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Palantir

Overview

Palantir's complicity in apartheid Israel's war crimes and Gaza genocide is evident in its unwavering, ongoing technological and ideological support for the Israeli military. In the wake of Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza, the company eagerly aligned itself with the Israeli military, equipping its operations in Gaza with cutting-edge technologies. Even in light of the International Court of Justice’s legally-binding rulings in 2024 to prevent Israel’s plausible genocide in Gaza, as well as its July 19, 2024 Advisory Opinion affirming Israel maintains an illegal occupation and apartheid system, Palantir has not only failed its obligation to avoid complicity in genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, but is accused of enabling these atrocity crimes, including by inciting to them. 

Palantir is a close partner of the Israeli military and government. Its CEO has expressed explicit support for Israel as it committed genocidal crimes in Gaza in a letter to shareholders, stating that Palantir is “one of the few companies in the world to stand up and announce our steadfast support for Israel.” The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry and the International Association of Genocide Scholars have joined many human rights organizations worldwide in recognizing that Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Still, in 2025, two years into this Western-backed genocide, Palantir advertised its tech to "power the West to its obvious, innate superiority," writing “across the battlefield, we build to dominate.” Palantir functions as a digital weapons manufacturer, and its leadership openly states that its tech is used “on occasion, to kill.”

Cutting all ties with Palantir is a legal and ethical duty and the most effective way to pressure it to stop its criminal operations. Globally, we must pressure governments and institutions (universities, hospitals, trade unions, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, religious institutions, the United Nations, and humanitarian aid organizations) to (i) end contracts and partnerships with Palantir and (ii) divest from the company. To do this, the Palestinian-led BDS movement calls for forming broad intersectional coalitions to lead contract exclusion campaigns, peaceful disruptions, and other creative forms of pressure on institutions contracting Palantir to end complicity in grave human rights violations.

Palantir has failed its corporate obligation to prevent genocide. In June 2024, Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp was one of five CEOs who advocated and lobbied US senators for continued U.S. arms sales to Israel in a private meeting on Capitol Hill titled, “Fostering a Private-Public Partnership in Support of Israeli Security and Regional Peace and Stability,” five months after the ICJ determined that Israel is plausibly committing genocide. A UN Special Committee has since confirmed Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza are consistent with genocide. In July 2024, when asked about the ethics of the Israeli military’s use of Lavender AI in the Gaza genocide, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Palantir, replied, “I'm not on top of all the details of what's going on in Israel, because my bias is to defer to Israel. It's not for us to second-guess every, everything. And I believe that broadly the IDF gets to decide what it wants to do, and that they're broadly in the right and that's sort of the perspective I come back to.”

Palantir’s impact on human rights is not limited to Palestinians. Palantir’s collaboration with United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and hospitals worldwide are particularly notable. Palantir’s technology in hospitals poses a threat to patient rights and healthcare workers because of issues of data privacy and dangerous staffing crises. Allowing Palantir to access patient data risks of exposure of sensitive, protected medical information, and dangerous AI generative staffing methods that leave healthcare workers without the proper resources to save lives. Dr David Wrigley, deputy chair of General Practitioners Committee England at the British Medical Association told Digital Health News, “Patients will understandably be alarmed and may choose to withhold information from their doctor to the detriment of their care if they do not trust [Palantir] processing their data or there are fears about what the data might be used for.” Further more, Dr Wrigley said, “If Palantir’s software is being used to target individuals in immigration enforcement and is being deployed in active conflict zones, then that’s completely incompatible with the values we uphold in the delivery of care.” At a Media City conference, former Greek finance minsiter Yanis Varoufakis noted that Palantir trains the AI models it sells to hopsitals on besieged Palestinains in Gaza during Israel’s genocide. As the “test subjects” for militarized technologies exported globally, and as survivors of Israel’s ongoing, AI-assisted genocide, Palestinians are a canary in the coal mine warning the world of the catastrophic future of Palantir’s weaponized AI. 

Palantir is a close partner of the Israeli military and government. It supplies them with deadly AI programs and surveillance technologies that are used by Israel to accelerate its destruction of Gaza and funnel civilian data into its AI “kill chain” – comprised only of Palestinians. These kill chains are associated with AI programs such as Lavander, “Where’s Daddy” and The Gospel which have been described as “mass assasination factories” by members of Israel’s intelligence community.  

