Statement at the 63rd Session of the UN Human Rights Council
Item 7: General debate on the human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories
Delivered by Shahd Ghassan Mahmoud Khader, The Palestinian Working Woman Society for Development-PWWSD
Mr. Vice-President,
CIVICUS and the Palestinian Working Woman Society for Development remain gravely concerned by settlement expansion and shrinking civic space in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
In 2025, OHCHR received submissions on 596 businesses; 215 were assessed, 381 remain under assessment, and 158 met the database criteria. No cloud or AI company is currently listed.
Project Nimbus is Google and Amazon’s cloud contract with Israel. Israeli procurement documents list the Settlement Division — the body responsible for expanding West Bank settlements — among entities required to use Nimbus cloud providers. This relationship must be assessed under paragraph 96.
Amnesty International documented Red Wolf facial recognition at Hebron checkpoints scanning Palestinians and enrolling biometric data without consent. PWWSD documents women in Susiya describing drones outside bedroom windows and cameras directed at beds, and women human-rights defenders facing surveillance, detention and prosecution linked to advocacy.
These systems affect all Palestinians, but their impact is not gender-neutral. For women, surveillance adds another layer of control — reaching into intimate spaces, increasing exposure to harassment, and chilling the work of women human-rights defenders and women-led civil society.
We call on this Council, all member states and OHCHR to ensure completion of the outstanding assessments and examine cloud, AI and surveillance services linked to settlements. Where companies meet the criteria and continue such activities, States should pursue accountability, including lawful targeted sanctions; home States must also hold companies under their jurisdiction accountable.
Accountability mechanisms cannot lag behind technologies that sustain settlement-related control.
Thank you!
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Photo by Mohamed Jamil Latrach on Unsplash
