State of Palestine

The Palestinian Authority has no comprehensive personal-data-protection law. This is confirmed both in the Authority's own Cybercrime Law (Law by Decree No. 16 of 2017, as amended), a 246,655-character text searched in full for "personal data," "privacy," and "private life," which returned exactly one hit, an evidence-seizure integrity provision, not a processing regime, and by independent secondary reporting stating plainly that a comprehensive law "is yet to be issued."

Two Amended Basic Law (2003) provisions supply general privacy rights, confirmed at primary source: Article 17 (home inviolability, with a guaranteed remedy) and Article 32 (sanctity of private life, criminalized violation, guaranteed criminal and civil remedy with no statute of limitations). Article 27, sometimes cited for Palestinian privacy rights, is a press and media freedom provision unrelated to privacy.

Article 32's remedy language is unusually strong relative to the rest of this batch: it declares any violation of "personal freedom" or "the sanctity of the private life of human beings" a crime, and guarantees both criminal and civil cases with no statute of limitations, which reads as arming a private plaintiff for a privacy violation as a constitutional matter, even though no statutory personal-data regime exists for that remedy to operate within.

Whether the West Bank and Gaza have distinct legislative histories on this point is not resolved here: the secondary reporting treats the absence of a comprehensive law as common to both territories rather than describing two distinct legislative tracks, and that is what is recorded here rather than a flattened or invented distinction.

Palestine has no scraping-specific statute.

Law by Decree No. 10 of 2018 on Cybercrime, articles 4 through 9, criminalises unauthorised access to a computer system, network, or means of information technology, exceeding authorised access, obstructing or disrupting access to a service or to devices or data sources, introducing anything that suspends, disrupts, or damages a program, and intercepting or wiretapping data sent over the network, each carrying a heavier penalty where the target is government data or where the act results in cancelling, deleting, altering, publishing, or republishing electronic data or in impersonating a website's owner or manager.

Article 4(1) reaches a person who 'exceeds the authorised access' without requiring that a technical security measure be defeated, so its reach to a scraper reading a public, unauthenticated page beyond what a site's own terms permit is broader on its face than a statute keyed to defeating an access control, and no Palestinian court decision construing this language for a public page was found.

The 2018 decree repealed an earlier, more severe Law by Decree No. 16 of 2017 on Cybercrime (article 55(1)), which criminalised the same core conduct in materially identical terms and additionally permitted a sentence of hard labour for life where a cybercrime was committed with intent to undermine national unity or public order or to show contempt for religion; that earlier decree no longer binds.

Neither decree addresses terms-of-service enforceability, a text-and-data-mining exception, a sui generis database right, an unfair-competition or misappropriation doctrine, or the legal weight of a robots.txt directive; Palestine's copyright statute is not described here.

Palestine has no comprehensive personal-data-protection statute (see the privacy topic's finding for this jurisdiction), so personal data scraped from a Palestinian source is not subject to a processing-specific regime beyond the general constitutional remedies of the Amended Basic Law (2003), articles 17 and 32.

Palestine's clearest private-sector security duty sits inside Law by Decree No. 41 of 2022 concerning National Payments, which conditions a Palestine Monetary Authority (PMA) license for a payment-service or financial-technology company on the security and protection systems and procedures PMA prescribes by instruction, alongside the licensed activities and application systems those same instructions also govern.

Law by Decree No. 10 of 2018 on Cybercrime, researched under this jurisdiction's scraping topic, criminalizes unauthorized access, service disruption, and unauthorized interception committed by an intruder against a system; it imposes no security-posture duty on an operator or a manufacturer and is not restated here.

Palestine has no comprehensive personal-data-protection statute, recorded in this jurisdiction's privacy-topic finding, and no general reasonable-security or information-security-programme statute reaching a business regardless of sector was found either. Law by Decree No. 37 of 2021 on Telecommunications and Information Technology (Official Gazette issue 186) repeals, in Article 77, everything that conflicts with it.

Its preamble lists Law No. 3 of 1996 on Wired and Wireless Communications among the laws it was issued after. Article 54 of that decree-law treats all information and data about a subscriber as confidential and bars a licensee from disclosing or publishing them without the subscriber's written and express consent. The decree-law sets no network-security or incident-reporting regime for licensees.

Law by Decree No. 17 of 2024 on Electronic Transactions and Trust Services (Official Gazette issue 220) requires a trust service provider, in Article 38(7), to take every measure needed to manage the risks it faces so as to secure its trust services and prevent security incidents and breaches or reduce their effect.

Article 38(8) of the same decree-law requires the provider to notify the supervisory authority, the competent bodies and the subscriber of any violation or compromise of data security as soon as it learns of it.

Palestine has no comprehensive news-aggregation regime distinct from ordinary copyright law: no press-publisher neighbouring right, no mandatory platform-to-publisher bargaining code, no hot-news or misappropriation doctrine separate from copyright, no located statute or case law on hyperlink or framing liability, and no machine-readable text-and-data-mining opt-out mechanism, since the operative instrument predates the concept entirely.

That instrument is the Copyright Act, 1911 (Extension to Palestine) Order, 1924, which extended the Imperial Copyright Act, 1911 to Palestine as its law of copyright; Section 2(1)(i) of the extended Act excepts from infringement any fair dealing with a work for the purposes of private study, research, criticism, review, or newspaper summary, a general exception that reaches summarising and reporting on another's work without a headline-length or short-extract cap of its own.

Whether this exception, or the Act's copyright protection more broadly, reaches a systematic news aggregator's reproduction of headlines and snippets, as distinct from an individual reporter's newspaper summary, was tested in one of the Mandate's earliest copyright disputes: the Palestine Telegraphic Agency and the Palestine Bulletin sued Jaber, editor of the newspaper Al-Hayat, for unauthorised copying of news wire reports (Palestine Telegraphic Agency v. Jaber).

The defendant argued the Act had never been validly promulgated in Palestine and so was not part of Palestine law; the Magistrate's Court and District Court rejected that argument, and it was not renewed on the further appeal reported at CA 66/32, Palestine Telegraphic Agency v. Jaber, [1933] 1 PLR 780. The courts' ultimate finding on the underlying copying claim is not confirmed in the sources located here.

The Press and Publications Law No. 9 of 1995, sometimes cited for Palestinian media regulation, is a licensing and content-restriction statute for the print press: it defines a covered publication as one recorded by letters, images, drawings, printing or engraving, requires periodical publishers to hold a Ministry of Information licence and to publish ownership and editorial particulars, and restricts import and sale of publications, but it creates no republication, reproduction, or platform-payment duty and its own definitions do not reach an online outlet, so it does not answer this topic's questions.