Yuval Abraham
+972 Magazine / August 4, 2024
The Israeli army is using Amazon’s cloud service to store surveillance information on Gaza’s population, while procuring further AI tools from Google and Microsoft for military purposes, an investigation reveals.
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.
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.
The first attempt to solve the problem, Dembinsky explained, involved activating all the available spare servers in the army’s warehouses and setting up another data center — but it wasn’t enough. They decided they needed to “go outside, to the civilian world.” 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, without the obligation to physically store the servers in the army’s computer centers.
But the “most important” advantage that the cloud companies provided, Dembinsky said, was their advanced capabilities in artificial intelligence. “The crazy wealth of services, big data and AI — we’ve already reached a point where our systems really need it,” she said with a smile. Working with these companies, she added, has granted 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.
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 our 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.
A security source explained that at the beginning of the war, the Israeli army’s systems were so overloaded that they considered transferring an intelligence system, which served as the basis for many attacks in Gaza, to public cloud servers. “There were 30 times more users, so it just crashed,” the source said of the system.
“What happens in the [public] cloud,” the source continued, “is that you press a button, pay another thousand dollars that month, and you have 10 servers. A war started? You pay a million dollars, and you have a thousand more servers. That’s the power of the cloud. And that’s why [during the war] people in the IDF really pushed for working with the cloud. It was a dilemma.”
Project Nimbus alleviated this dilemma. As part of the terms of the tender, 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 helping military units migrate to the cloud 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 from overseas courts — which, presumably, might demand the information in the event of a lawsuit against Israel.
“During the war,” Kushnir continued, “needs were created [in the army] that did not exist [before], and it was much easier to implement them [using] this infrastructure, because it is the infrastructure of a global proprietor that can bring services from the simplest to the most complicated.” These companies, he added, provided the Israeli military with “the most advanced services” available, and which were used in the current Gaza war.
This dramatic change in the army’s procedures has accelerated significantly since the war began. In the past, Kushnir said, the army mainly relied on systems that it had developed itself, known as “on-prem,” short for “on premises.” But this meant it would have to wait for months, if not years, to build new services that it was lacking. In the public cloud, on the other hand, the AI, storage, and processing capabilities are “much more accessible.”
Qualifying his comments, Kushnir explained that “the really sensitive information, the most secret things, are not [on the civilian cloud]. The operational side is definitely not there. But there are intelligence things that are partially kept there.”
Yet even inside the army, some have expressed concerns about the potential for data breaches. “When they started talking to us about the cloud, and we asked if there wasn’t an information security problem with sending our information to a third-party company, we were told that this [risk] is dwarfed by the value of using it,” an intelligence source said.
‘The cloud has information on everyone’
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.
Defense sources affirmed that the intelligence information kept on AWS is still considered “negligible” in terms of its operational use, compared to what is kept on the military’s internal systems. However, three sources who took part in the army’s attacks said that it was used in a number of cases to provide “supplementary information” ahead of airstrikes against suspected military operatives, some of which killed many civilians.
As +972 and Local Call revealed in a previous investigation, the Israeli army authorized the killing of “hundreds of civilians” in attacks against senior Hamas commanders at the level of brigade commander and sometimes even battalion commander. In some of these cases, security sources explained, Amazon’s cloud was operationalized.
Sources said that the AWS-based system is particularly useful for Israeli intelligence because it can hold information “on everyone,” with no storage limitations. This sometimes had operational advantages: one intelligence source described a “really fateful” moment in the war, when the army located a senior member of Hamas’ military wing inside a large, multi-story building filled with hundreds of refugees and sick people. The source described using AWS to gather information on who was in the building. The attack, he said, was ultimately aborted because it was unclear exactly where the senior operative was hiding, and the army feared that going ahead with it would further harm Israel’s image.
“The [Amazon] cloud is the endless storage [space],” another Israeli intelligence source said. “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.”
Previously, the army would customarily delete the useless information accumulated in its databases in order to make room for new information. But in her lecture on July 10, Dembinsky noted that the army has been working since October to “safeguard, save, and store all the combat materials.” A security source confirmed that this is indeed the case, attributing the increase in storage space to the public cloud companies.
Another major incentive for working with the cloud giants is their artificial intelligence capabilities and the graphics processing unit (GPU) server farms that support them. One intelligence source, who participated in discussions about shifting military intelligence to the public cloud, said that their superiors “talked about how if they migrate to the cloud, then [the cloud companies] also have their own STT [speech-to-text capabilities]. These are good; they have many capabilities. Why develop everything in the army unit if the capabilities already exist?”
