Big Tech’s complicity deepens Israel’s AI-powered assault on Gaza

Safeer Raza

GAZA, Palestine (MNTV) — In Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and West Bank, major U.S. technology firms, including Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and IBM, have been highly complicit by actively assisting Israel’s military on the ground, and manufacturing and altering the narrative on the social media space. 

Rights groups, leaked internal documents, and independent investigations suggest these companies provide critical digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence tools that bolster Israel’s systems of surveillance, targeting, and control, which directly destroyed lives of Palestinians and prevented content which supported their rights and criticized Israel.

Analysts and human rights observers warn that this expanding technological partnership extends far beyond logistics or data support—forming what some describe as an AI-driven machinery of domination that dehumanizes Palestinians and systematically erases their digital and physical presence.

In lockstep with Israel’s October 7 offensive, executives from Silicon Valley publicly professed open and defiant support for Israel. 

Meanwhile, their firms quietly expanded contracts, data centers, cloud services, and surveillance infrastructure that underpin Israel’s most advanced tools of war, all in the background of protests against their complicity.

Since the outset, I posted images and testimonies of Gaza’s devastation and the resistance led by Palestinians.

Every post—whether photo, video, or critical text—was removed from Facebook or Instagram within hours. 

Appeal routes were blocked or nonfunctional. The erasure was total, as though these platforms were programmed to purge not just content but collective memory itself.

“These platforms erase entire narratives,” said China-based tech expert Mehran Ahmed, condemning the fusion of digital power and state violence. 

“Tech capitalism and Israel’s genocidal instincts have converged to maximize the destruction of Palestinian lives and livelihoods in Gaza and the West Bank. These companies pursue profit at the expense of Palestinians, while their technologies have effectively colonized digital space”, he said.

He warned that this merger of profit algorithms and militarized oversight is not localized: “What begins in Gaza will not end there—it’s the prototype for a global system where dissent is algorithmically deleted and hyper-surveillance becomes the new normal. The collaboration between big tech and the Israeli state is manufacturing an inescapable net of control, one that normalizes total surveillance and leaves no room for accountability or complaint.”

At the core of this lethal alliance lies Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud deal between Google, Amazon and the Israeli state. 

Leaked internal memos, staff testimonies cited by Al Jazeera and The Intercept, and advocacy reporting suggest Nimbus is deployed to power Israeli AI systems like Lavender and The Gospel—purported automated targeting tools that assist in bombarding civilian neighborhoods with minimal human oversight.

While the tech firms maintain that their services “comply with applicable law,” independent observers contend that these systems are infrastructure for a “mass assassination factory.” 

Organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Yale’s Information Society Project have called the marriage of AI and warfare “a new frontier of automated atrocity.”

The complicity extends beyond the battlefield. IBM designs and maintains the Eitan database system, which holds biometric and demographic data on Palestinians and Syrians, forming a backbone for Israel’s permit and checkpoint regime. 

Microsoft has supported the Israeli military’s Almunasseq app, used to grant or deny movement permits to Palestinians in occupied territories.

Social media platforms act as parallel instruments of erasure. Meta’s internal audits confirm that moderation bias against Palestine content is pervasive. 

Human Rights Watch reviewed over 1,000 takedown cases and found nearly all removed or suppressed content was peaceful, human rights–oriented, or purely documentary.

Among leaked guidelines is a notable memo from The New York Times, which instructed its journalists to avoid the words “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “occupied territory” when reporting on Gaza. 

The memo also discouraged use of “refugee camps,” and even “Palestine,” except in rare contexts. It warned that emotional terms like “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “carnage” “convey more emotion than information” and urged writers to think carefully before using them. 

Analysis by The Intercept, at the time it was reported, revealed that in the weeks following October 7, the Times used “massacre” 53 times in reference to Israelis killed by Palestinians, but only once to describe large-scale Palestinian civilian deaths. The word “slaughter” appeared 22 times more frequently when describing Israeli fatalities than Palestinian ones.

By suppressing such language in its own space and on social media platforms, the narrative architecture is being systematically shaped. 

The word choices, deletions, and algorithmic silences together produce a media environment that dehumanizes Palestinians and makes their suffering invisible.

The tech, the censorship, and the linguistic veil together form a powerful coalition that stifles dissent, normalizes erasure, and hides the machinery of mass death behind a sanitized, sanitized veneer. This is digital occupation. This is algorithmic genocide.