How Israel Use AI Silicon Valley Tools and Amazon Cloud in its War

From Cloud Services to Project Nimbus, Thousand of Servers Work as Back up to Intelligence

There have been various reports and concerns about the flow of technology and information from Silicon Valley to the Israeli army using cloud storage and artificial intelligence services provided by civilian tech giants in its ongoing onslaught on the Gaza Strip.

Several tech companies, both large and small, have established significant business ties with Israeli defense contractors and governmental agencies. These relationships often involve providing advanced technologies such as cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and data analytics, which are used by the Israeli military for various purposes, including intelligence gathering and security operations.

AWS as main partner

One of the prominent ways through which information and technology reach the Israeli army is through partnerships and collaborations between Silicon Valley tech firms and Israeli tech companies. Many Israeli tech companies have deep connections with the Israeli military, as a significant number of their founders and employees are veterans of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and its elite technological units. These companies often act as intermediaries, adapting and integrating Silicon Valley innovations into military applications.

Sources told +972 and Local Call that most of the Israeli army’s intelligence information about Palestinian military operatives is stored on the army’s internal computers rather than the public cloud, which is connected to the internet. However, according to three security sources, one of the data systems used by Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate is stored on Amazon’s public cloud, AWS. The military has been using this system in Gaza for mass surveillance since at least the end of 2022, but it wasn’t considered particularly operational before the current war. Now, according to these sources, the Amazon system contains an “infinite store” of information for the army to use.?

The IDF was flooded with new needed data and Project Nimbus alleviated this dilemma. As part of the tender terms, the two winning companies, Google and Amazon, established data centers in Israel in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Anatoly Kushnir, co-founder of the Israeli tech firm Comm-IT, which has been assisting military units with cloud migration since October, explained to +972 and Local Call that Nimbus “created an infrastructure” of advanced computer centers under Israeli jurisdiction.

This arrangement, he said, made it easier for “security entities, even the more sensitive ones,” to store information in the cloud during the war without fear of overseas courts potentially demanding the information in a lawsuit against Israel. “During the war,” Kushnir continued, “the army developed needs that didn’t exist before, and it was much easier to meet these needs using this infrastructure. It is the infrastructure of a global provider that can offer services from the simplest to the most complex.” These companies, he added, provided the Israeli military with “the most advanced services” available, which were used in the current Gaza war.

This significant change in the army’s procedures has accelerated since the war began. In the past, Kushnir said, the army primarily relied on systems it developed itself, known as “on-prem,” short for “on premises.” This approach meant waiting months, if not years, to build new services. In contrast, the public cloud offers much more accessible AI, storage, and processing capabilities.

The Silicon Valley Connection

Investments by Israeli venture capital funds in Silicon Valley startups sometimes facilitate the transfer of technology. These VCs often have close ties to the Israeli defense sector and seek out technologies that can be utilized by the military.

As recent media investigations have uncovered, Israeli AI targeting systems “Lavender” and “The Gospel” are automating mass slaughter and destruction across the Gaza Strip. This is the apotheosis of many AI rights-abusing trends, such as biometric surveillance systems and predictive policing tools, that we have previously warned against. The AI-enhanced warfare in Gaza demonstrates the urgent need for governments to ban uses of technologies that are incompatible with human rights — in times of peace as well as war.

Death from above: Gaza as an experimental tech laboratory

Israel’s use of AI in warfare is not new. For decades, Israel has used the Gaza Strip as a testing ground for new technologies and weaponry, which it subsequently sells to other states. Its 11-day military bombardment of Gaza in May 2021 was even dubbed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) the “first artificial intelligence war.” In the current assault on Gaza, we’ve seen Israel use three broad categories of AI tools:

1. Lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) and semi-autonomous weapons (semi-LAWS): The Israeli army has pioneered the use of remote-controlled quadcopters equipped with machine guns and missiles to surveil, terrorize, and kill civilians sheltering in tents, schools, hospitals, and residential areas. Residents of Gaza’s Nuseirat Refugee Camp report that some drones broadcast sounds of babies and women crying, in order to lure out and target Palestinians. For years, Israel has deployed “suicide drones,” automated “Robo-Snipers,” and AI-powered turrets to create “automated kill-zones” along the Gaza border, while in 2021, it also deployed a semi-autonomous military robot named “Jaguar,” promoted as “one of the first military robots in the world that can substitute soldiers on the borders.”