The workflow described to +972 and Local Call by intelligence officers — “ordering” data from the public AWS cloud then sending it to a closed military network — matches details in a book authored in 2021 by the current commander of Unit 8200, an elite unit within Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate, who was recently revealed by The Guardian to be Yossi Sariel.
“How can the security establishments use the ‘Amazon cloud’ and feel secure?” Sariel wrote, advocating as a solution for a special network in which the military’s internal system and the public cloud could securely “communicate with each other all the time.” The scope of secret information collected by Israeli intelligence is so big, he added, that it can be stored “only in companies such as Amazon, Google, or Microsoft.”
In the same year, writing in an Israeli intelligence journal, the deputy commander of Unit 8200 called for “new partnerships” with the public cloud providers, since their AI capabilities are “irreplaceable” and superior to the army’s. He hinted that the cloud companies will also gain from partnering with the military: “Aman [Military Intelligence] holds most of the data in the IDF, including data about the enemies, from a wide variety of sensors — data that civilian companies would pay a fortune to get access to.”
‘What the IDF uses will be one of the best-selling points’
For years, according to sources in the military and the weapons industry, Microsoft Azure was considered Israel’s main cloud provider, selling its services to the Defense Ministry and army units that deal with classified information. According to one source, Azure was supposed to provide the Israeli military with the cloud on which surveillance information would be stored — but Amazon offered a better price. Sources in the cloud companies, who were privy to the ties with Israel’s Defense Ministry, said that since Amazon won the Nimbus tender, it has been aggressively competing with Azure, hoping to replace it as the army’s top service provider.
Kushnir, of Comm-IT, explained that in the past, “most government and military agencies invested a lot in development and creating systems based on Azure.” But since Azure didn’t win the Nimbus tender, he continued, there has been a “certain migration process” at the Defense Ministry to Google’s and Amazon’s servers, which accelerated during the current war.
Sources in the high-tech industry said that the Israeli Defense Ministry is considered an important and “strategic” customer for the three cloud companies. This is not only because of the large financial scope of the transactions, but because Israel is perceived as influential in shaping opinion among security agencies worldwide and in leading “trends” that other agencies adopt.
One of the people who for years directed the Defense Ministry’s procurement policy, and maintained contact with the cloud giants, is Col. Avi Dadon, who spoke to +972 and Local Call for this investigation. Until 2023, he headed the Defense Ministry’s purchasing administration and was responsible for military procurements amounting to more than NIS 10 billion (around $2.7 billion) a year.
“For [the cloud companies], it’s the strongest marketing,” Dadon said. “What the IDF uses was and will be one of the best-selling points of products and services in the world. For them, it’s a laboratory. Of course they want to [work with us].”
Dadon said that he held many meetings with representatives of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud in Israel as well as on trips to the United States. He was also in contact with the cloud giants about a classified tender called Project Sirius.
First reported in the Israeli financial newspaper Globes in 2021, Sirius is considered much more sensitive than Nimbus, and has yet to be signed with any of the tech companies. In May, the military announced on its website it is seeking to hire an expert who will “work with the big cloud providers” to “transfer [military] systems into the public cloud (Nimbus)”, and to “prepare the upload of core, operational systems, into the security cloud” under the framework of the Sirius tender.
“Sirius is a private and air-gapped security cloud [isolated from public and other networks], and it is intended only for the IDF and the Defense Ministry,” Dadon explained. “There have been discussions for more than a decade about what this will look like.” This new cloud, according to three security sources, is supposed to be disconnected from the internet and built on the infrastructure of the large cloud providers, allowing all Israeli security agencies to use it for classified systems.
The public cloud services, according to Dadon, have the potential to enhance the military’s lethality. When searching for a person to “eliminate,” he explained “you collect billions of details that are seemingly uninteresting. But you have to store them. Once you want to process [and] fuse everything into a product that tells you [the target] is here at this hour, you have five minutes, you don’t have all day and night. So obviously you need the information.
“You can’t [do it] on your servers, because you have to constantly delete what you think is unnecessary,” Dadon continued. “There is a very critical trade-off here. Once you’ve uploaded to the cloud, the way back to ‘on-prem’ is almost impossible. You get to know a new world. You’ve already uploaded information several orders of magnitude larger, and what will you do now? Start deleting it?”
