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The Israeli website “Siha Mekomit” revealed in an exclusive investigation the close cooperation in the war on Gaza between the Israeli army and famous cloud storage companies, including Google, Microsoft and Amazon, which included providing the occupation army with artificial intelligence services to develop its operational capabilities in the Gaza Strip, and enabling it to store infinite amounts of data for use in the war.
In a lengthy investigation titled “Amazon Order: How Cloud Storage Companies Help the Army in Gaza,” the investigative website recalled a lecture given by Colonel Racheli Dembinski, head of information systems in the Israeli army, a month ago, on the cloud storage and artificial intelligence services provided by the three companies to the army since the beginning of the war. This was the first public acknowledgement of this cooperation by a military official, against the backdrop of a demonstration by employees of cloud storage and artificial intelligence giants in the United States, who protested the sale of cloud services and artificial intelligence systems to Israel that were used against civilians in Gaza.
The website wrote that what Colonel Dembinski said confirms what was found in a previous investigation, based on interviews with senior military officials, others in the arms industry, officials in cloud storage companies, and intelligence agencies.
Operational Cloud
Although the Dembinski doctrine did not specify the nature of the services the army received, and although security sources confirmed that no operational data was transferred to these companies, the Siha Mekomit investigation reveals that intelligence data collected on Gaza residents was stored in Amazon’s cloud service, and that the three companies provided the army with artificial intelligence capabilities and other services at a level unprecedented since the beginning of the war.
Seven intelligence officials who have worked in Gaza since October spoke of very close cooperation between the army and Amazon Cloud, which began even before the war, with the cloud storage giant providing the army with a kind of huge warehouse in which to store data that serves it in its war against the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas).
Military sources said the volume of intelligence data collected from monitoring the entire population of the Strip is so vast that it is impossible to store it on the army's servers, and some said it testifies that the data stored in the cloud warehouse helped give the green light to carry out assassinations carried out from the air during the current war.
In her July 10 lecture, Colonel Dembinski said the war had strained what she called the military’s “operational cloud,” with so many users added that it was no longer sufficient with the ground invasion, not to mention the shrinking processing capacity. So it was decided to turn to private companies that “allowed the military during the war to purchase unlimited storage and processing capacity, at the push of a button and as needed, without having to physically store data on the military’s servers.”
This operational cloud is operated by the army’s information systems department, and according to military sources and the military spokesman, it is not stored on private companies’ cloud servers, but rather on the army’s own independent servers. It contains, according to Colonel Dembinski, applications that allow for the identification of targets to be bombed, and may provide “live” monitoring of what the drones are capturing in the skies over Gaza, and then firing.
Although Colonel Dembinksi did not name the three major cloud storage companies, the logos of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure appeared at least twice in her presentation. Google’s logo also appeared briefly among the sponsors and was removed before the event began.
Dembinski said the most important service provided by the three cloud companies is advanced artificial intelligence, which has allowed the military to greatly increase its operational effectiveness, but did not specify the nature of the services purchased, or how they enhanced the military's operations.
Military sources also said that the secret systems and firing systems, including the target bank, were not transferred to the public cloud storage, but the Siha Mekomit investigation revealed how systems that helped the army in its war were actually transferred to the servers of these private companies, including at least an intelligence system operated by military intelligence.
The investigation also revealed that the artificial intelligence services provided by the three companies have been sold, since the beginning of the war, on an unprecedented scale to units in the army, some of them secret.
In a comment, a military spokesman said that it was never mentioned during the event that data was being transferred from the operational cloud to the public cloud, and that the military cooperates with the three companies under the Nimbus agreement, and that confidential information is not transferred to cloud storage providers and remains stored on the military’s own cloud.
Nimbus Project
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud won a $1.2 billion tender in 2021 to help Israeli ministries move their data systems to public cloud servers, and also receive advanced services from them in what is known as “Project Nimbus.”
Although Israeli media reports say that the army and the Ministry of Defense will only transfer unclassified data to the companies’ servers, these companies have been, according to military sources, selling artificial intelligence services to secret units in the army since at least October.
An intelligence source told Siha Mekomit that when the discussions began and a question was raised about the security problem that could be caused by transferring data to a third-party company, the answers were downplaying the problem, arguing that the positives of cooperating with cloud storage companies outweigh the negatives.
Another security source revealed how, at the beginning of the war, the army considered moving an intelligence system used as a base for launching many attacks in Gaza to servers of public companies, after the number of users increased. The alternative was tempting: “In the cloud, you just press a button, pay an additional thousand dollars and get ten servers a month, and you are given another thousand at a million dollars a month if war breaks out. This is the power of the cloud, which made the army push towards working with cloud service providers.”
This dramatic change began even before the war, but accelerated dramatically after it broke out.
“In the past, the army relied on systems it developed itself, but if it needed a service, it had to wait months or even years for it to be developed. In the cloud, it’s much simpler,” Anatoly Kushner, founder of a high-tech company that has been helping army units “move” to the cloud since October, told Siha Mekomit.
