Amazon sold cloud-computing services to two Israeli weapons manufacturers whose munitions helped devastate Gaza, according to internal company materials obtained by The Intercept.

Amazon Web Services has furnished the Israeli government — including its military and intelligence agencies — with a suite of state-of-the-art data processing and storage services since 2021 as part of its controversial Project Nimbus deal. Last year, The Intercept revealed a provision in that contract requiring Amazon and Google, the other Nimbus vendor, to sell cloud services to Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Israeli Aerospace Industries, two leading Israeli weapons firms.

New internal financial data and emails between Amazon personnel and their Israeli corporate and governmental clients show that Amazon has consistently provided software to both Rafael and IAI in 2024 and 2025 — periods during which Israel’s military was using their products to indiscriminately kill civilians and destroy civil infrastructure. Rafael purchased artificial intelligence technologies made available through Amazon Web Services, including the state-of-the-art large language model Claude, developed by AI startup Anthropic.

The materials reviewed by The Intercept also indicate Amazon sold cloud-computing services to Israel’s nuclear program and offices administering the West Bank, where Israeli military occupation, population displacement, and settlement construction is widely considered illegal under international law.

Amazon proclaims broad commitments to international human rights values, like most of its Big Tech peers. “We’re committed to identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and addressing adverse human rights impacts connected to our business,” the company’s Global Human Rights Principles website states. “Within Amazon’s own operations, we deploy a variety of mechanisms to conduct due diligence, assessing and responding to risks across the company,” including “human rights impact assessments to assess risks specific to Amazon businesses, including in the sectors and the countries where we operate.”

Amazon declined to comment or respond to a list of detailed questions, including whether it conducted a human rights impact assessment pertaining to selling its services to weapons companies whose products are used in a war widely assessed to be genocidal.

Rafael, Israel Aerospace Industries, and the Israeli Ministry of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s unclear how much money Rafael and IAI paid Amazon for its services. The documents reviewed by The Intercept show that Amazon sold its cloud-computing to Rafael at a discounted rate, though the exact percentage is not disclosed. The materials cite a 35 percent discount for services sold to the Israeli Ministry of Defense, a major Project Nimbus customer; it’s unclear if this rate is provided to Rafael and IAI as well.

Rafael was founded in 1948 as a governmental weapons research lab and, like its American equivalents at Raytheon or Lockheed, has become synonymous with Israeli militarism. Today, the state-owned company manufactures a diverse arsenal of missiles, bombs, drones, and other weaponry for both domestic use and international export. The corporation has thrived since Hamas’s October 7 attacks, reporting record revenues in both 2023 and 2024 that it attributed to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. “2024 was a record year for Rafael, during the longest and most complex multi-front war in Israel’s history,” CEO Yoav Turgeman said last year, referring to the ongoing war with Hamas and related regional conflicts. “Rafael played a significant role in Israel’s military achievements in offense, intelligence and defense.”

IAI, another state-owned weapons firm, is best known for co-developing Israel’s anti-rocket Iron Dome system alongside Rafael. The company also manufactures a wide array of military aircraft, including its Heron line of drones — which the company has boasted about being used to great effect in Israel’s war on Gaza. A November 2023 promotional item about IAI’s drones published in the Jerusalem Post noted that “In the face of the October 7 challenges, the HERON UAS demonstrated its strategic importance by providing real-time intelligence, supporting targeted acquisitions, and aiding in the neutralization of threats.”

Missiles and other weapon systems built by Rafael and IAI have been used against Palestinians throughout the Gaza war. One of the most prominent Rafael weapons is its line of missile guidance kits dubbed SPICE: “Smart, Precise Impact, and Cost-Effective.” The SPICE technology converts “dumb” 1,000 or 2,000-pound bombs into “smart” guided munitions. In September 2024, Israel bombed a refugee camp — previously designated by the government as a “safe zone” for displaced Palestinians — with what weapons analysts later assessed was a 2,000 pound SPICE-guided bomb. The attack, condemned by the United Nations as “unconscionable,” killed at least 19 Palestinians, including women and children, with a massive explosion that burned, shredded, and in some cases buried those who’d sought shelter at the site. Fragments of a SPICE guidance kit were found amid the wreckage of a December 2024 airstrike on a house in Central Gaza that reportedly killed 12 civilians.

