The war in Gaza is one of the deadliest and most destructive wars in recent history — creating a “hell on Earth.” In just over a year, more women and children have been killed by the Israeli military than in any other conflict over the past two decades. On average, 10 children a day lose one or both legs. More than 902 entire families have been obliterated; at least 17,000 children have been orphaned; and 90 percent of the population has been displaced, some as many as 10 times. With 80 percent of its buildings destroyed, there are no safe places left to go inside Gaza, and no escape possible beyond its borders. In January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) determined that Palestinians in Gaza have plausible rights to be protected from genocide — and concluded that those rights are at real and imminent risk of irreparable damage.
Technology is playing a central role in enabling the relentless mass slaughter and destruction unleashed in Gaza. From supplying the dystopian AI systems used to automate the killing and bombing, to facilitating the spread of state-sponsored disinformation and online incitement to violence and war crimes, Big Tech is deeply embroiled in this brutal war. However, the impunity with which Israeli authorities have been allowed to wage this war has also served to shield technology companies from scrutiny. Not only have companies failed to uphold their human rights commitments in times of war, they have also dismissed, ignored, and even punished dissenting voices among their own ranks, civil society, and the public flagging their possible complicity in what the UN’s top independent expert on Palestine describes as an unfolding genocide.
This post interrogates how technology companies can be potentially facilitating or contributing to an endless list of egregious violations of international law, including the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, currently under investigation by the ICJ and the International Criminal Court (ICC). We also provide companies with recommendations to avoid potential complicity in such violations.
Who may be profiteering from war crimes, collective punishment, and indiscriminate violence?
Below, we highlight technology companies that have provided the Israeli army with services and tools, such as cloud computing services and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, which may have been used in atrocity crimes in Gaza. This includes companies that have failed to take sufficient action to prevent the proliferation of incitement to violence and genocidal rhetoric on their platforms — linked to offline violence — or that have censored marginalized voices protesting the war. While we focus on Alphabet’s Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Meta, the list is not exhaustive; other major tech-sector actors are potentially contributing to serious international crimes in Gaza, and they should also be taking urgent action to meet their human rights obligations.
Meta
Meta’s failure to overhaul its discriminatory content moderation system means that it continues to censor Palestine-related content across its platforms. The company — alongside other social media platforms, including X, YouTube, and Telegram — has failed to tackle illegal and harmful content, including hate speech, incitement to commit genocide, and state-sponsored disinformation. For example, the social media accounts of Israeli officials, media, politicians, and the military remain active, even though they feature content that allegedly incites genocide against the Palestinian people, especially in the Hebrew language.
Meta has also been implicated in the Israeli military’s use of the Lavender AI targeting system, which reportedly uses WhatsApp metadata, such as information on WhatsApp group members, to identify Hamas militants.
Meta’s latest update on its actions relating to the Gaza war came two months after October 7. Since then, it has publicly communicated no further on any actions taken or plans to protect people’s safety or defend their right to freedom of expression. Despite multiple engagements with civil society, the company has failed to show that it has conducted any heightened human rights due diligence to assess, mitigate, and remedy any negative human rights impacts of its operations, even as the war continues.
Responding to allegations that WhatsApp data is used for the Lavender system, Meta publicly denied handing over people’s data to the Israeli government. While that may be true, there is no evidence to show that it has taken any concrete action to protect people’s privacy or to ensure that its metadata is not exploited to train and run dystopian AI systems.
In 2021, Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS) signed a USD $1.2 billion contract to provide the Israeli government, including its military, with cloud computing services, AI, and machine learning capabilities. The following year, Google established a cloud center in Israel. Under Project Nimbus, Google provides Israel with advanced AI capabilities including facial detection, automated image categorization, object tracking, and sentiment analysis to assess the emotional content of pictures, speech, and text.
Google gives the Israeli Ministry of Defense a special “landing zone” into its cloud computing infrastructure so it can securely store and process data, and use Google’s AI services. Despite disturbing revelations of Israel’s use of AI warfare in Gaza, the company signed a new contract with the defense ministry in March 2024, allowing “multiple units” access Googleʼs automation technologies.
While Google claims that its contract with the Israeli government is “not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services,” an investigation by +972 Magazine reported that the Israeli army has used Google services during the current war to process the large troves of data collected on Palestinians through mass surveillance.
