How Google and Amazon became enablers of Israeli war crimes

In 2021, Google and Amazon signed a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli regime to provide it with advanced cloud computing and artificial intelligence services—technologies later used during Israel’s two-year war on the Gaza Strip. The lucrative deal, known as Project Nimbus, remained shrouded in secrecy.

However, research conducted by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian now shows that Google and Amazon, anticipating possible legal challenges over the use of their technologies in the West Bank and Gaza, submitted to highly unusual control clauses demanded by the Israeli government as part of the agreement.

Documents leaked from Israel’s Ministry of Finance—obtained by The Guardian—alongside information from sources familiar with the deal, expose two stringent requirements the Israeli regime imposed on the tech giants.

The first clause prohibits Google and Amazon from limiting or restricting how Israel uses their products, even if such use violates the companies’ own terms of service.

The second clause obliges the companies to secretly notify Israel if a foreign court compels them to hand over data stored on their cloud servers on behalf of the regime—effectively allowing them to evade their legal obligations.

Project Nimbus, originally designed as a seven-year contract with potential extensions, aimed to enable the Israeli cabinet to transfer vast amounts of data belonging to state institutions, intelligence services, and military units to the cloud infrastructure of the two companies. Yet even two years before October 7, Israeli officials drafting the agreement anticipated potential lawsuits against Google and Amazon over the use of their technology in occupied territories.

One scenario that particularly concerned Israeli officials was the possibility that a court in a country where these companies operate might order them to share data with police, prosecutors, or intelligence agencies to assist in criminal investigations.

Under the U.S. CLOUD Act (2018), American law enforcement agencies can compel U.S.-based cloud providers to hand over data even if it’s stored abroad. In the European Union, due diligence regulations may obligate companies to identify and address human rights violations across their global supply chains; failure to comply can trigger court intervention.

Crucially, companies that receive such data disclosure orders are typically prohibited from informing affected clients. But the leaked documents reveal that Israeli officials sought to circumvent this vulnerability by inserting a clause requiring companies to secretly alert Israel if compelled to release data.

According to The Guardian, this signaling would be carried out through a coded payment system—part of an arrangement known internally as the “Blink Mechanism”, referred to in the contract as a form of “special compensation.”

Under this “special compensation” clause, the companies are required to send four-digit payments in Israeli shekels, corresponding to the international dialing code of the country requesting the data—followed by a zero—to Israel’s Cabinet Office.

For example, if Google or Amazon were forced to share data with U.S. authorities (country code +1) and were prohibited by a U.S. court from disclosing the order, they would transfer 1,000 shekels to the Israeli cabinet. If a similar request were made in Italy (country code +39), they would transfer 3,900 shekels. The contract specifies that these payments must be made within 24 hours of the data transfer.

If the companies are bound by a gag order so strict that they cannot reveal which country requested the data, they are to make a 100,000-shekel payment (around $30,000) to the Israeli Cabinet instead.

Legal experts—including several former U.S. prosecutors—have described this arrangement as highly irregular, warning that such coded communications could violate American legal obligations that prohibit revealing sealed subpoenas.

Several analysts characterized the system as a “legal workaround” that might comply with the letter of the law while clearly violating its spirit.

Israeli officials themselves appeared to acknowledge this risk. The documents note that Israel’s demands regarding how Google and Amazon should respond to U.S. court orders may conflict with American law, forcing the companies to choose between breaching their contract or breaking the law.

Neither Google nor Amazon responded to questions about whether they have ever used the secret code since Project Nimbus came into effect.

Leaked documents and insider accounts further show that Israeli officials were also concerned that access to Google or Amazon’s cloud services might be restricted or revoked—either through a foreign court ruling or a unilateral corporate decision under pressure from employees or shareholders.

They were particularly worried that human rights organizations and activists could use European laws to sue the companies or pressure them to end business ties with Israel—especially if the services were linked to human rights abuses.

Google and Amazon’s deception

Last month, after +972, Local Call, and The Guardian revealed that Israel had used Microsoft’s cloud platform to store massive amounts of intercepted Palestinian phone calls, thereby violating Microsoft’s terms of service, the company suspended the Israeli army’s access to certain services.

In contrast, the leaked Nimbus documents show that Google and Amazon are explicitly prohibited from taking similar action against Israel—even if corporate policies change or Israel’s use of the technology breaches their own service terms. Doing so would not only constitute a breach of contract but also incur severe financial penalties.

This willingness to accept such terms reportedly helped Google and Amazon beat Microsoft in the Nimbus bidding process, as Israel’s deals with Microsoft are governed by separate contracts. Sources told The Guardian that following Microsoft’s suspension, Israeli intelligence agencies plan to migrate their surveillance data from Microsoft’s servers to Amazon’s cloud infrastructure.

Google was apparently aware that the deal would largely strip it of control over how Israel uses its technology.

According to The Intercept, Project Nimbus operates under a set of special policies jointly negotiated between Google and Israel, separate from Google’s general cloud service terms. The outlet cited a leaked email from a Google attorney warning that winning the deal would require signing a non-negotiable contract with terms heavily favorable to the Israeli cabinet.

Both companies’ “acceptable use” policies explicitly prohibit using their platforms to violate others’ legal rights or to engage in activities that cause serious harm to people. However, a source involved in drafting the Nimbus contract said it makes clear that there are no restrictions on the types of data Israel may store on Google or Amazon’s servers.

An internal analysis by Israel’s Ministry of Finance confirms that the agreement allows the government to use any service “at its sole discretion”, as long as such use does not violate Israeli domestic law.

A subsequent Cabinet memo noted that the fact the providers agreed to subordinate their own terms of service to the Nimbus contract demonstrates their “understanding of the Cabinet’s sensitivities” and their willingness to comply with the regime’s demands.

Both Google and Amazon now face growing backlash from employees and investors over their role in supporting Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza—an assault that numerous human rights organizations and the UN Commission of Inquiry have described as genocidal.

In statements leaked last year by +972 and Local Call, a commander in the Israeli army’s Unit for Computing and Information Systems admitted that AI and cloud services provided by these tech giants had given Israel significant operational advantages in Gaza.

Multiple Israeli security sources have confirmed that the occupying army has made extensive use of the infrastructure built under Project Nimbus—including massive data centers that Google and Amazon constructed inside occupied territory.

At the time of drafting the contract, Israeli officials saw the likelihood of foreign legal challenges as minimal. But as global public outrage over Israel’s actions grows—and as international journalists increasingly seek access to Gaza to document the digitally enabled devastation—that assumption may no longer hold true.