Digital exclusion is economic exclusion, and for Palestinians, it’s by design

By Jalal Abukhater

For many people around the world, the digital economy is not an abstract concept but a lived reality shaping everyday life and work. At the mention of the digital economy, most people would think of entrepreneurship, innovation, and technological advancement. But for Palestinians, the question is not whether the digital economy exists, but whether they are allowed to access it at all and participate in the global economy equitably.

7amleh recently published a new report entitled “Palestinian Accessibility to Digital Economy Platforms: Barriers, Gaps, and Adopted Policies to Overcome Them.” The report documents how Palestinians across historic Palestine face systematic barriers in accessing digital payment systems, e-commerce platforms, and remote work opportunities. The research tested around 30 major digital services by attempting account creation, verification, and use under real conditions, while also relying on semi-structured interviews and user testimonies from Palestinians navigating these systems daily.

A structural exclusion

The report’s findings reveal, once more, that Palestinian exclusion from the digital economy is not accidental or technical, but rather structural. This matters because the digital economy has become one of the few remaining spaces where Palestinians can attempt to overcome restrictions on movement, employment, and access imposed by decades of occupation and apartheid. For many young Palestinians, digital work offered something rare: the possibility of connecting to the outside world without passing through a checkpoint.

But even online, Palestinians encounter walls. The report examines three central pillars of the digital economy: digital payment platforms, e-commerce services, and remote work platforms. Across all three, Palestinians face layered barriers shaped by platform policies, telecommunications restrictions, financial exclusion, and broader political realities that severely restrict their participation in the global economy.

Digital payments are perhaps the clearest example. Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza remain excluded from PayPal, despite years of advocacy and despite the platform operating freely for Israeli citizens, including settlers living illegally in West Bank settlements. This exclusion forces Palestinian freelancers and businesses to rely on costly intermediaries, informal transfer systems, or unstable alternatives that consume significant portions of their income.

For a generation increasingly dependent on online work, being unable to access basic financial tools is devastating. A designer in Gaza may successfully secure freelance contracts through global platforms, but still struggle to receive payment safely or consistently. Access exists in theory, but meaningful participation remains blocked in practice.

Unequal infrastructure

Infrastructure deepens these inequalities. Palestinians do not control their own telecommunications sector and continue to face severe restrictions on spectrum access, network development, and digital infrastructure. While Israelis benefit from advanced 4G and 5G connectivity, Palestinians in the West Bank only gained limited 3G access in recent years, while Gaza has remained restricted largely to outdated 2G infrastructure for years. The consequences are immediate: unstable internet directly undermines remote work and client relationships, while also severely disrupting communication, education, and e-commerce.

In Gaza, these structural restrictions have escalated into outright destruction. A previous 7amleh report, “The Impact of the Gaza Blockade and the Destruction of Telecommunications Infrastructure on the Digital Economy Amidst Genocide,” documented how the deliberate targeting of telecommunications and power infrastructure since October 2023 pushed Gaza’s digital economy toward collapse. 

The most recent Gaza and West Bank Interim Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment, published by the EU and UN in April 2026, found that 81 percent of Gaza’s telecommunications network had been completely destroyed, 12 percent partially damaged, with only 7 percent minimally damaged. Internet traffic in Gaza dropped by more than 80 percent during October 2023 alone and has not recovered since.

A digital lifeline

Yet amid genocide, famine, displacement, and blackouts, Palestinians continued trying to work. The research conducted during the famine period in July 2024, surveying over 180 digital workers in Gaza City and across the Gaza Strip, captured testimonies that remain difficult to forget. People described prioritising access to a laptop, electricity source, or internet signal over almost everything else because digital work represented their final connection to survival, dignity, and hope. 

Freelancers gathered in makeshift solar-powered coworking spaces to charge devices and access weak internet signals for a few hours each day. Others walked long distances searching for connectivity to submit projects or respond to clients before losing signal again.

One thing must be made clear: this resilience should not be romanticized. It reflects the absence of alternatives. Before October 2023, remote work had already become a critical lifeline for Gaza’s economy. Thousands of Palestinians worked through platforms like Upwork and Fiverr in programming, design, translation, and digital marketing. The Palestinian ICT sector employed nearly 9,000 people across around 700 companies and contributed approximately 4 percent of Palestinian GDP. For many young Palestinians facing movement restrictions and unemployment, digital labour became one of the only viable economic pathways available.

But Palestinians are expected to compete in the global digital economy while being denied equal infrastructure, equal payment access, freedom of movement, and even stable electricity.

The price of occupation

The conversation about Palestinian digital rights often focuses on censorship and online speech. Those issues remain essential. But digital rights are also economic rights. They shape who can work, trade, build businesses, receive payments, and sustain livelihoods. As more of the world moves online, exclusion from digital platforms increasingly means exclusion from economic life itself.

Technology companies cannot continue treating Palestinian exclusion as a secondary issue or an unfortunate side effect of “complex realities.” Platform policies are political when they systematically deny access to one population while enabling another living under the same geographic control. Digital infrastructure is political when an occupied population is denied sovereignty over the networks it depends on to survive. For Palestinians, digital access is ultimately about the right to participate in modern economic and public life on equal terms.

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