Amazon

Amazon.com, Inc. operates the world's largest e-commerce platform and Amazon Web Services (AWS), the dominant commercial cloud computing provider. The company appears in the 2025 UN Human Rights Council report A/HRC/59/23 identifying corporations complicit in Israel's "economy of genocide." The BDS Movement lists Amazon as a pressure target, and the No Tech for Apartheid campaign calls for ending Amazon's military contracts with Israel. Amazon provides cloud infrastructure to the Israeli military through the $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract,

Project Nimbus: $1.2 Billion Israeli Military Cloud Contract

Project Nimbus is a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract between the Israeli government and Amazon and Google, awarded in April 2021 during Israel's bombing of Gaza. AWS serves as one of the primary cloud provider. The initial term runs seven years, but Israel can extend it up to 23 years with limited ability for either company to exit.

A 63-page Israeli government procurement document reviewed by The Intercept identifies mandated customers required to purchase through Nimbus: the Israeli occupation forces, the Ministry of War, state-owned weapons manufacturers Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries, and the Settlement Division responsible for expanding colonies in the occupied West Bank.

Leaked contract documents obtained by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian revealed that the contract prohibits Amazon and Google from restricting how Israel uses their products, even if that use breaches their standard terms of service. Israel demanded a secret "winking mechanism" (coded compensation payments corresponding to a requesting country's telephone dialing code) designed to alert Israel when foreign courts compel Amazon or Google to hand over Israeli data, circumventing legal gag orders.

After October 7, 2023, Israel's internal military cloud became overloaded and was mitigated through Amazon, Google, and Microsoft infrastructure. Internal Amazon financial data obtained by The Intercept shows Amazon consistently provided software to Rafael and IAI throughout 2024 and 2025, including Anthropic's Claude AI purchased by Rafael through AWS. After The Guardian exposed that Microsoft cut off Unit 8200's access to Azure surveillance storage, Unit 8200 planned to transfer this surveillance data to AWS.

Named in the UN Genocide Economy Report

The June 2025 UN Human Rights Council report A/HRC/59/23 explicitly named Amazon as complicit in Israeli apartheid and genocide. The report stated that Microsoft, Google, and Amazon

grant Israel virtually government-wide access to their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, enhancing data processing, decision-making and surveillance and analysis capacities.

The report connected this infrastructure to AI targeting systems including "Lavender," "Gospel," and "Where's Daddy?", systems that generated lists marking up to 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants for potential airstrikes, with human operators spending approximately 20 seconds per target for approval.

U.S. Intelligence and Military Contracts

AWS has built the most extensive classified cloud infrastructure of any commercial provider, holding contracts worth over $22 billion with U.S. intelligence and war agencies.

CIA

In 2013, the CIA awarded AWS a $600 million, 10-year Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) contract. AWS built a private cloud region inside CIA facilities. In November 2020, the CIA awarded the Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) multi-vendor contract — estimated at tens of billions over 15 years — to AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and IBM.

NSA

In July 2021, the NSA awarded AWS a $10 billion contract to modernize its primary data repository.

Pentagon

The $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract was awarded in December 2022 to AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle. By mid-2025, JWCC task orders had reached $2.7 billion. AWS operates six classified cloud regions.

Palantir and ICE

In 2018, reporting showed that Palantir’s Investigative Case Management system for ICE was running on Amazon Web Services, with Palantir reportedly paying around 600,000 dollars per month for AWS infrastructure on a cloud environment certified for federal use. Today, Palantir’s core products are embedded across the cloud ecosystem: Gotham, Foundry and newer AI platforms are sold as managed services on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud, these environments extend Palantir’s reach into police forces, border regimes, militaries, spy agencies and corporate clients that rely on these platforms to process and act on vast quantities of personal and operational data. Gotham functions as a war‑fighting and surveillance operating system, enabling law‑enforcement and military actors to utilize different data sources for investigations, targeting, detention, deportation and lethal missions. Foundry generalizes this same logic into civilian life, healthcare, welfare, transport, and energy.

