A week ago, Israel was rocked by the case of the Sde Teiman detention centre, where the Israeli army (IDF) is holding several hundred Palestinians arrested during ground operations in the Gaza Strip. The case actually began back in July 2024, but last Wednesday it was revealed that IDF lawyer Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi is playing a key role in it.

Back in May this year, CNN published a report based on the testimonies of detainees who had been released home to the Gaza Strip by the IDF. They described beatings, prolonged use of handcuffs (which often led to gangrene and amputation) and blindfolding. The case was investigated by the military police, who were confronted by pro-government demonstrators.

The case would have fallen into dust had it not been for the fact that, as part of the investigation, attorney Tomer-Yerushalmi leaked a video of Israeli reservists deployed at the base allegedly raping a Palestinian detainee to the media. The lawyer was arrested on Sunday evening for breaching the secrecy of prosecution documents, having resigned from her post back on 31 October.

The footage was released by Channel 12 television at the time, and according to a recent report by Haaretz, several Western officials have also taken an interest in the Negev desert detention camp, asking "in good faith" for details. However, if they wanted information on their own, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government would have been informed by the very browsers such as Google and Amazon.

How the "winking mechanism" works

In April 2021, Israel established the Nimbus project, which is used for cloud computing for the government, the Prime Minister's Office, the Ministry of Defense, and the IDF. At the time, divisions of tech giants Google and Amazon applied for the Finance Ministry's grant scheme.

However, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services had to promise not to suspend cooperation when brokering cloud services, even in the event of employee calls for boycotts (which occurred several times), and they had to inform the government of attempts to search for information about Israel by other governments or public companies.

The latter process is called the "winking mechanism" and, according to an investigative report by the Guardian, +972 magazine and the Hebrew portal Local Call, consisted of sending specific sums to the Israeli finance ministry.

According to the contract, Google and Amazon were to send coded messages disguised as financial transactions. The amount of these transactions was to correspond to the phone code of the country that requested data about the government in Jerusalem or the army through these search engines.

Accountingly, these transfers were labeled as "special compensation." They were in Israeli shekels and in four figures. When the information was Googled by the United States authorities (whose area code is +1), the company sent 1,000 shekels to Bezalel Smotrich's resort. For Italy (area code +39), firms sent 3,900 shekels, and for Ireland (+353), 3,530 shekels.

Firms did so even when governments explicitly instructed browsers not to "inform the parties concerned," i.e., Israel. If the browsers were unable to reveal the identity of the country, they sent a payment of 100 thousand shekels.

According to the Guardian, this is a violation of both European and American law, as it seeks to circumvent local laws in the name of the security of a third country, in this case Israel. Neither Google nor Amazon can unilaterally withdraw from a cloud contract - Microsoft recently canceled its cooperation, accusing the 8200 intelligence unit of unauthorized eavesdropping on Palestinians.

Innovation, AI eavesdropping or pagers

Unit 8200, a military unit similar to the US National Security Agency (NSA) that focuses on intelligence gathering through eavesdropping (SIGINT), rose to prominence in April this year when a New York Times report drew attention to "Israeli experiments with artificial intelligence" in the war in the Gaza Strip.

Indeed, military agents deployed an artificial intelligence-based eavesdropping tool that located the source of a phone call made by one of the masterminds of the October 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel named Ibrahim Biari. Based on this information, the IDF attacked Camp Jabaliya on October 31, 2023, and killed the Hamas member - along with 125 civilians.

Meanwhile, Google, Microsoft, as well as Meta, the company that develops the Facebook platform, were involved in the development of the eavesdropping tool. In addition to this AI tool, the tech firms have developed a program in collaboration with Unit 8200 to partially visually reconstruct scanned faces.

However, the Israeli army's most famous technological feat has been the use of specially modified pagers, which have been used by Shiite Hezbollah militants in southern Lebanon instead of smartphones. Their detonation left at least twelve dead, including two children, and more than 3 500 injured.

According to official information, the AR924 pagers were manufactured by Apollo Gold, a Taiwanese company with zero ties to Israel. However, its visual identity was used by Israel's Mossad intelligence service to sell thousands of devices embedded with PETN explosives to Hezbollah, according to testimony by anonymous Israeli agents to the Washington Post.

The September 17-18 attack last year was approved by Netanyahu a week earlier, ten days after the IDF killed Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in a pager attack. Subsequently, they also killed four potential successors, with former Vice Chairman Naeem Qassim eventually becoming the movement's leader.

Israel has been renewing its offensive in Lebanon since October, the main argument being the failure of the government in Beirut to disarm Shiite militants. In Gaza, more and more tribal militias are rising up against Hamas, and in Syria the Jewish state is being backed by the local Druze, who are clashing with the new jihadist government of Ahmad Hussein Sha'ar.

One of the defining moments in Israeli history was the Six-Day War (June 5-10, 1967). As prominent Israeli historian Avner Cohen has argued, it was this war that "transformed Israel from a nation that saw itself as struggling to survive into an occupying and regional power." On the eve of this war, the Jewish state allegedly achieved military uranium enrichment, as he wrote in Israel and the Bomb (1999).

In the 21st century, this evolution to regional superpower status is aided by ethnic militias in neighboring countries - and by American tech giants.