‘Data is Power, Control’ – Reports Reveal Ties Between Tech Companies, Israeli Army 

December 31, 2025 News

A series of investigations over the past year has revealed “a symbiotic relationship” between major tech companies and the Israeli military. (Design: Palestine Chronicle)

By Palestine Chronicle Staff  

“These American cloud providers allow the Israeli military to store a lot of data and to sift through it very effectively. That has direct consequences for people on the ground.”

A series of investigations over the past year has revealed “a symbiotic relationship” between major tech companies and the Israeli military, the Guardian has reported.

Citing its work in partnership with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 magazine and the Hebrew outlet Local Call, the Guardian said that one investigation showed that an Israeli mass surveillance system collected nearly all Palestinian phone calls and stored them on Microsoft’s cloud services. The report led to an internal inquiry that resulted in Microsoft cutting off Israel’s access to certain technologies.

Another investigation found that the Israeli military “created a ChatGPT-like tool to analyze data collected through the surveillance of Palestinians.” While another revealed that Google and Amazon “had agreed to extraordinary terms to clinch a lucrative contract with Israel.”

October 7 Changed Scope

Journalist Yuval Abraham, involved in the investigations, told the Guardian that the Israeli military “had been fetishizing artificial intelligence and big data for many years…because the occupation generates a lot of data.”

Abraham said that after the events of October 7, 2023, the scope changed.

“The military was looking to bomb hundreds of targets every day in Gaza. Tens of thousands of people were recruited into reserve duty. That meant a huge spike in usage of technological systems. That’s where the big tech companies stepped in,” he explained.

There was “a huge surge in demand” not only for the storage capabilities of tech companies “but also for the products that they offer to analyze the information used to prosecute a war,” Harry Davies, the other journalist involved in the investigations, said.

Referring to the revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden, Abraham said much of that information was linked to metadata, which does not weigh much.

However, the Israeli military also wanted to store huge amounts of data, such as mass audio files, images or videos.

This was where the assistance of companies such as Microsoft was sought, Abraham said.

“In the West Bank, sources have told us this information has been used to find dirt on people to blackmail them. In the Gaza Strip, we know that this massive trove of intercepted phone calls was also used in airstrikes that killed civilians,” he stated.

“So data is power and data is control,” Abraham continued. “And these American cloud providers allow the Israeli military to store a lot of data and to sift through it very effectively. That has direct consequences for people on the ground.”

Israel’s Elite Unit 8200

Davies pointed to Yossi Sariel, the former head of Israel’s elite Unit 8200, who published a book under a pseudonym revealed to have been him.

Two years before October 7, Sariel said that “militaries and governments needed to forge relationships” with companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft, “that are similar to the relationships they have with companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin,” Davies said.

Their reporting revealed how aspects of his vision have been realized and put into effect, “both before October 7 and afterwards, in both the West Bank and Gaza.”

Abraham said artificial intelligence allowed Israel “to achieve the effective results of carpet bombing without losing the legitimacy of a data-driven assault with targets and objectives.”

Score Assigned to Individuals in Gaza

In Gaza, AI systems were used to assign a score to nearly every individual with a phone number, determining the likelihood of that person being a member of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, Abraham said.

“This score was based on a machine-learning algorithm [developed by Israel] called Lavender,” and was trained on alleged Hamas members, enabling the military to generate tens of thousands of targets at a scale that would otherwise have been “humanly” impossible.

Citing sources, Abraham said most of the targets “were not Hamas members,” adding that  “Israel for the most part bombed these people not while they were engaged in military activity, but when they stepped inside their families’ homes.”

He explained that these AI systems had “an error rate” that the Israeli army knew about.

“But to me, the key thing about AI is not the mistakes that it makes. It’s the scale of destruction that it allows militaries to unleash, and it’s a discourse of legitimacy that it enables – a discourse of targets and collateral damage,” Abraham emphasized.

Microsoft’s Policies Changed

On the question of Microsoft having changed its policies as a result of the series of investigations by the journalists, Davies said there is the question of legal ramifications for these companies.

“If the ICJ (International Court of Justice) ends up ruling that Israel has committed a genocide, then a follow-up question will be: who contributed to that genocide? Which companies helped maintain it and sustain it? For some people in these companies who are thinking ahead, that could also be a cause for concern,” Abraham noted.

Israel heavily relies on companies involved in the Nimbus project, a major cloud contract with Google and Amazon signed in 2021, to move large volumes of government data, including “troves of information” from the Defense Ministry, onto US-based servers.

“These are US companies,” Abraham said, adding, “They’re taking a certain gamble here that the US will stay loyal to Israel and won’t block, limit or sanction them.”

He said Microsoft’s decision “made many people in the Israeli system nervous.”

“It was the first time we know of that a big tech company withdrew services from the Israeli military. It made some people ask whether Israel is making a mistake by giving these foreign companies so much leverage,” he added.

‘Tip of the Iceberg’

While Abraham said the reporting had only uncovered “the tip of the iceberg,” Davies noted that their investigations revealed a partial glimpse into a much larger system.

“We’re continuing to build a fuller picture of how this technology was and continues to be used in Gaza and in the West Bank as well,” he stated.

Davies pointed out that militaries “pay attention to what other militaries are doing.”

“We don’t know for sure, but the Pentagon and the US military have very big contracts with all of these companies to provide cloud services. Post-Gaza, we have to look at these relationships and ask: what is the involvement of these companies and their technology in military decisions, in military operations and in warfare more broadly?” he stated.

Israel’s genocidal military assault on Gaza, launched in October 2023, has resulted in the deaths of more than 71,000, with over 171,000 others wounded.

(PC, Al Mayadeen)