A 2026 complicity profile by the BDS movement documents Palantir’s partnership with Israel’s Ministry of War, including deployment of its Artificial Intelligence Platform and related tools in support of Israeli occupational military and intelligence operations in Gaza and beyond, and concludes that Palantir’s systems are actively enabling large‑scale surveillance, automated targeting and population‑management in occupied Palestine.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s HART system

Under DHS's Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) $6.158 billion program, Amazon Web Services GovCloud is the structural backbone of one of the most expansive biometric surveillance apparatus in the U.S.. The HART system is designed to store fingerprints, iris scans, facial images and other biometric identifiers on over 270 million people with records retained for a minimum of 75 years. The system is explicitly scoped to serve ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), CBP (U.S. Customs and Border Protection), the FBI (U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation), foreign governments and local police forces, integrating data across agencies to automate the generation of target lists for raids, detention and deportation. Beyond biometrics, HART is designed to store unverified data on individuals' relationships, travel patterns, religion and behavioral "risk factors," embedding racialized, error-prone profiling directly into the targeting pipeline.

Anthropic, Palantir, and AWS

In November 2024, Anthropic formalized a three-way partnership with Palantir and AWS to sell its Claude AI models to U.S. war and intelligence agencies. Under the deal, Claude is deployed inside Palantir's environments which are accredited for data deemed critical for "national security" requiring "maximum protection,". The arrangement runs on AWS GovCloud as the backbone for AI-assisted military and intelligence operations. Amazon is also by far Anthropic's largest investor, having committed four billion dollars to the company.

U.S. Domestic Surveillance: Rekognition, Ring, and Law Enforcement

Amazon Rekognition, a cloud-based facial recognition service launched in 2016 as part of Amazon Web Services, has been marketed to U.S. law enforcement agencies as a low-cost investigative tool. In 2018, an ACLU test used Rekognition to compare photos of all 535 members of U.S. Congress against a database of 25,000 public mugshots and produced 28 false matches, wrongly identifying those lawmakers as people who had been arrested. Nearly 40% of the false matches were people of color, despite making only 20% of Congress at the time.

Ring, acquired by Amazon in 2018 in a deal valued at around $1 billion, has built an integrated network with thousands of U.S. police departments. Amazon admitted that it had provided camera footage to police without user consent 11 times. In 2023, the FTC charged Ring for allowing employees to access to private customer videos, including one employee who viewed videos of at least 81 female users.

Amazon's Israeli Tech Operations

Amazon has deepened its investments in apartheid Israel through multiple acquisitions of Israeli tech firms, many linked to the IOF Unit 81 alumni.

• Annapurna Labs (2015, $350–370 million): Israeli chip firm powering AWS Graviton processors and Trainium/Inferentia AI chips.
• CloudEndure (2019, $200–250 million): Israeli disaster recovery firm which got integrated into AWS.
• E8 Storage (2019, $50–60 million): Israeli NVMe storage startup integrated into AWS Tel Aviv center.
• NeuroBlade (2025): Israeli data processing firm whose founders (IOF Unit 81 alumni) and team joined AWS Annapurna Labs.

Amazon launched the AWS Israel Region (il-central-1) in August 2023, backed by a planned $7.2 billion investment through 2037. AWS is a listed partner of the 8200 EISP, the accelerator program founded by the Unit 8200 Alumni Association. Israel Aerospace Industries, a mandated Nimbus customer and state-owned weapons manufacturer, also services 80% of Amazon's global cargo aircraft fleet.

Bezos Political Positioning

Bezos has cultivated direct access to U.S. military and political power to secure federal contracts for Amazon. A ProPublica investigation documented how Amazon deployed a network of former consultants turned senior War Department aides to steer a $10 billion contract to consolidate the entire U.S. military's cloud infrastructure, toward AWS as its sole candidate.

In 2025, Bezos, through Amazon, donated $2 million to Trump's 2025 inauguration fund.

Bezos has used his ownership of The Washington Post to shape editorial coverage in ways that align with his political and business interests. An Intercept analysis of the Post's Gaza coverage found the term "slaughter" applied 60-to-1 for Israeli versus Palestinian casualties.

Labor Rights Violations

Amazon's warehouse injury rate has remained roughly double that of non-Amazon warehouses every year from 2019 through 2024. The company employed 36% of all U.S. warehouse workers but accounted for 53% of all serious injuries in the industry. A U.S. Senate HELP Committee 18-month investigation found Amazon's internal injury rate reached nearly 45 injuries per 100 workers during Prime Day 2019, uncovered internal studies identifying safety improvements that were never implemented because they would slow delivery speeds, and found Amazon manipulated injury data to appear safer to OSHA and lenders.

Amazon spent over $34 million on anti-union consultants from 2021–2024. When workers at Staten Island voted to unionize in April 2022, Amazon refused to recognize the union or negotiate for over three years despite exhausting all appeals. Amazon was found that it committed multiple labor law violations including using racial stereotypes against organizers.

