A report published by the “+972” magazine website has revealed that the Israeli military has been using Amazon’s cloud service to store surveillance data on Gaza’s residents, while also purchasing more artificial intelligence tools from Google and Microsoft for military purposes.
On July 10th, the head of the Israeli military’s Computing and Information Systems Unit, which provides data processing for the entire army, spoke at a conference titled “Information Technology for the Israeli Defense Forces” and publicly confirmed for the first time that the military is utilizing cloud storage and AI services offered by major civilian tech companies in its ongoing assault on Gaza.
Cloud storage is a method for keeping large amounts of digital data off-site, often on servers managed by third-party providers. Initially, Dembinski explained that her military unit, known by the Hebrew acronym “Mamram,” uses an “operational cloud” hosted on internal military servers, rather than public clouds managed by civilian companies.
This internal cloud is described as a “weapons platform,” which includes applications for targeting for strikes, a gateway for live footage from drones over Gaza, as well as fire control, command, and control systems.
With the beginning of the ground invasion of Gaza in late October 2023, internal military systems quickly became overloaded due to the large number of soldiers and military personnel added to the platform as users, causing technical issues that threatened to slow down Israeli military operations.
However, a new investigation by +972 and Local Call may reveal that the Israeli military has, in fact, stored some intelligence information gathered from mass surveillance of Gaza’s residents on servers managed by Amazon’s AWS.
The investigation could also disclose that some cloud service providers have supplied a significant range of AI capabilities and services to military units.
