The summer sky over Gaza no longer fades gently into a warm red; it hangs in the air like a film of toppings dust mixed with the chemical burnt flesh that dirties the skin, clogs the throat, and chokes the chest. Under the suffocation, an unsettling truth lurks. Palestine is no longer just a flashpoint or a symbol of international struggle; it constitutes the world’s most lethal petri dish for putting new kinds of military hardware to the test.
The carnage is no longer a regrettable byproduct of conflict; it is the business model itself.
On this dystopian test range, high-tech weaponry and surveillance systems are tested on a captive population, then refined and marketed to the world at large. Over forty multinational companies, ranging from Silicon Valley cloud companies to German heavy machinery companies with a presence across Europe, closely monitor their quarterly numbers, which rise and fall in direct proportion to Palestinian suffering. In other words, the carnage is no longer a regrettable byproduct of conflict; it is the business model itself.
The United Nations has compiled a list of forty-eight companies that directly benefit from Israel’s ongoing assault, and the list includes the names of the biggest corporations around the world. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and IBM provide cloud power and AI frameworks laced with machine intelligence, capable of sifting through biometric records, drone feeds, and satellite imagery with all the tireless energy technology can muster. That nonstop flow of information drives software that Palantir provided to the IDF, which uses machine learning to power predictive algorithms that Israeli officers have described as dynamic kill lists.
Manufacturers roll out the next version with each software update, subtly marketing it as field-tested, and defence ministries worldwide nod. On the other side of the pond, the American behemoths Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics scan their evening bulletins and beam as a headline plugs the F-35, JDAM kits, and laser-guided shells they produce. That on-air proof-of-concept sends shockwaves from Brussels to Tokyo, triggering new requisitions. European partners BAE Systems, Thales, Leonardo, and Rheinmetall contribute their expertise by integrating sensors, guidance pods, and jamming suites into a single system.
Caterpillar, Volvo Group, and HD Hyundai do the heavy lifting; armoured diggers shift the rubble once military bulldozers level the ground, and with it, more contracts to rebuild. And while investors BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street quietly watch their multibillion-dollar stakes grow with each bomb that falls in Gaza, lifting a portfolio by a fraction imperceptible on Wall Street but shattering on the cratered streets, the reason the fighting in Gaza does nothing for us is that it does so very little. The entire racket runs, or shambles, with near mechanical grimness: Ruin churns up new orders for missiles, drones, and surveillance gear.
After a cease-fire, the same multinationals that provided the munitions are ready to turn to lucrative rebuilding contracts, money primarily from donors, typically also foreign, who only recently condemned the earlier death and destruction. Fluor, Bechtel, and KBR roll in glossy brochures that promise emergency shelters and sometimes desalination plants. Cement behemoths Heidelberg Materials and Cemex are hot on its heels, with quick-mix mixes to replace the concrete that was crumbled to dust the last time around.
Each new lifeline being sent to Gaza, then, turns out to go in a circle, back onto the ledgers of the firms that sold products requiring such lifelines in the first place. Creative destruction. This era’s sense of identity and morality comes in that grey zone where blast and rebuild, funeral and ground-breaking converge. The pathway for Gazans is one of never-ending loss.
“The thing that makes this round of violence unique is that both Israeli and foreign suppliers are showing state-of-the-art salesmanship.” Banners fly at Eurosatory in Paris or IDEX in Abu Dhabi, boasting ‘Combat Proven in Gaza’ or ‘Field Validated by the Israel Defence Forces’. Sales teams provide clients with scrubbed drone footage of strikes on Khan Yunis, just as software companies share user testimonials. Destructive power, which was once privately held know-how, is now a glossy marketing tool. India has gone from being a mere buyer in this network to a strategic partner and, in some instances, a willing enabler.
“The kind of rising tide of nationalism that Modi is part of, it’s very automatically going to put India in an alliance with Israel.” Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Hindutva project has found common cause with Israel’s ethno-nationalist frame, placing both countries as avatars of civilisation against imagined religious alternatives. This alignment is not only symbolic. Adani Defence and Aerospace also has a production line with Israel’s Elbit Systems at Hyderabad, where Hermes 900 drones (used for the first time to target Gaza) are built now.