Retired Air Force operator and weapons targeting expert Wes Bryant described Rafael and IAI as “highly integral to Israel’s defense industrial complex,” telling The Intercept both companies are implicated in killing civilians. Israel has been criticized for its frequent use of 2,000-pound bombs in Gaza, one of the densest urban areas in the world. “It could level multiple large houses in the average suburban American neighborhood,” Bryant explained. “Ideally the only time they should be used in urban warfare is when we have identified a large and/or hardened enemy structure and confirmed it is entirely in use by the enemy and has no civilian function nor civilians within or around it at risk.”

Rafael’s electro-optically guided Spike family of missiles are designed to both punch through and destroy heavily armored tanks or kill humans, and can be fired from portable ground-launchers in addition to drones or other vehicles. Some Spike missiles use “shaped charge” warheads, which slice into targets with a cone of scalding metal launched from the weapon as it detonates. In 2009, a former Pentagon official described the Spike to Haaretz as “a special missile that is made to make very high-speed turns, so if you have a target that is moving and running away from you, you can chase him with the weapon.” Rafael marketing materials note one variant “can be used in urban combat against structural targets found in urban settings for in-structure detonation.” Arms experts have at times attributed devastating, widespread shrapnel wounds inflicted upon Palestinian civilians to Spike missiles, which can be packed with tiny pieces of tungsten. When a tungsten-loaded Spike weapon hits its target, the 3-millimeter metal cubes blast outward in a 65-foot radius, lacerating blood vessels, puncturing organs, and shredding the flesh of anyone nearby, according to analysts.

In April 2024, an investigation by The Times of London revealed Israel used a drone-launched Spike missile manufactured by Rafael to kill seven aid workers with World Central Kitchen. U.N. special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese called for indictments following the attack, echoing international condemnations and demands for an inquiry into whether the airstrike constituted a war crime.

“Though the IDF does not release numbers of munitions utilized in the war in Gaza, SPIKE missiles have been used extensively and have been attributed by many investigations to the death of civilians, including children,” said Bryant. “It is likely that Israel has used dozens, if not hundreds, of SPIKE missiles throughout Gaza since the outset of the conflict.”

Both Rafael and IAI supply the Israeli military with so-called loitering munitions: suicide drones that can hover for extended periods while scanning for targets, then quickly slam into the ground and detonate an onboard explosive. Both companies’ weapons are frequently highlighted when the Israeli military–industrial apparatus wants to flag its technology supremacy. In July, Rafael posted a promotional video using footage of its Firefly suicide drone killing an apparently unarmed person walking down the street in an unidentified area of Gaza. Suicide drone attacks have also been documented in the Occupied West Bank; a December 2023 video captured a Firefly explosive descending into a dense courtyard.

Israel’s military similarly promoted the use of the shoulder-fired Matador rocket, co-developed by Rafael, in a March 2024 video reported by Israeli outlet Ynet: “In the clip, one of the terrorists opened fire from a room inside an apartment — and the use of a Matador missile targeting him precisely to eliminate the threat.” The outlet noted “a woman and two children” were in the adjoining room, but claimed they were not harmed in the missile attack against their home.

The Israeli military did not respond to a request for comment.

The documents show that Rafael acquired generative artificial intelligence tools through Amazon. In 2024, the firm sought to begin testing generative AI services made available through Amazon’s Bedrock service, which provides customers with machine-learning tools, including those made by third-party firms. According to the files, Rafael wanted to use both Amazon’s Titan G1 large language model and Claude, the advanced LLM model created by Anthropic.

Like its competitor OpenAI, Anthropic recently pivoted toward military contracting, announcing a $200 million deal with the Pentagon in July. Anthropic’s permissible use policy prohibits the use of its technology to “Produce, modify, design, or illegally acquire weapons,” and to “Design or develop weaponization and delivery processes for the deployment of weapons.” It’s unclear how the use of Claude by Rafael — a company that exists to design, develop, and deliver weapons — could be in compliance with this policy. The documents reviewed by The Intercept indicate Rafael was able to purchase access to these models, but do not reveal how they were used.

