Amazon Web Services “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,” the report said.

The Israeli army has been using Amazon’s cloud service and artificial intelligence (AI) tools from Microsoft and Google for military purposes amid the increasing amount of data on Palestinians and Gaza, according to reports by +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language news site Local Call cited by the Anadolu news agency.

An audio recording obtained by the news outlets reveals that Col. Racheli Dembinsky, commander of the Israeli army’s Center of Computing and Information Systems Unit, disclosed the use of these technologies during a presentation to around 100 military and industrial personnel on July 10.

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,” the +972 Magazine reported. “In Dembinsky’s lecture slides, the logos of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure appeared twice.”

She said that her army unit, known by its Hebrew acronym Mamram, already used an “operational cloud” hosted on the military’s internal services, but following October 7, it became overloaded due to the high number of users within the military who were added to the platform.

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‘Weapons Platform’

Dembinsky described the internal cloud as a “weapons platform” which the report said, 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.”

“The crazy wealth of services, big data and AI — we’ve already reached a point where our systems really need it,” she reportedly said, adding that the services of these companies have granted the military “very significant operational effectiveness” in Gaza.

While Dembinsky did not specify which services were purchased or how they helped the army, the Israeli army told +972 Magazine and Local Call that classified information and attack systems stored in the internal cloud were not transferred to the public clouds provided by tech firms.

However, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call revealed that the Israeli army “has, in fact, stored some intelligence gathered through mass surveillance of Gaza’s population on servers managed by Amazon’s AWS.”

The probe – which involved sources in the Israeli Military of Defense, the Israeli arms industry, three cloud storage companies, and seven Israeli intelligence officers – also uncovered that certain cloud providers have supplied numerous AI capabilities and services to the Israeli army since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza.

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Citing three intelligence sources, the report said AWS “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.”

AWS’ capacity allows the army to have “endless storage” for holding intelligence on almost “everyone” in Gaza, including “billions of audio files (as opposed to just textual information or metadata).”

The report said the vast amount of information stored in Amazon’s cloud, “even helped on rare occasions to confirm aerial assassination strikes in Gaza — strikes that would have also killed and harmed Palestinian civilians.”

Project Nimbus

In 2021, Google and Amazon signed a $1.2 billion contract called Project Nimbus with the Israeli government to encourage ministries to transfer their information systems to the public cloud servers of the companies and obtain advanced services.

Hundreds of employees at both companies later published an open letter calling for cutting ties with the Israeli army. Google dismissed 50 employees who participated in protests organized as part of these calls after October 7.

Multiple security sources informed +972 Magazine and Local Call that since October, the Israeli army has significantly increased its procurement of services from Google Cloud, Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft Azure, with most purchases from the former two companies happening through the Nimbus contract.

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Sources said the Amazon system contains an “infinite store” of information for the army to use.

‘Benefits’ of AWS

Sources in the army and the weapons industry said that Microsoft Azure was Israel’s main cloud provider, selling services to the Defense Ministry and army units that deal with classified information.

According to one source, Azure was supposed to provide the military with the cloud on which surveillance information would be stored, but Amazon offered a better price.

Sources in the cloud companies said that since Amazon secured the Nimbus tender, it has been aggressively competing with Azure, aiming to become the military’s top service provider.

+972 Magazine said that Google and Microsoft “declined to respond to multiple requests for comment from their offices in Israel and the United States.”

Amazon Web Services said it was “focused on making the benefits of our world-leading cloud technology available to all our customers, wherever they are located.” It said it was “committed” to ensuring its employees were safe, “supporting our colleagues affected by these terrible events, and working with our humanitarian relief partners to help those impacted by the war.”

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health,  39,677 Palestinians have been killed, and 91,645 wounded in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza starting on October 7.

Moreover, at least 11,000 people are unaccounted for, presumed dead under the rubble of their homes throughout the Strip.

(Anadolu, PC)