Bharat Electronics is working on integrating the Spike anti-tank missile systems, and the Indian Air Force has been flying Heron TP drones in the skies over Kashmir, where residents say suspicious-looking drones appear to be hovering overhead more frequently than they used to. Investigative shipping data from last year followed the containers of the propellant and warhead casings from Indian ports to Haifa, while the civilian death count in Gaza exceeded thirty thousand. New Delhi’s consistent abstention from UN ceasefire resolutions, therefore, speaks less to diplomatic reticence and more to the protection of its growing arms sector.
The consequences of that partnership penetrate deep into Palestinian society. In Rafah, a man points up towards the racket overhead, unable to put names to the machines. Some are Elbit Skylark drones, and others could be the newer hybrids built under the Adani licenses.
Banners fly boasting ‘Combat Proven in Gaza’ or ‘Field Validated by the Israel Defence Forces’.
These twin server farms, residing in cooled desert hangars deep in the Negev, now hum with the input of raw data from machine-learning platforms, sending and receiving with server farms hosted on the Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure clouds. Analysts reprogram targeting algorithms nearly in real time. Lessons that work in Gaza are being rapidly repackaged into slick briefs and sold to future clients in Manila, Abuja, or Brasília. The strip, therefore, serves as a macabre testing site in which every dead Palestinian is a data point, and every mangled block a live demo of a technological promise.
There has also been a buildup of pushback at the grassroots, on a scale and with a fury. From commissioning new plays to pressuring state legislatures, the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign has emerged as a generational cause for a largely left-wing cohort of young Americans and their counterparts overseas. Endowment committees from Cape Town to California have moved to divest holdings in leading arms manufacturers. Healthcare unions in New York are threatening to withdraw pension funds unless Palantir’s shares are removed from their portfolios.
At Microsoft’s annual meeting in May, an unlikely group of employees and outside shareholders succeeded in pushing for an unusual vote on its four-hundred-million-dollar contract with the Army. The proposal failed, but the twenty-three per cent who supported it five years ago and the forty-three per cent now appear a universe apart. These kinds of wins, however small they may seem, represent a spark of hope in the face of corporate complicity. Yet the whole operation ploughs ahead, reinforced by a thicket of legal shields carefully sown across many jurisdictions.
Its offices are now in Denver, its legal charter is in Delaware, and a network of Luxembourg subsidiaries helps ensure a modest tax bill. The Lockheed Martin F-35, meanwhile, is built using subassemblies from over a dozen countries, making it as much a diffuse liability as anything else. When critics question how such hardware could contribute to conflict, executives cite export licences signed by their home governments and say they serve only approved diplomatic demand. International humanitarian law developed in an era when uniformed armies fought wars under easily identified banners, so chasing accountability through shell companies, cloud servers, and cross-border venture funds does strain the rules almost beyond recognition.
There are precedents for companies to own up, but they materialise at a glacial pace. The South African apartheid suits of the early 2000s hung around for a decade, then collapsed into settlements that were worth pennies on the dollar. Facebook continues to face civil claims over its role in the Myanmar genocide. Compensation has been withheld for 70 years from Japanese companies that used forced labour during the Second World War. The current crop of Gaza-connected companies appears to be taking the same bet, hoping that outrage will wane long before a serious subpoena is issued. Breaking out of this loop, then, requires a strategy that combines street-side protest with the gravity of the law.
Advocates from civil society argue that liability should extend not only to the sale of clear weapons but also to any service that significantly facilitates the targeting loop. A machine-learning engineer isn’t being neutral if her system ranks targets with ninety-five per cent certainty. Pension funds that operate within the rules of environmental and social governance could have easily mandated conflict-zone filters in their risk assessments. Export-control authorities could require end-use checks for every bulldozer blade, every high-resolution imaging deal. None of this is easy, but it’s all well within current technical capabilities.
The financial sector is beginning to understand the risk. Earlier this year, Barclays quietly reduced its holdings in Israeli defence bonds after ratings agencies suggested they could downgrade them due to reputational damage. BNP Paribas distributed a client note saying that the E.U. could soon introduce punitive limitations on sensitive dual-use technology. Insurers are now considering war-crime exclusions that would open manufacturers to lawsuits worth tens of millions of dollars. Money, as a value-neutral (amoral) traveller, is quick to move when the association cost exceeds the potential return.
Because in Gaza, every hour that passes with no action is counted by funerals. Thirty-four thousand Palestinians are dead, a third of them children. Survivors slumber in makeshift shelters cobbled together from walls pulverised by bombs and courtyards destroyed by hospitals.
