According to Israeli investigative journalist Yuval Abraham, Israel allegedly stores data on Amazon’s cloud services to identify targets in the Gaza Strip.

Abraham claims that Israel used artificial intelligence with a high error rate and sensitive data from hundreds of thousands of Gaza residents to systematically target them. If these allegations are confirmed, technology companies like Amazon and Google could be held responsible for the genocide in the Gaza Strip.

Yunus Emre Erdolen, a journalist from the daily Serbestiyet, drew a connection between this situation and a historical precedent involving the American banana company Chiquita. Between 1997 and 2004, Chiquita donated $1.7 million to the AUC, a fascist terrorist organization in Colombia.

The AUC used these resources to commit serious human rights abuses, including extortion and murder. The United States subsequently designated the AUC as a terrorist organization and fined Chiquita $25 million. This case highlights the consequences of American companies indirectly condoning human rights abuses in other countries.

As Erdolen pointed out, in April 2021, Israel signed the Nimbus initiative with Google and Amazon, which provides cloud storage services to the Israeli government. Under the initiative, Amazon and Google operate data storage centers in Israel through which Tel Aviv transfers and manages sensitive data. This agreement raises significant ethical concerns as it allows Israel to identify targets in Gaza more efficiently and quickly.

According to Abraham, Israel uses AI applications such as “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy?” to identify targets in Gaza. Despite its high inaccuracy rate, Lavender assigns individuals a score from 1 to 100 based on their likelihood of being members of Hamas.

The family residences of these individuals are identified by Where’s Daddy?, leading to targeted bombings of those homes. The data used by these AI systems is reportedly stored in cloud services owned by technology companies, allowing for larger and faster attacks.

If these allegations are true, the involvement of technology companies in the genocide in Gaza could result in serious legal and ethical consequences, similar to the Chiquita experience. Abraham’s research shows the extent to which these companies’ partnerships with Israel contribute to ongoing atrocities and raises concerns about how this complicity will be resolved in the future.