Although Kushner says that the actual, highly classified information that is part of the operational circle is not stored with public cloud storage companies, there is intelligence on the cloud, some of which has operational aspects.
Gaza data
One such system operated by military intelligence is stored in Amazon’s public cloud service and contains, according to three security officials who have used it, an “endless amount” of data, some of which, according to several of them, is used operationally.
These sources said that the army has been using this system in Gaza since at least the end of 2022, but it was not estimated before the war that it was of particular operational importance.
A security source who participated in meetings that discussed moving the system to the public cloud described the general mood at the time, saying that it tended to describe the service as excellent, with one person asking, for example, “Why develop everything at the unit level if this capability was already available?”
According to intelligence experts, what is difficult to store is not text data, but rather audio files, which are estimated in the billions and require saving and processing to move to the cloud service.
Military sources said that since the beginning of the war, Amazon’s cloud has been a “very marginal” source of information for the military, but three of those sources who participated in carrying out attacks using cloud data confirmed that the data was used many times as “additional data” to carry out airstrikes against militants, some of which killed many civilians.
Operational recruitment
As revealed by the Sicha Mekomit website, the army had adopted a policy at the beginning of the war to proceed with the assassination of senior Hamas leaders even if it resulted in the deaths of 100 or more civilians who had nothing to do with the attacks, and security sources said that the Amazon cloud was then in some cases used for operational purposes.
Another security source involved in the current war explained how he used two screens, one connected to the army system and the other to the cloud, and through them he executed “orders from Amazon.”
The book by Yossi Sharel, commander of the famous Israeli Unit 8200 since 2021, explains how the military’s private cloud can safely take advantage of the massive and efficient storage provided by public cloud storage companies. “This is necessary, because the amount of data that intelligence stores is so huge that it is impossible for anyone but companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft to store it effectively.”
The unit’s deputy commander for digital affairs explained in an article published in 2021 how the army could also benefit from the cooperation: “The military intelligence service holds most of the data that the army stores, including data on enemies collected from a wide range of sources, and this is information that civilian companies can pay huge sums to obtain.”
An intelligence source who used the cloud-based system gave an example of a collaboration with someone who gained importance during the intelligence operation, but about whom there was no information (because he had not previously been identified as a target worthy of follow-up), and here comes the role of the cloud, which can provide data about him because it has everything.
The military typically deletes information that accumulates in its databases to relieve pressure, but Colonel Dembinski said in her lecture that since October it has been working to preserve, store and accumulate all war-related material, a claim confirmed by a security source who attributed the increase in storage to public cloud storage services.
Marketing platform
The three companies view the Defense Department as a “strategic” customer, high-tech sources say, not only because of the profit margin, but also because it helps shape the companies’ image among other intelligence agencies around the world, setting “trends” that other agencies may follow.
The Siha Mekomit website spoke to Colonel Avi Dadon, who ran the acquisitions department in the Israeli Ministry of Defense until 2023 and was responsible for purchases estimated at $2.6 billion annually.
For cloud storage companies, the IDF is the most powerful marketing platform and a laboratory, Dadon says.
Dadon was among those who approached the cloud storage giants to flesh out a secret and more sensitive project than Nimbus, known as Sirius.
The goal of the project – which has not yet been completed – is to establish a private cloud for the Israeli security system (combined) on the servers of companies that provide public cloud storage services.
Danon explains how Sirius is a private, isolated cloud intended exclusively for the military and the Ministry of Defense, not connected to the Internet, and built using the architecture of major cloud computing companies to allow Israeli security agencies to use it for their secret systems.
Danon offers one aspect of the efficiency of the cloud service: “When you want to eliminate someone, for example, you have billions of details that don’t seem important, but you have to store them anyway. The moment you want to process them, you combine everything into one product that tells you, ‘Here is the target at a certain hour,’ and you have five minutes, not the whole day. So you definitely need the data.”
“And because you can't store it on your servers, you constantly delete what you don't need, but what's the harm if you have everything available to you with its history?” he adds.
Lavender App
A previous investigation showed how previous attacks in Gaza were carried out based on recommendations from an application called “Lavender,” which processes data on most of the Strip’s residents and identifies, for liquidation purposes and using artificial intelligence, a list of military activists, including low-ranking ones, before beginning to carry out regular attacks that targeted civilian homes and ended with the killing of entire families. This was a pattern that dominated in the first weeks of the war, before the army stopped using the application because it deemed it “not reliable enough,” and resorted to other applications.
It is not yet known whether Lavender was developed with the help of civilian companies, including public cloud storage companies.
While the current war is certainly not the first all-out digital war, as Doctrine Dembinski notes, it has seen a dramatic acceleration in the digitization process within the Israeli military, with military leaders seen moving around the battlefield carrying encrypted cell phones, writing in WhatsApp-like operational discussion groups, and using countless apps.
An officer who served in Gaza said, “You are fighting from your computer. In the past, you would see the whites of your target’s eyes and look through the binoculars to see them explode. Today, you tell them to bombard with the tank while you are working from your computer.”