Doctors rely on the light from their cell phones during surgeries because debris from a recent storm has torn down the electricity lines in the city. Teachers improvise lessons in the shade of canvas canopies, as Israeli jets test a bunker-destroyer (on a tent) and call it a success, a newly developed weapon perfected in part by Boeing and Rafael engineers. Blockade strictures have turned the strip into concentric circles of desperation, trauma and dust. However, each quiet night provides Tel Aviv with data on the angles of attack of the warheads and on the live behaviour of targeting algorithms.
India’s abstention from UN ceasefire resolutions speaks less to diplomacy and more to protecting its arms industry.
The emotional damage goes even deeper. Children in Jabalia don’t blink when a phone screen lights up anymore; they flinch back, sure that each flash bears the same laser guiding the narrow-diameter munition targeting their street. In Deir al-Balah, a young woman recounts a terrible act of betrayal, placing her trust in the cloud that backed up family photos, only to discover it was the same infrastructure that had flagged her brother’s house for demolition. The arbitrary suffering is cruel enough; the monetisation of pain is almost intolerable.
India’s backdoor role provides a regional twist. In government-friendly commentators in New Delhi, Israel’s campaign is lauded as evidence that numbers can trump, a message that resonates among Hindutva voices contemplating Kashmir and Assam.
India’s acquisition of Israeli spyware Pegasus, and the targeting of journalists and opposition figures, was a little too well synchronised to dismiss as happenstance. The tactics mastered in Gaza are swiftly exported to other locations, weaving together an international web of repression that benefits authoritarian forces everywhere. Gaza now serves as both a case study and a cautionary tale.
Can one credibly sever this assembly line of agony? One suggestion is to apply targeted sanctions, not just to government contracts, but also to the private wealth of executives who grow fat on having their war atrocities fueled and fed. A related notion is that of a “war tax” on arms exports, with the proceeds earmarked to provide compensation for victims. Politicians from across Europe want each firm to publish statutory transparency reports detailing how much it earns from conflict zones. Cumulatively, it would erode the profit logic of endless violence.
None of these changes can happen without sustained public outrage. However, history teaches us that empires and corporations rarely retreat until the social costs have escalated to the point of threatening their fundamental legitimacy. Student protests, not court decisions, were also what led Dow Chemical to cease production of napalm during the Vietnam War; no one would go near the graduates there all of a sudden.
Apartheid-era bonds dulled when retirees in the American heartland discovered that their pensions were benefiting from the racist underpinnings of South African segregation. The day that consumers stop updating a smartphone associated with a cloud that runs casualty-prediction models is the day the Gaza test range goes dark.
Today, demonstrators take to the streets in Karachi, Kuala Lumpur, Chicago, and Copenhagen, chanting Microsoft, Lockheed, Elbit, and Adani alongside the names of the dead. They have a grip on what diplomatic mouthpieces obscure. War is a business, and businesses respond to pressure.” Each boycott, each divestment motion, each revolt at a shareholder meeting adds friction to the gears of corporate governance. If sufficient sand is thrown there, the engine can be swamped and stall.
It’s bigger than Palestine, the stakes are higher! Modern technology respects no borders. A fire control solution to level a neighbourhood of Rafah is just as easily capable of targeting a missile toward Taipei or Addis Ababa. A cloud-based surveillance package trained on Gaza’s captive population can be redeployed for minority districts in any country willing to pay the subscription. The exchange in violence ramps up, eerily smoothly. So Gaza’s pain is a mirror that the world holds up to its conscience.
Every dead Palestinian is a data point, every mangled block a live demo of a technological promise.
Nowadays, valuation spreadsheets trump human dignity, and cutting-edge tools commonly slash through the lives of the vulnerable. But a well-angled mirror does more than reflect; it reveals the fragile wires of complicity and delineates plausible steps to take to dismantle them. If investors prioritise short-term gains over long-term stewardship, if regulators halt the flow of dual-use science, and if consumers demand that stringent ethical firewalls be established, many unsafe labs will likely shutter.
Now, with the sun setting on embattled neighbourhoods here, families are gathering in small groups under concrete awnings, trading stories of homes that had provided for them and kept them safe. They deserve more than sympathy; they deserve a world order that is not designed to monetise their loss as another person’s quarterly earnings beat. And the critical question now is not whether the world can witness their pain, but whether we are prepared to cease benefiting from it.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. They do not represent the views, beliefs, or policies of the Stratheia.
