Hyperscale cloud services are directly being used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in its ongoing war in Gaza, Palestine.

It is primarily using Amazon’s cloud service to store surveillance information on Gaza’s population, and also procuring AI tools from Google and Microsoft for military purposes.

An investigation by Israeli media +972 Magazine and Local Call found that Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate uses Amazon Web Services for mass surveillance.

The directorate moved to the cloud to keep up with the growing data troves, including billions of audio files. This data was, on rare occasions, used to confirm aerial assassination strikes in Gaza, which would have also killed and harmed Palestinian civilians. More critical data is still kept on government systems.

The Israeli army authorized the killing of “hundreds of civilians” in attacks against senior Hamas commanders. Security sources told the publication that, in some of these cases, Amazon’s cloud was used.

“The [Amazon] cloud is the endless storage [space],” another Israeli intelligence source said. “There are still the regular [army] servers, which are quite large … But during intelligence gathering, sometimes, you find someone who interests you, and say: ‘What a bummer, he’s not included [as a surveillance target], I don’t have the information about him.’ But the cloud gives you information about him, because the cloud has [information on] everyone.”

Google and Microsoft also provide cloud services, including AI tools, that are used in the conflict.

Microsoft was Israel's primary cloud provider for years, but in 2021 Israel signed a joint contract with Google and Amazon called Project Nimbus. The $1.2 billion tender, led by AWS, was for all Israeli governmental services.

At the time, it was not meant to include classified data, but the investigation found that that restriction was loosened at the outset of the war. Multiple security sources told +972 and Local Call that since October there has been a dramatic increase in the purchase of services from Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure.

At the beginning of the war, the Israeli army system would crash due to the number of users, so was moved to the cloud.

The government is also still developing Project Sirius, first reported by Globes in 2021, which aims to move much more classified data to a cloud provider's data center. That facility, however, will be isolated from public and other networks.

Google and Amazon employees protested the Project Nimbus cloud contract when it was first announced. Google then fired 28 employees who protested the contracts this year.

The war broke out in October after Hamas launched an attack into Israel from Gaza that led to at least 1,139 deaths, most of whom were civilians, and another 250 taken hostage.

The resulting invasion of Gaza has caused an estimated 40,000 deaths, primarily of civilians. More than 70 percent of the region's houses have been destroyed in the Israeli air and ground offensive.

In May, a University Network for Human Rights (UNHR) report said that “Israel has committed genocidal acts, namely killing, seriously harming, and inflicting conditions of life calculated, and intended to, bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza."

That month, the United Nations’ top court ordered Israel to immediately halt its military offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where 1.4 million displaced Palestinians had fled to amid the conflict. With the offensive continuing, the UN now estimates that about 50,000 remain in Rafah.

Israel has denied genocide charges and asserted its right to defend itself from ongoing Hamas attacks.

"AWS is focused on making the benefits of our world-leading cloud technology available to all our customers, wherever they are located," Amazon said in a statement.

"We are committed to ensuring our employees are safe, supporting our colleagues affected by these terrible events, and working with our humanitarian relief partners to help those impacted by the war.”