Israel has a long history of using biometric surveillance, including facial recognition technologies, to entrench its apartheid regime and control Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The Israeli army expanded its use of facial recognition technology surveillance to Gaza, following last year’s ground invasion. A New York Times article revealed that Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers use Google Photos to power the biometric surveillance of Palestinians in Gaza. By uploading a database of known persons to Google Photos, Israeli officers could use the service’s photo search function to identify specific people. According to one Israeli officer, the army uses Google’s services because of its superior ability to match faces and identify people even when only a small portion of their face is visible.
On November 19, 2023, while fleeing North Gaza with his family, Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha was falsely identified and arbitrarily detained at an Israeli military checkpoint, after this system, partially powered by Google, was reportedly used. According to his testimony, he was blindfolded and taken to an Israeli detention center where he was interrogated and beaten, before being returned to Gaza and released without explanation.
Shortly after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, Politico reported on how Israel’s Foreign Affairs Ministry had published more than 75 ads on YouTube in order to shape public opinion about the war among audiences in Western countries including the U.S., the UK, France, and Germany.
The Israeli government also ran a number of ads on Google’s search engine and YouTube specifically to spread disinformation about the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), featuring false allegations that “UNRWA is inseparable from Hamas” and that it “keeps employing terrorists.”
Google has publicly committed to respecting human rights and upholding its responsibilities as established in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (“UN Guiding Principles”). These include conducting human rights due diligence in conflict zones or when expanding their cloud regions. Furthermore, Google’s self-proclaimed AI Principles maintain that they will not design or deploy AI technologies that may cause overall harm, violate international law, or be weaponized to injure people or for mass surveillance.
Despite these commitments, Google has so far deflected public demands for transparency and accountability. It has ignored requests from civil society, including a letter that Access Now sent in May 2024, requesting information about the extent to which its services are used by the Israeli military and what steps it has taken to identify and mitigate human rights risks.
To date, Google has failed to live up to its commitment to the UN Guiding Principles. Quite the opposite: the company brushes off the use of its technologies to facilitate gross human rights abuses, even going so far as to fire 50 of its own employees who protested the company’s cloud-computing contract with the Israeli government.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
As part of Project Nimbus, Amazon subsidiary AWS launched a cloud region in Israel in August 2023, allowing the government to “migrate substantial governmental workloads to the cloud.” Among this cloud’s featured clients is Bank Leumi, one of Israel’s largest banks, which has been denounced for bankrolling war crimes and financing illegal settlements and land grabs. AWS also partners with Palantir to provide services that help customers such as the Israeli military to “win in the warfighting context.”
A +972 Magazine investigation revealed that the Israeli army is using Amazon’s cloud service to store surveillance information on people in Gaza, while procuring AI tools from Google and Microsoft to be used in its military operations. More specifically, AWS provides Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate with a server farm that allows for “endless storage” of the mass surveillance data Israel has gathered “on almost ‘everyone’ in Gaza,” the investigation says. Israeli military sources told the magazine that on some occasions, AWS services helped the army confirm airstrike targets.
Parent company Amazon takes pride in its “long-standing dedication and commitment to human rights.” The company’s Global Human Rights Principles include embedding human rights safeguards across its operations and conducting human rights due diligence to identify and mitigate harm. Furthermore, AWS specifically claims to be building “responsible AI,” including “appropriately obtaining, using, and protecting data,” and “preventing harmful system output and misuse.”
Despite these public commitments, Amazon has failed to demonstrate how it is mitigating the gross human rights abuses and possible war crimes facilitated by the Israeli military using its services. For example, the company’s 2023 sustainability report makes no mention of any efforts to conduct heightened human-rights due diligence in the context of the war on Gaza.
Microsoft
Microsoft has maintained close business ties with Israel’s military and security establishment for decades; so much so that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called their partnership “a marriage made in heaven but recognized here on Earth.” Microsoft Azure, the company’s flagship cloud computing platform, was long considered Israel’s main cloud provider, and was used by its military. In November 2023, shortly after the war began, Microsoft launched a new cloud region in Israel and it has reportedly provided AI and cloud services for military purposes.
In addition, Microsoft also provides Israel’s government with services that have reportedly been used to support illegal settlement operations, the Israeli military, the police, and the Israeli Prison Service (IPS), through various initiatives. As of October 2024, the IPS is detaining over 10,000 Palestinians, half of whom have been imprisoned without any charges being brought or trial date being set. According to the UN Human Rights Office, Palestinian prisoners from Gaza — including at least 310 medical professionals, UN staffers, women, and children — are currently held in prolonged, secret, and incommunicado detention where they’re subject to torture, ill-treatement, and sexual violence and abuse.