1. Facial recognition systems and biometric surveillance: Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza was an opportunity to expand its biometric surveillance of Palestinians, already deployed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The New York Times reported on how the Israeli military is using an expansive facial recognition system in Gaza “to conduct mass surveillance there, collecting and cataloging the faces of Palestinians without their knowledge or consent.” According to the report, this system uses technology from Israeli company Corsight and Google Photos to pick out faces from crowds and even from grainy drone footage.
2. Automated target generation systems: most notably the Gospel, which generates infrastructural targets, Lavender, which generates individual human targets, and Where is Daddy?, a system designed to track and target suspected militants when they are at home with their families.?

LAWS, and to a certain degree semi-LAWS, have been condemned by the UN as “politically unacceptable and morally repugnant,” and there are growing calls for them to be banned. The use of AI target-generation systems in warfare, coupled with biometric mass surveillance, warrants further attention, given how they demonstrate the devastating, even genocidal, wartime impact of technologies that should already be banned in peacetime.

Some specific examples of how technology and information flow from Silicon Valley to the Israeli army:

1. NICE Systems: Originally founded in Israel, NICE Systems specializes in digital recording, data security, and surveillance technologies. The company has provided technology to various intelligence and security agencies, including the Israeli military. Their technologies are used for monitoring communications and data analysis.
2. NSO Group: Known for its Pegasus spyware, NSO Group has been linked to several controversies involving surveillance and espionage. Although not a Silicon Valley company, its connections to various tech entities in the region facilitate the transfer of advanced surveillance technologies.
3. Palantir Technologies: Founded by Peter Thiel, Palantir provides data analysis software used for intelligence and counter-terrorism. Palantir has reportedly worked with Israeli security forces to help manage data and improve intelligence operations.
4. Intel: Intel's largest R&D center outside the U.S. is in Israel, and the company has a significant presence there. Technologies developed in collaboration with Israeli teams often find applications in defense projects, leveraging Israel’s tech expertise for military purposes.
5. Facebook and Google: Both companies have acquired Israeli startups and established R&D centers in Israel. Technologies and innovations from these centers often have dual-use potential, meaning they can be used for both civilian and military applications. For instance, facial recognition and AI developed in these centers can be adapted for security and surveillance.
6. Verint Systems: Verint, with roots in Israeli intelligence, provides communication interception, data mining, and analysis technologies. These systems are widely used by intelligence agencies, including the Israeli military, to monitor and analyze data for security purposes.
7. Elbit Systems: A defense electronics company, Elbit has collaborated with various tech firms from Silicon Valley to integrate cutting-edge technology into their defense systems. This includes drones, advanced optics, and cyber defense tools.

How the IDF is profiting

On July 10, the commander of the Israeli army’s Center of Computing and Information Systems unit — which provides data processing for the whole military — spoke at a conference titled “IT for IDF” in Rishon Lezion, near Tel Aviv.

In her address to an audience of about 100 military and industrial personnel, of which +972 Magazine and Local Call obtained a recording, Col. Racheli Dembinsky confirmed publicly for the first time that the Israeli army is using cloud storage and artificial intelligence services provided by civilian tech giants in its ongoing onslaught on the Gaza Strip. In Dembinsky’s lecture slides, the logos of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure appeared twice.

According to +972 Magazine: "Cloud storage is a means of preserving large amounts of digital data off-site, often on servers that are managed by a third-party provider. Dembinsky initially explained that her army unit, known by its Hebrew acronym Mamram, already used an “operational cloud” hosted on internal military servers, rather than on public clouds run by civilian companies. She described this internal cloud as a “weapons platform,” which includes applications for marking targets for bombings, a portal for viewing live footage from UAVs over Gaza’s skies, as well as fire, command, and control systems".

But with the onset of the Israeli army’s ground invasion of Gaza in late October 2023, she continued, the internal military systems quickly became overloaded due to the enormous number of soldiers and military personnel who were added to the platform as users, causing technical problems that threatened to slow down Israel’s military functions.

Dembinsky explained that the initial attempt to solve the problem involved activating all available spare servers in the army’s warehouses and setting up another data center, but it wasn’t sufficient. Consequently, they decided to turn to the civilian sector. According to her, cloud services offered by major tech firms allowed the army to purchase unlimited storage and processing servers at the click of a button, eliminating the need to physically store the servers in the army’s computer centers.

