Facebook administration has banned the page documenting the situation of Palestinians of Syria in Iraq.

The page has garnered thousands of followers among the Palestinian refugee community in and outside of Iraq.

The ban was attributed to a 2018 post commemorating Palestinians killed in anti-occupation uprisings.

In a statement posted on his Facebook page, Palestinian journalist in Baghdad Hasan AlKhaled said the measure is suppressive and represents another sign of Facebook’s pro-Israel bias.

On Friday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report that Facebook has wrongfully removed and suppressed content by Palestinians and their supporters, including about human rights abuses carried out in Israel and Palestine during the May 2021 hostilities.

HRW said that the company’s acknowledgment of errors and attempts to correct some of them are insufficient and do not address the scale and scope of reported content restrictions, or adequately explain why they occurred in the first place.

“Facebook has suppressed content posted by Palestinians and their supporters speaking out about human rights issues in Israel and Palestine,” said Deborah Brown, senior digital rights researcher and advocate at Human Rights Watch. “With the space for such advocacy under threat in many parts of the world, Facebook censorship threatens to restrict a critical platform for learning and engaging on these issues.”

An escalation in violence in parts of Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) during May led people to turn to social media to document, raise awareness, and condemn the latest cycle of human rights abuses. There were efforts to force Palestinians out of their homes, brutal suppression of demonstrators, assaults on places of worship, communal violence, indiscriminate rocket attacks, and airstrikes that killed civilians.