According to BBC News, several Palestinians living abroad have had their Microsoft email accounts, and access to Skype, arbitrarily suspended, since the war began. This has left them unable to access bank accounts, hampered their work, and further disconnected them from their families in Gaza, which has already experienced a number of internet shutdowns in the past year.
#NoTechForGenocide: corporate complicity in Gaza’s plight
Companies have a responsibility to respect human rights wherever they operate. The aforementioned UN Guiding Principles, to which all of the companies listed above have publicly subscribed, demand that companies also respect international humanitarian law in situations of armed conflict. This reflects the heightened risk of companies becoming complicit, whether inadvertently or deliberately, in gross human rights abuses or international crimes committed by other actors, such as the military or warring parties.
Companies may be directly linked to the commission of a crime during an armed conflict if they provide direct support to the perpetrator, including through providing military, logistical, intelligence, or financial assistance. In some cases, companies, and their leaders or managers, could be held liable even if the company did not participate in the crime or did not intend to support it. As the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR) has noted, companies “should treat this risk in the same manner as the risk of involvement in a serious crime, whether or not it is clear that they would be held legally liable.”
These risks are acute in Gaza, given the plausible risk of genocide. An expert legal opinion commissioned by Al-Haq and SOMO to examine the legal consequences of the ICJ’s order for states and corporations suggests that, given the services they provide are essential for the Israeli army’s operations, tech companies may find they are directly contributing to violations of international humanitarian law and the commission of genocidal acts against Palestinians in Gaza.
The legal analysis notes that, “International criminal law suggests that direct complicity requires intentional participation, but not necessarily an intention to do harm, only knowledge of foreseeable harmful effects.” Tech companies should be on notice in light of the ICJ orders, as well as the arrest warrants requested by the ICC Prosecutor for the Israeli Prime Minister and Minister of Defense. These warrants cover charges of crimes against humanity of extermination and persecution, and the war crimes of starvation, wilful killing, and causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health.
The technology and social media companies partnering with the Israeli government face a particularly salient risk of aiding or abetting these crimes, in addition to the crime of genocide. Direct and public incitement to commit genocide is also a crime under international law, and giving Israeli officials, media, and others a platform to incite genocide, while failing to remove such content, may make social media platforms complicit. A similar argument can be made regarding the targeted ads used by Israel to justify its war in Gaza, which arguably constituted propaganda aimed at dehumanizing an entire group of people.
What should companies do now?
The prohibition to commit genocide is a jus cogens norm from which no state, or in some jurisdictions, no company, can derogate. Given the serious risks, companies, their investors, and the states they are domiciled in must urgently take the following actions:
- Comply with the UN calls for a full arms embargo and cease the sale and transfer of surveillance technologies and dual use items. In April 2024, the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution condemning the use of AI to “aid military decision-making that may contribute to the commission of international crimes,” as well as calling for an arms embargo, and for all states “to refrain, in accordance with international norms and standards, from the export, sale or transfer of surveillance goods and technologies and less-lethal weapons, including ‘dual-use’ items, when they assess that there are reasonable grounds to suspect that such goods, technologies or weapons might be used to violate or abuse human rights.” Similarly, UN human rights experts have issued repeated calls to states and investors for a full arms embargo on Israel.
- Withdraw or suspend business relationships, economic ties, and trade agreements with Israel that may contribute to its unlawful presence and apartheid regime in the occupied Palestinian territory. In light of the ICJ’s advisory opinion of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories as illegal, states, companies should also avoid providing any aid or assistance that may help maintain the occupation. A subsequent UN General Assembly resolution mandates that states abstain from entering into economic, investment, or trade dealings with Israel that may help entrench its unlawful presence in the occupied territories.
- Conduct conflict-sensitive and heightened human rights due diligence regarding companies’ policies, operations and supply chains. Tech companies must urgently assess how their products and business ties are exacerbating the conflict in Gaza, contributing to or directly linked to violations of international law and develop clear plans for mitigation. As the UN Guiding Principles make it clear, companies must take the risks of contributing to gross human rights abuses in conflict zones as a “legal compliance issue.”
- Assess responsible exit strategies and cease activities that may contribute directly or indirectly to ongoing crimes. When companies cannot influence the human rights situation through their business ties or mitigate contributing to the ongoing crimes in Gaza, they should consider responsibly disengaging from or exiting the market. Tech companies that have direct business relations with the Israeli authorities or state-owned enterprises face salient risks of possibly facilitating, abetting, or aiding the crime of genocide and other atrocity crimes currently under investigation.