 Since at least 2013, Palantir has given the notorious Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200 an “enormous amount of assistance.” Despite Israel’s well documented crimes in Gaza, Palantir continues to supply the Israeli military with data and AI services, in violation of its own code of conduct, which says that the company "will not build products that exploit or disenfranchise disadvantaged and/or disempowered populations and/or undermine the rights and livelihoods of workers." James Bamford, an American journalist known for his writing about US intelligence agencies, told Democracy Now!, "Palantir is one of the companies that ... has given an enormous amount of assistance to [Israel’s] Unit 8200 in terms of targeting. And that goes to the [Israeli] military. So, the military targets civilians, lots of civilians. Most of the [Palestinian] people killed were civilians. Women and children have been the people who have been [mostly] targeted in the Occupied Territories, in Gaza."

Shortly after Israel began its genocide in Gaza in October 2023, Palantir entered into a “strategic partnership” with Israel’s Ministry of Defense to help the “war effort.” The company reported “seeing high demand from Israel for new tools” and in Jan 2024 Palantir held a board meeting in Tel Aviv in "solidarity" with Israel committing to supply AI tools and decision-making systems aimed at bolstering genocidal military operations in Gaza. This collaboration includes the deployment of Palantir's Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), designed to aid in battlefield intelligence and decision-making, by analyzing enemy “targets” and proposing battle plans. Palantir Executive Vice President Josh Harris confirmed the partnership, stating that “both parties have mutually agreed to harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of [Gaza] war-related missions.” Furthermore, Harris told Bloomberg at the time, “This strategic partnership aims to significantly aid the Israeli Ministry of Defense in addressing the current situation in Israel.” In comments during that January meeting, CEO Alex Karp said, “our products have been in great demand… We have begun supplying different products than we supplied before [Israel’s genocide started in Gaza].” This proves Palantir’s customization of genocide enabling technologies to directly support Israel’s war crimes and violate international law. 

Since the launch of its strategic partnership in early 2024, Palantir has been providing the Israeli military and intelligence agencies with at least four of its main products:

  1. Gotham: Palantir's flagship product for military, intelligence, and law enforcement applications. It ingests, integrates, and organizes large amounts of data from many sources to detect patterns and insights. Gotham can also integrate with sensors and autonomous systems like drones and give them tasks. Gotham powers the AI kill chain that has been central to accelerating and scaling Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
  2. Foundry: A complementary product that was developed primarily for civilian and commercial uses. A military could use Foundry for big-picture planning and logistics, like predicting equipment failures, analyzing and optimizing complex supply chains, etc.
  3. GAIA: Palantir's geospatial platform, which integrates with its other products and visualizes their data on a real-time map.
  4. Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP): Palantir's large language model, which integrates into its other products and allows users to query them and give them commands with natural language.

Palantir proudly partners with Israel’s apartheid government, providing racially discriminatory predictive policing systems and technologies used to coordinate remote attacks. In addition, Palantir has increased its operations in Israel since the start of the genocide where corporate and Israeli intelligence and military personnel closley collaborate. In September 2015, Palantir provided the Israeli government with “predictive systems,” which analyze civilian social media posts to identify Palestinians deemed a “threat.” Palestinians are arbitrarily arrested and face long prison sentences for citing Quranic verses, calling for protests, and posting photos of family members imprisoned or killed by Israeli forces as a result of Palantir’s racial-profiling systems. Israel also relied on Palantir in its September 2024 attacks in Lebanon using exploding electronic pagers and radio devices, which killed dozens and wounded thousands of people. 

Palantir’s presence in apartheid Israel has seen a "rapid growth" since 2023. Its employees in Israel work directly with its local clients to help them use Palantir's systems. As the head of Palantir's operations in Israel clarified, these primarily include the military and intelligence sectors: "Palantir is here in Israel to work with the Israeli security system – if we manage to generate commercial business that’s great – but our focus was and remains creating collaborations with security companies and supporting Israel.”

Building an intersectional movement to “Purge Palantir” 

Palantir and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

In the United States, Palantir builds targeting systems for the notoriously violent and racist US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Palantir’s tech coordinates ICE raids on homes, schools and religious spaces. Their $30M “ImmigrationOS” contract merges government databases and social media to identify, track and prioritize people for deportation. Amnesty International notes that in 2017, ICE relied on Palantir technology to arrest parents and caregivers of unaccompanied children, leading to detentions and harming children’s welfare. In Palestine and the US, Palantir surveils communities through its specialized AI tools and by centralizing data—including everyday people's personal information—in one place.

