, sanctioned by the US, UK, and other nations for their involvement in violent attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, continue to generate revenue through Facebook and Instagram.

The report presented samples of monetised Israeli pages that “promote illegal outposts, justify settler violence, mock Palestinian victims, call for forced displacement, or celebrate destruction and genocide in Gaza”. Meta’s moderation systems still permit these groups, which use platforms to organise and fundraise for illegal settlement activities, to receive revenue despite committing violence and violating the company’s own policies.

It is of omnipotent importance that the learned International Court Of Justice (ICJ) in the month pf July 2024, have declared Israel’s decades-long occupation of historical Palestine illegal. The ICJ demanded the evacuation of all existing settlements in the West Bank and East al-Quds.

Moreover, the international community views the settlements as illegal under international law and the Geneva Conventions due to their construction on occupied territories. The UN Security Council has condemned Israel’s settlement activities in several resolutions.

Meanwhile, Palestinian accounts of well-known journalists and human rights advocates are subject to systematic censorship and “digital erasure”. 7amleh documented thousands of instances where Palestinian accounts were shadow-banned, restricted, or permanently deleted for showing the reality of life under Israeli occupation. This discrepancy creates a “monetisation blockade” that prevents Palestinian creators from earning revenue based on their geographic location.

“This reality creates a dual system: on one hand, Palestinian digital and economic participation is suppressed; on the other, pages that promote settlement activity, violence, and incitement against Palestinians are financially rewarded”, the report concluded. By allowing sanctioned groups to profit while suppressing the narratives of those reporting from the ground, Meta is accused of facilitating a “digital apartheid” in West Asia.

7amleh called for an independent audit of Meta’s Hebrew-language moderation and an end to the discriminatory policies that silence Palestinian civil society while enabling settler violence to flourish.

Violence by Israeli forces and extremist settlers has escalated across the occupied West Bank since October 2023, when Israel launched the genocidal war against Gaza. Israeli attacks in the West Bank have killed at least 1,154 Palestinians and wounded about 11,750 since then. More than 700,000 Israelis live in over 230 settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East al-Quds.

It has been long reported that Israel has been indiscriminately targeting Palestinians in the narrow strip using its artificial intelligence (AI)-based programs such as “Lavender”; “Gospel”; “Where’s Daddy” using information partly provided by Meta’s messaging app WhatsApp. The revelation had exposed deep linkages between the apartheid regime and social media giants, in this case, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, headquartered in California, United States.

How do Israeli AI kill machines at work? – Lavender is a “target machine”, based on AI and machine-learning algorithms, which is fed with inputs including the characteristics of prominent Hamas and Islamic Jihad resistance fighters as training data, and then it can locate these same characteristics or what is called “features” among the general population, according to a recent investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call.

These features, such as being in a WhatsApp group with a known resistance fighter, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently can increase an individual’s rating, the report published earlier this month stated.

The Lavender machine joins another AI system known as Gospel. While Lavender marks people and puts them on a kill list based on its training dataset, Gospel marks buildings and structures that the Israeli military claims resistance fighters, including low-ranking ones, operate from.

‘Where’s Daddy’ tracks targets and signals to the Israeli military when suspects enter their family homes.

Six unnamed sources who served in the Israeli military during the current war on the Gaza Strip told +972 Magazine and Local Call that Lavender has played a “central role” in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the onset of the current war. According to these sources, while Lavender makes “errors” in approximately 10% of cases by marking individuals who have merely a loose connection to resistance groups, or no connection at all, human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions. The outputs provided by the machine were treated “as if it were a human decision”, they said, adding it took them about “20 seconds” before authorising a bombing, which is enough to make sure the Lavender-marked target was male.

Moreover, the report revealed that, due to what they called an “intelligence standpoint”, the military preferred to locate the individuals in their private houses, using automated systems such as “Where’s Daddy” to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings in their family residences.

“The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) is bombing them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations”, one of the sources said. Other sources cited in the report also said that in some cases after the Israeli military bombed a family’s private home, it turned out that the intended target of the assassination was not even inside the house, since no further verification was conducted in real-time.

The report also highlighted that the Israeli military used its unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs in contrast to “smart” precision bombs to target junior resistance fighters. These bombs are known to cause more collateral damage than guided bombs. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people; it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage of those bombs”, one of the sources cited in the report stated.

Two of the sources said that for every “suspected” junior Hamas resistance fighter that Lavender marked, the Israeli military permitted the personnel to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians, which the sources claimed was unprecedented in the past. “In the past, the military did not authorise any ‘collateral damage’ during assassinations of low-ranking militants”, they said.

However, in the case of senior Hamas officials, the Israeli military on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians, they added.

Fighting “human animals”, making Gaza a “slaughterhouse”, and “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth,” are among the inflammatory rhetoric and a key component of the language used by Israeli leaders about Palestinians in Gaza since the war began and is proof of Israel’s intent to commit genocide in the Strip.

Is Meta complicit in Israel’s AI-assisted genocide? – Paul Biggar, a New York-based software engineer and blogger, brought into the spotlight a “little-discussed detail” in +972 Magazine and Local Call article about Lavender and how it is killing Palestinians based on the data Meta’s WhatsApp is probably sharing with it. Based on the +972 article, Israel’s AI system’s inputs can include being in a WhatsApp group with a suspected member of Hamas.

“There are many possible scenarios, including employees colluding with Israel, known or unknown security vulnerabilities, and failures of the WhatsApp product to prioritize protecting its users against this in various ways”, Biggar had then informed the media reporters.

Team Maverick.