As +972 and Local Call revealed in a previous investigation, many of Israel’s attacks in Gaza at the beginning of the war were based on the recommendations of a program called “Lavender.” With the help of AI, this system processed information on most Gaza residents and compiled a list of suspected military operatives, including junior ones, for assassination. Israel systematically attacked these operatives in their private homes, killing entire families. Over time, the military realized that Lavender was not “reliable” enough, and its use decreased in favor of other software. +972 and Local Call could not confirm whether Lavender was developed with the help of civilian firms, including public cloud companies.
‘You’re fighting from inside your laptop’
In her lecture last month, Dembinsky called the current military operation in Gaza “the first digital war.” While this seems like an exaggeration, given that the 2021 offensive on the Strip also used digital capabilities, Israeli defense sources said that the army’s digitization processes have significantly accelerated during the current war. According to them, commanders in the field walk around with encrypted smartphones, message in an operational chat similar to WhatsApp (yet unrelated to the company), upload files to a shared drive, and use countless new applications.
“You’re fighting from inside your laptop,” said an officer who served in a combat operations room in Gaza. In the past, “you would see the whites of your enemy’s eyes, look through binoculars and see him explode.” Today, however, when a target appears, “you tell [soldiers] through the laptop, ‘Shoot with the tank.’”
One of the apps on the military’s internal cloud is called Z-Tube (Z being short for Zahal, the acronym for the IDF); it is a website, which looks much like Youtube, that allows soldiers to access live footage of all the military’s filming devices in Gaza, including UAVs. Another app, called “MapIt,” allows soldiers to mark targets in real time on a collaborative, interactive map. “Targets are the heaviest layer on the map,” a security source told +972 and Local Call. “It looks like every house has a target.”
A related app called “Hunter” is used for signaling targets in Gaza and detecting patterns of behavior using AI. It was presented in the IT for IDF conference by Col. Eli Birenbaum, commander of a unit known by the Hebrew acronym Matzpen, which is responsible for developing systems for operational uses.
The internal cloud is supposed to be managed on military servers and not connected to the private companies’ clouds, but multiple sources said that there are “safe” ways the civilian cloud companies can provide services to operational systems as well.
“The IDF doesn’t take very sensitive, classified things out — these things stay inside [the air-gapped military networks],” Col. Assaf Navot, a former senior army ICT official and now head of Comm-IT’s defense division, told +972 and Local Call. According to him, the challenge is to bring the “brain” of civilian cloud companies, such as AI services, into the army’s internal systems, “without it living outside. It lives right in. So you can’t do everything in a way that is one-to-one [equal to] what happens outside, but you manage to make crazy progress.”
In 2022, Itai Binyamin, an AI expert who at the time worked with Microsoft Azure and is now with AWS, described to a group of graduates of Dembinsky’s Mamram unit that this system makes it possible to “deploy [Microsoft’s] AI capabilities even on-prem, on your servers, in an environment that is disconnected [from the internet].” In his explanation in the video, Binyamin showed the graduates how Microsoft’s facial recognition tool could analyze a news video and identify that Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh appeared in it.
Microsoft Azure’s website refers to tools called “disconnected containers,” designed for “strategic partners” who need to keep their information secure. The tools, according to the website, include capabilities for transcription, translation, sentiment recognition, language, summary, document and image analysis, and more.
Navot explained that the pace of development of digital technology is so fast that the only way for the army to “catch up” is to purchase services from the civilian market and cloud companies. “Look at the M16 [assault rifle]. The last time they made an M16 was in [the] Vietnam [War]. Not much has changed.” But as for digital software, he says, things change “in months, not years.”
The very fact that intelligence material, even if it is not directly operational, is uploaded to a civilian cloud has raised concerns among some in the Israeli military. “There’s something scary about it,” an army source said. “The information that the army has today is intimate information about a lot of people in [the occupied territories]. So to surrender it to giant, private and commercial companies that have the goal of making money?”
Other security sources, on the other hand, said that raw intelligence that is collected broadly rather than on specific targets is not particularly sensitive, since it only becomes sensitive when translated into targets for attack. “It’s not that it’s really scary if the Iranians were to have [access to] this information,” one of the sources stated.