France fined Amazon €32 million for "excessively intrusive" worker surveillance.

Amazon's delivery drivers, classified as non-employees through multiple subcontractors despite Amazon controlling routes, quotas, and AI surveillance cameras, were documented urinating in bottles and defecating in bags due to impossible schedules. The FTC settled for $61.7 million after finding Amazon secretly diverted customer tips meant for Flex gig drivers from 2016 to 2019 while telling customers "100% of your tip goes to your courier."

Sources:

• +972 Magazine ‘No restrictions’ and a secret ‘wink’: Inside Israel’s deal with Google, Amazon
• +972 Magazine ‘Order from Amazon’: How tech giants are storing mass data for Israel’s war
• +972 Magazine ‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza
• 8200EISP Home
• ACLU Amazon’s Face Recognition Falsely Matched 28 Members of Congress With Mugshots
• AWS News Blog Now Open – AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region
• BDS Movement Guide to BDS Boycott & Pressure Corporate Priority Targeting
• BDS Movement Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its technology in mass surveillance of Palestinians
• BDS Movement Palantir Company Complicity Profile
• CNBC Amazon to pay over $30 million in FTC settlements over Ring, Alexa privacy violations
• CNBC Amazon workers on Staten Island vote for company’s first unionized warehouse in U.S.
• CNBC Amazon broke federal labor law by calling Staten Island union organizers ‘thugs,’ interrogating workers
• CTech After raising $110M, NeuroBlade’s engineers join Amazon's Annapurna Labs in quiet exit
• Euronews Amazon fined for 'excessively intrusive' surveillance of its workers in France
• Electronic Frontier Foundation Ring Changed How Police Request Door Camera Footage: What it Means and Doesn’t Mean
• FedScoop Justice Department discloses FBI project with Amazon Rekognition tool
• Federal Trade Commission Amazon To Pay $61.7 Million to Settle FTC Charges It Withheld Some Customer Tips from Amazon Flex Drivers
• Globes Amazon's Israeli chip acquisition pays off handsomely
• HELP Committee PEAK SEASONS, PEAK INJURIES: Amazon Warehouses Are Especially Dangerous During Prime Day and the Holiday Season—and the Company Knows It
• Immigration Defense Project HART Attack
• MIT Technology Review Amazon is the invisible backbone of ICE’s immigration crackdown
• Nextgov CIA Awards Secret Multibillion-Dollar Cloud Contract
• Nextgov Judge: IBM gamed procurement system in CIA cloud bid
• Nextgov NSA Awards Secret $10 Billion Contract to Amazon
• No Tech For Apartheid No Tech For Apartheid
• NPR Amazon manipulated injury data to make warehouses appear safer, a Senate probe finds
• Occupational Health & Safety Amazon 2022 Warehouse Worker Injury Rates Decreased from 2021 but Were Higher Than Other Warehouses, Report Shows
• OHCHR A/HRC/59/23: From economy of occupation to economy of genocide - Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967
• Progressive International PI Briefing | No. 44 | How we Make Amazon Pay
• ProPublica How Amazon and Silicon Valley Seduced the Pentagon
• Reuters Pentagon awards $9 billion cloud contracts to Google, Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft
• Reuters Amazon buys Israeli startup E8 Storage: source
• Tech Church Anthropic teams up with Palantir and AWS to sell AI to defense customers
• Tech Church Update: Amazon has acquired Israeli disaster recovery service CloudEndure for around $200M
• The Guardian Revealed: Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret ‘wink’ to sidestep legal orders
• The Intercept Google Worried It Couldn’t Control How Israel Uses Project Nimbus, Files Reveal
• The Intercept Coverage of Gaza War in the New York Times and Other Major Newspapers Heavily Favored Israel, Analysis Shows
• The Intercept As Israel Bombed Gaza, Amazon Did Business With Its Bomb-Makers
• The Intercept Israeli Weapons Firms Required to Buy Cloud Services From Google and Amazon
• The Intercept Documents Show Amazon Is Aware Drivers Pee in Bottles and Even Defecate En Route, Despite Company Denial
• The Intercept Documents Show Amazon Is Aware Drivers Pee in Bottles and Even Defecate En Route, Despite Company Denial
• Times of Israel Amazon to invest $7.2b in Israel as it rolls out local cloud data region
• U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education Labor & Pension NEWS: Sanders Releases Sweeping Report Exposing How Amazon’s Obsession with Speed Injures Workers at Unprecedented Rates
• Variety Amazon, Meta Are Both Donating $1 Million to Donald Trump’s Inauguration Fund