ICE also relies on Palantir’s app, “ELITE” (Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement). According to +972 Magazine, ELITE is a new geospatial system built for the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and designed for use on smartphones and tablets. That means the surveillance state lives in every ICE officer’s pocket because of Palantir. The consequences are deadly. ELITE “populates a map with deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address,” according to a user manual published late last month.

Journalist and AI researcher Sophia Goodfriend writes for +972 Magazine, “it’s no coincidence that, reporting on ICE’s incursion into Minnesota, New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen described an ‘occupation designed to punish and terrorize.’ The technologies supporting their operations illustrate how thoroughly ICE is following in Israel’s footsteps: ELITE… bear[s] a striking resemblance to mobile targeting applications Israeli forces have integrated into their policing arsenal over the last decade.” In an interview with +972 Magazine, former Palantir employee Juan Sebastián Pinto said, “Platforms used by DHS bring war-grade technologies we see in Gaza to American neighborhoods… They give ICE officers the same kind of common operating picture as military and intelligence agencies.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other privacy rights organizations are raising alarm bells about Palantir’s access to protected patient information. Palantir feeds on medicare data to deliver targets to ICE in a blatant overreach and denial of basic data privacy rights. This abuse of patient data is particularly concerning as Palantir expands its presence in healthcare. 

 

Palantir and healthcare 

Israel relied on Palantir technology (in partnership with Starklink) to bomb Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza while Palantir sought hospital contracts in North America and Europe. For the past 6 years Palantir has been aggressively expanding to the healthcare sector, raising serious concerns about data protection and the reliance of AI in hospitals. The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) mapped Palantir’s major healthcare contracts, noting major contracts in the US, Europe and Saudi Arabia. In the US, the largest healthcare union, National Nurses United, opposes Palantir’s partnership with US hospitals and is campaigning to end all Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) hospital contracts with Palantir. One of the company’s largest contracts and most contested partnerships is with the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK. In 2023, NHS signed a roughly $390 million, seven-year contract with Palantir to create the Federated Data Platform, to centralize unprecedented amounts of sensitive health data. The British Medical Association, which represents NHS doctors, said it has “long opposed the involvement of Palantir in the delivery of care and the use of patient data in our NHS.”

The No Palantir in the NHS campaign was started by Health Workers for a Free Palestine (UK), in response to the call for solidarity from Palestinian Health Unions. As health workers in Gaza were kidnapped, tortured and murdered by the Israeli military, Palantir provided the  military with advanced AI weaponry. Health workers, patients and communities are demanding this UK contract be cancelled, and pressuring their local hospitals to refuse to use Palantir technology. The campaign focuses on workplace and community organising in solidarity with Palestinians, and also recognises that Palantir's contracts with the UK state are part of the government's wider expansion of surveillance technologies and repression. No Palantir in the NHS is a health worker and patient-led grassroots campaign in the UK that is not affiliated with any political party and is supported by a coalition of grassroots and non-profit organisations. To get involved, check out the resources below and contact [email protected].

Impact

  • In October 2024, one of the Nordic region's largest investors, Storebrand Asset Management, sold its holdings worth $24 million in Palantir due to concerns that the U.S. data firm's work for Israel might put the asset manager at risk of violating international humanitarian law and human rights.
  • In August 2024, San Francisco State University (US) divested from Palantir, selling its stock in the company after determining that it did not meet the university's human rights standards, as part of a $163 million total investment portfolio realignment.
  • In early 2026, National Nurses United, a US union with more than 225,000 members nationwide and the largest union and professional association of registered nurses in U.S. history, launched a campaign to end all Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) hospital contracts with Palantir.
  • In 2025, Purge Palantir, a US intersectional collective of social justice organizations called for institutions and government representatives to cut ties with Palantir due to itscomplicity in human rights violations globally, including the genocide in Gaza.
  • Over 40,000 UK National Health Service patients complained to their local hospitals about the use of Palantir AI in the NHS. Hundreds of health workers are involved in organising against the Palantir contract. Some hospitals have refused to use the technology publicly or privately. The Doctors' union has committed to opposing the roll out of Palantir tech in the NHS.

Take action

  • Organize your union (especially healthcare workers), local community, and within university to end all contracts and partnerships with Palantir and to divest from it. 
  • Use AFSC’s Palantir contract map to identify Palantir investments and contracts at your institutions. 
  • Check out Purge Palantir’s action tracker and intersectional toolkits.
  • Reach out to the BDS movement’s tech campaigns organizer at [email protected] for support. 

Resources

Find Palantir Contracts, Investments and Locations in Your Community