According to an in-depth expose by +972 Magazine, Israeli Colonel Racheli Dembinsky confirmed last month that they are using the services of these tech giants at the “IT for IDF” conference in Rishon Lezion.
In particular, Amazon Web Services’ public cloud services’ “exponential capacity” gives the military “endless storage” so it can keep intelligence information about nearly everyone in the enclave, according to the publication. This information has helped the IDF conduct air strikes and assassinations in the strip that have killed numerous civilians. Since the fighting broke out in October, Israeli air strikes have murdered tens of thousands of Gazans, most of them women and children.
Intelligence sources told the publication that the military shifted when the war broke out from using its own storage to seeking offerings from Big Tech as “much more extensive storage capabilities and processing power were needed to keep billions of audio files (as opposed to just textual information or metadata), which compelled the army to turn to the cloud services offered by tech companies.”
However, their partnerships with Big Tech date back much further. They marked a major milestone in 2021 when the Jewish state signed a $1.2 billion joint contract with Amazon and Google known as Project Nimbus over the protests of numerous employees who wanted no part in the effort. This saw the two tech giants setting up data centers in Israel in 2022 and 2023 that enabled them to store even the most sensitive intelligence information in the cloud in wartime without having to worry about overseas courts demanding access to the data.
This partnership expanded after the war started, with Microsoft, Amazon and Google all working to provide Israeli army units that use classified information with data storage and AI services. At that time, the internal military systems had become overloaded as a significant number of soldiers and other military personnel were added as users, which considerably slowed their operations.
One intelligence source explained that “the [Amazon] cloud is the endless storage [space]. There are still the regular [army] servers, which are quite large … But during intelligence gathering, sometimes, you find someone who interests you, and say: ‘What a bummer, he’s not included [as a surveillance target], I don’t have the information about him.’ But the cloud gives you information about him because the cloud has [information on] everyone.”
Cloud services are helping military operations become more lethal
However, it is not just the extra storage space that the IDF is benefiting from; some experts have explained how public cloud services could make the military’s operations more deadly.
Colonel Avi Dadon said that these services can help process billions of details about a target quickly and determine where they will be at a specific hour so they can eliminate them.
An investigation by +972 confirmed the army is keeping some of the intelligence information it has collected through its mass surveillance of the Gazan population on servers that are managed by Amazon’s AWS.
These tech corporations are shamelessly supporting Israel in its ongoing genocide, despite the country being flagged for suspected war crimes by international courts.
Al-Shabaka U.S. policy fellow Tariq Kenney-Shawa made it clear that these tech companies have blood on their hands, noting: “It’s more than complicity: it’s direct participation and collaboration with the Israeli military on the tools they’re using to kill Palestinians.”
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