In 2021, two of the world’s leading cloud-service providers entered into a $1.2 billion contract with a state whose military operations in Gaza and the occupied territories many legal experts describe as a genocidal war. That agreement gave the state unfettered access to the companies’ cloud infrastructure, and internal leaks now reveal astonishing secret clauses designed to shield the state from external legal scrutiny.

Those hidden provisions include a “winking mechanism” whereby the tech firms must discreetly notify the state if they hand over its data to foreign law-enforcement bodies under a gag order. The notification comes via coded payments, tied to international dialling codes, within 24 hours. For example, if US authorities request the data the company pays a sum linked to the “+1” code.Equally troubling: the contract stipulates that neither company may suspend or restrict the state’s access to services, even if those services are used for human-rights violations, or run counter to the providers’ own acceptable-use policies. 

Behind these commercial terms lies a broader moral and legal reckoning. The state in question has long relied on advanced surveillance, data-analytics and cloud computing to conduct large-scale operations in Gaza and the occupied territories, many of which international institutions have characterised as genocidal in nature. By agreeing to such a contract, with terms that effectively override corporate safeguards and civil-liberties protections, the tech firms risk being complicit in enabling the state’s campaign of destruction and displacement. Internal documents from one firm show that its own lawyers warned the services could be “linked to the facilitation of human-rights violations.”

What is particularly striking is how contractual language is being used to freeze out accountability. By requiring payments in coded sums rather than open disclosure, the state ensures that neither courts nor civil-society watchdogs readily track when data is shared. By forbidding service suspension, the contract protects an aggressive regime from any commercial consequences even if its actions arouse international condemnation. From a Palestinian-perspective lens, this deal reveals how corporate and state power can intertwine to sustain and normalise violent occupation and annihilation. Regardless of geographic borders, the architecture of surveillance, data control and cloud-based enablement becomes the backbone of a system in which a population is systematically de-humanised and targeted. In short, the story isn’t simply about a cloud-computing contract, it is about the infrastructure of genocide in the modern age.