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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.

By Yuval Abraham, +972 Magazine

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.

soldiers in israeli on a training mission

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.

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Militarism and Foreign Policy