The +972 Magazine based in Israel and Palestine ran an exposé earlier this week on how Google and Amazon help the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) commit genocide in Gaza. +972 obtained the recording of a presentation that the chief of the IDF’s Center of Computing and Information Systems unit, Col. Racheli Dembinsky, delivered to a July 10 conference entitled “IT for IDF” in Rishon Lezion, near Tel Aviv. In her speech, 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,” wrote author Yuval Abraham. “In Dembinsky’s lecture slides, the logos of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure appeared twice.”
“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,” Abraham reports further. “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.”
But further investigation by +972 revealed 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.