Anthropic did not respond to questions about Rafael’s usage of Claude, or whether it would permit a weapons company to use its services despite an apparent ban on exactly that. In a statement, spokesperson Eduardo Maia Silva said, “Anthropic services are available to users, including governments, in most countries and regions around the world under our standard commercial Usage Policy. Users are required to comply with our Usage Policies which include restrictions and prohibitions around how Claude can be deployed.”

Project Nimbus has been a military program from its start. The Israeli Ministry of Finance declared in 2021 that its purpose was “to provide the government, the defense establishment and others with an all encompassing cloud solution.” Google, Amazon’s co-contractor on the project, has repeatedly denied that Nimbus involves “highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services,” while Amazon has generally refrained from commenting at all.

A separate internal Amazon document obtained by The Intercept shows that the company was quietly lobbying Israel to allow it to handle classified material from the country’s defense and intelligence community. The document, an overview of Israel’s regulatory landscape, explained that the country’s military and spy agencies were reluctant to migrate classified data onto Amazon’s cloud servers. But the paper also notes that Amazon was trying to influence state regulators into changing this position, and had begun working with one unnamed, major government body to bring some of its classified materials onto AWS.

Portions of the internal financial materials indicate exactly which Amazon services the Israeli military and state-owned weapons firms use. The purchases include dozens of networking, storage, and security tools, including Elastic Compute Cloud, which lets customers run software in virtual computers hosted by Amazon. Multiple documents show the Israeli Ministry of Defense purchased access to Amazon Rekognition, the company’s face-recognition tool, including an unspecified “OSINT,” or open-source intelligence, project by the Israeli military’s Central Command. Rekognition has previously been criticized for its lower accuracy rates with women and people of color; in 2020, the company announced a self-imposed yearlong moratorium on police use of Rekognition, citing the need for “stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology.” The system, according to Amazon, is capable not only of identifying faces, but also a range of emotions including “fear.”

The documents show the Israeli military has also used Amazon technology to test large language models, though the specific models or applications are not mentioned. One Israeli military username includes the number 9900, a possible sign of use by the IDF’s Unit 9900, a geospatial intelligence unit that aided in planning strikes in Gaza, including through the use of a spy satellite developed by IAI. Unit 9900 also purchased cloud services from Microsoft, according to a January report by The Guardian and +972 Magazine.

The documents indicate that another Amazon customer through its Nimbus contract is the Israeli state-operated Soreq Nuclear Research Center, a scientific installation constructed in cooperation with the United States in the 1950s. Although Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal is technically secret and unacknowledged by its government, Soreq operates in the open, ostensibly part of the country’s civilian atomic energy program. Unlike Israel’s highly classified Negev Nuclear Research Center, Soreq is not believed to be a major contributor to the country’s weapons capabilities. A 1987 Pentagon study, however, stated the Soreq installation “runs the full nuclear gamut of activities …required for nuclear weapons design and fabrication.” A 2002 report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute noted “The Soreq Center shares a security zone with the Palmikhim AB,” an Israeli Air Force base, “from where missiles are assembled and test launched into the Mediterranean Sea.”

A separate document briefly references as AWS users unspecified government offices in “Judea and Samaria,” Israel’s term for the West Bank, which it has illegally occupied since 1967. Ioannis Kalpouzos, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and an expert on human rights law and laws of war, told The Intercept that Amazon’s work with Israeli weapons makers could potentially create liability under international law depending on “whether it is foreseeable that it will lead to the commission of international crimes.”

“There is no need for genocidal intent for accessorial liability in aiding the principal to commit genocide,” Kalpouzos said.

It’s unclear to what extent Amazon is aware of how its services are being used by the companies that build Israel’s bombs or the military that drops them. The Intercept previously reported internal anxieties amid the bidding process at Google, where leadership fretted that the project was structured in such a way that the company would be kept in the dark about how exactly its technology would be used, potentially in violation of human rights standards. While servicing the Israeli government includes plenty of mundane applications — say transportation, schools, or hospitals — in addition to its military, there’s little nuance in the operations of Rafael and IAI. Even if Amazon lacks the ability to conduct oversight of these customers, Bryant said there is little ambiguity when it comes to the purpose of their business: building and selling weapons.

“I don’t see how Amazon can make a claim of not being complicit in killing,” said Bryant, who previously led civilian harm assessments at the Pentagon, “even if they don’t fully know what everything is used for.”