However, the “most important” advantage provided by the cloud companies, Dembinsky noted, was their advanced capabilities in artificial intelligence. “The extensive range of services, big data, and AI — our systems now truly require it,” she said with a smile. Collaborating with these companies, she added, has given the military “very significant operational effectiveness” in the Gaza Strip.

Dembinsky did not specify which services were purchased from cloud companies, or how they helped the military. In a comment to +972 and Local Call, the Israeli army emphasized that classified information and attack systems stored on the internal cloud were not moved to the public clouds provided by tech firms.?

+972 Investigation

However, a new investigation by +972 and Local Call can reveal that the Israeli army has in fact stored some intelligence information collected via the mass surveillance of Gaza’s population on servers managed by Amazon’s AWS. The investigation can also reveal that certain cloud providers supplied a wealth of AI capabilities and services to Israeli army units since the start of the Gaza war.

Sources in Israel’s Defense Ministry, the Israeli arms industry, the three cloud companies, and seven Israeli intelligence officials who have been involved in the operation since the start of the ground invasion in October, described to +972 and Local Call how the military procures private sector resources to enhance its wartime technological capacities. According to three intelligence sources, the army’s cooperation with AWS is particularly close: the cloud giant provides Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate with a server farm which is used to store masses of intelligence information that assists the army in the war.?

According to multiple sources, the exponential capacity of the AWS public cloud system allows the army to have “endless storage” for holding intelligence on almost “everyone” in Gaza. One source who used the cloud-based system during the current war described making “orders from Amazon” for information while carrying out their operational tasks, and working with two screens — one connected to the army’s private systems, and the other connected to AWS.

Military sources emphasized to +972 and Local Call that the scope of intelligence collected from the surveillance of all Palestinian residents of Gaza is so large that it cannot be stored on military servers alone. In particular, according to intelligence sources, 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.?

The vast amount of information stored in Amazon’s cloud, the military sources testified, even helped on rare occasions to confirm aerial assassination strikes in Gaza — strikes that would have also killed and harmed Palestinian civilians. Taken altogether, our investigation further exposes some of the ways in which major tech corporations are contributing to Israel’s ongoing war — a war that has been flagged by international courts for suspected war crimes and crimes against humanity on illegally occupied territory.

‘You pay a million dollars, you have a thousand more servers’

In 2021, Israel signed a joint contract with Google and Amazon called Project Nimbus. The stated goal of the tender, worth $1.2 billion, was to encourage government ministries to transfer their information systems to the public cloud servers of the winning companies, and to receive advanced services from them.

The deal was highly controversial, with hundreds of workers at both companies signing an open letter within months calling to cut ties with the Israeli military. Protests by Amazon and Google employees have grown since October 7, organized under the banner of No Tech For Apartheid. In April, Google — which was briefly listed as a sponsor of the IT For IDF conference at which Dembinsky spoke, before its logo was removed — fired 50 staff members for participating in a protest at the company’s offices in New York.

Media reports stated that Israel’s military and Defense Ministry would upload only unclassified materials to the public cloud within the framework of Project Nimbus. But investigation reveals that, at least since October 2023, large cloud companies have been providing data storage and AI services to army units that deal with classified information. Multiple security sources told +972 and Local Call that pressure on the Israeli army since October led to a dramatic increase in the purchase of services from Google Cloud, Amazon’s AWS, and Microsoft Azure, with most purchases from the former two companies happening through the Nimbus contract.

Big Tech’s role in atrocity crimes

As discussed above, surveillance infrastructure developed and deployed during peacetime is easily repurposed during war to enable the worst human rights abuses. This brings into question the role of Big Tech companies in supplying civilian technologies that can be used for military ends — most notably the cloud computing and machine learning services that Google and Amazon Web Services provide to Israel through Project Nimbus. Additionally, it has been suggested that metadata from WhatsApp, owned by Meta, is being used to provide data for the Lavender targeting system.

By failing to address their human rights responsibilities, and continuing to provide these services to Israel’s government, companies such as Google, AWS, and Meta risk being complicit in aiding or abetting the Israeli military and intelligence apparatus and its alleged atrocity crimes in Gaza.?