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According to legal documents, a former Meta engineer has claimed he was wrongfully terminated due to his efforts to address content suppression related to Palestinian protests.

On Tuesday, Ferras Hamad, a Palestinian-American engineer who was part of Meta’s machine learning team since 2021, filed a lawsuit against Meta in California state court. He alleged that the company fired him after he attempted to fix bugs that were suppressing Palestinian posts on Instagram, citing discrimination, wrongful termination, and other misconduct.

Hamad’s complaint details an alleged pattern of bias against Palestinians within Meta, including the deletion of internal communications mentioning the deaths of employees’ relatives in Gaza and investigations into the use of the Palestinian flag emoji. According to Hamad, the company did not investigate the use of Israeli or Ukrainian flag emojis in similar contexts.

These claims echo long-standing criticisms from human rights groups about Meta’s content moderation practices related to Israel and Palestine. In 2021, an external investigation commissioned by Meta highlighted these issues. The recent conflict in Gaza, sparked by Hamas’s attack on Israel in October and Israel’s subsequent offensive, has exacerbated concerns about the suppression of pro-Palestinian content on Meta’s platforms.

Hamad’s dismissal appears linked to a December incident involving an emergency procedure, or “site event” (SEV), related to restrictions on Palestinian Instagram posts. He identified procedural irregularities and found that a video by Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza was misclassified as pornographic. Despite receiving conflicting guidance and having previously handled similar SEVs, Hamad was fired after filing an internal discrimination complaint. Meta claimed he violated a policy against working on issues involving personal acquaintances, though Hamad denies any personal connection to Azaiza.

Meta has not yet responded to these allegations.