Brig. Gen. Yael Grossman, commander of the army’s Division for the Strengthening of Operational Technology — known by the Hebrew acronym Lotem — which is in charge of Mamram, said in a podcast in May that the reliance on civilian technologies in the current war enabled a “crazy leap in a short period of time.” But Dadon likens uploading materials to the cloud to “handing over the keys of a Mercedes to someone else. Should we not use the Mercedes? We need to. So how? I don’t know.”
‘It’s direct participation on the tools used to kill Palestinians’
In recent years, Amazon has become not only a partner of the Israeli army, but also a provider of cloud services for several Western intelligence agencies. In 2021, AWS signed an agreement with U.K. intelligence agencies GCHQ, MI5, and MI6 to store “classified” information and speed up the use of AI tools. The Australian government similarly announced this month that it would invest U.S. $1.3 billion to build a cloud for “top secret” intelligence material on Amazon’s servers. The tech giant also signed an agreement with the Pentagon, along with three other large companies, to build a giant cloud that would serve the U.S. Department of Defense for “all levels of classification.”
Amazon publishes vague rules for “Building AI Responsibly,” which refer only to “appropriately obtaining, using, and protecting data,” and “preventing harmful system output and misuse.” Microsoft’s Responsible AI Principles and Approach state: “We’re committed to making sure AI systems are developed responsibly and in ways that warrant people’s trust.”
Google also publishes a list of its AI Principles which state more clearly that Google “will not design or deploy AI in … technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm; … weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people … technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms … [or] technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”
However, Gabriel Schubiner, an activist and organizer with No Tech For Apartheid, says these principles have “no real effect” because cloud companies “use them as PR to show how responsible they are.” According to him, the companies have no way of knowing in real time how their customers are using their services.
Schubiner — who previously worked at Google, and took part in a protest by Google employees against the supply of technology they claim is being used by the Israeli military in the Gaza war — says Google has always used “vague language” when stating its ethical principles. Moreover, he says, the company continues to claim that its contracts with Israel are “first and foremost for civilian use, even though it is clear that many of the actions at Nimbus are aimed at military use.”
A defense source told +972 and Local Call that most of the new contracts between the military and cloud companies since the war began have been realized through the Nimbus tender. However, the military can also forge and deepen ties with cloud companies through Defense Ministry tenders or through contracts that predate Project Nimbus. +972 and Local Call could not confirm whether the AWS cloud, used for storing intelligence information, was purchased as part of Project Nimbus.
“Neither company has publicly disclosed what, if any, human rights due diligence they carried out before participating in Project Nimbus,” Zach Campbell, a digital rights expert at Human Rights Watch, explained. “They haven’t mentioned which, if any, red lines there are in terms of what would be permissible use of their technology.”
Kushnir, who has been helping Israeli military units migrate to the cloud, is not afraid of the protests against the cloud companies’ partnerships with Israel succeeding. “You have to remember that the same companies run similar government and military clouds in the United States, the U.K., and NATO,” he said. “These are not start-up companies, they are global ICT powerhouses.”
Nadim Nashif, the executive director of 7amleh – The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, which focuses on Palestinian digital rights, said that his basic demand from the cloud companies is that they “make sure that their products are not used to harm people,” which is not currently the case in practice. According to him, despite rhetoric about concern for human rights, the cloud giants’ products are sold “to governments and regimes that oppress people” — including the Israeli army.
Regarding the lack of oversight of the cloud companies’ projects and partnership, Nashif added: “In the local context, in the case of an occupation, the question of whether [these services] are sold for military use, to the occupation army, or whether it is sold for civilian use, becomes much more important.” According to him, the closeness that exists in Israel between the private sector and the military facilitates cooperation without red lines, which leads to “more control over [Palestinians] — even more so amid the war.”
“There’s always a lot of focus on the direct military assistance the United States provides to Israel — the munitions, fighter jets, and bombs — but a lot less attention has been paid to these partnerships that span both civilian and military environments,” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, U.S. policy fellow at the Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka. “It’s more than complicity: it’s direct participation and collaboration with the Israeli military on the tools they’re using to kill Palestinians.”
Google and Microsoft declined to respond to multiple requests for comment from their offices in Israel and the United States. Amazon Web Services stated: “AWS is focused on making the benefits of our world-leading cloud technology available to all our customers, wherever they are located. We are committed to ensuring our employees are safe, supporting our colleagues affected by these terrible events, and working with our humanitarian relief partners to help those impacted by the war.”
Yuval Abraham is a journalist and filmmaker based in Jerusalem
