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It's early morning, and Zelda Montes walks briskly through the crisp New York air as they head to Google's headquarters on Manhattan’s 9th Avenue. Montes, who self-identifies as they, fumbles with their ID card at the entrance, blending in with the steady stream of Googlers swiping through the security barriers as if it were just another day at the office.

Armed with an oversized tote bag, Montes pulls back their purple hair and heads to the 13th-floor canteen to order their usual: a dirty chai and an egg, avocado, and cheese sandwich with a bowl of raspberries.

Their hands tremble slightly as they grip the coffee cup.

Locking eyes with two others, they get the signal that the coast is clear, head down to the entrance, and sit. The three Googlers unfurl their banners and begin chanting to demand that Google do one thing: Drop Project Nimbus.

But this will be the last time they sit inside Google's New York office as Googlers, as Google itself refers to its own employees. "Getting fired felt like a possibility but never a reality," remarked Montes, one of 50 employees fired by Google for staging a 10-hour sit-in at one of its American offices in April.

For the last three years, Montes has been one of several activists calling for Google to drop Project Nimbus, a partnership Google and Amazon have with the Israeli government reportedly worth $1.2bn.

Meta is restricting the use of the upside-down red triangle emoji, a reference to Hamas combat operations that has become a broader symbol of Palestinian resistance, on its Facebook and Instagram, and WhatsApp platforms, according to internal content moderation materials reviewed by The Intercept.

Since the beginning of the Israeli assault on Gaza, Hamas has regularly released footage of its successful strikes on Israeli military positions with red triangles superimposed above targeted soldiers and armor. Since last fall, use of the red triangle emoji has expanded online, becoming a widely used icon for people expressing pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli sentiment. Social media users have included the shape in their posts, usernames, and profiles as a badge of solidarity and protest.

The symbol has become common enough that the Israeli military has used it as shorthand in its own propaganda: In November, Al Jazeera reported on an Israeli military video that warned “Our triangle is stronger than yours, Abu Obeida,” addressing Hamas’s spokesperson.

Microsoft is co-sponsoring a conference in Israel to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the Israeli military's Center of Computing and Information Systems unit, known by its Hebrew acronym Mamram. The conference, called "I Love Mamram," is now scheduled to be held in Tel Aviv in November, after the "security situation" (presumably the growing conflict with Lebanon) pushed the date from September.

Mamram is not merely a banal IT service provider for the Israeli military. This summer, as reported by the Israeli news outlet +972 Magazine, a commander in the unit confirmed that it was providing cloud data services and artificial intelligence support for the Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip. In a speech at the "IT for IDF" conference held just outside of Tel Aviv this July, Racheli Dembinsky, a colonel in the Israeli army and commander in the information systems unit, confirmed that Mamram was assisting the offensive in Gaza through the provision of internal cloud services that she referred to as a "weapons platform" helping facilitate the campaign. Amid the war, Mamram was providing support to the Israeli military in conducting mass surveillance on the population of Gaza in addition to "marking targets for bombings, a portal for viewing live footage from UAVs over Gaza’s skies, as well as fire, command, and control systems," +972 reported.

In the same speech, Dembinsky indicated that cloud services from civilian tech giants, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, were being employed by the unit for military tasks. After the military's existing technological infrastructure was overwhelmed by the amount of data and intelligence information flowing in during the conflict, services available on contract from tech companies became a stopgap to allow the military to continue operating its platforms. “The crazy wealth of services, big data and AI—we’ve already reached a point where our systems really need it,” Dembinsky said, adding that the services provided “very significant operational effectiveness” during the fighting in Gaza.

The Israeli Defense Tech Conference, aimed at tech companies working with the Israeli military, was scheduled for November at the Google for Startups campus in Tel Aviv.

The event, according to a listing posted on the event management app Luma, was pitched at “founders, investors and innovators” looking to network and learn more about the defense tech space. It was co-sponsored by Google; Fusion Venture Capital; Genesis, a startup accelerator; and the Israeli military’s research and development arm, known as the Directorate of Defense Research and Development (DDR&D, or Ma’fat).

Google was not only listed as the physical host of the event and one of its sponsors, but the event listing also included a notice that attendees “approve of sharing [their] details with the organizers (Fusion & Google)” as part of signing up.

When The Intercept contacted Google and the other companies and venture capital firms on the event page, the event page disappeared. Google spokesperson Andréa Willis told The Intercept in an email, “Google is not associated with this event.” Willis did not respond when asked how this could be possible if Google is hosting and co-sponsoring the event, or why the event page went down. None of the other companies or venture capital firms on the event page responded to requests for comment.

Anas Altikriti was in London, and busy, on the day in July 2020 when his phone was hacked. He frequently works as a hostage negotiator and, at the time, he was negotiating a deal to free a hostage being held on the Libya–Chad border. Altikriti also had a meeting with former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. But his schedule did not include having his phone infiltrated by Pegasus, the phone hacking software made by Israel’s NSO Group.

For many years, he had been vocally critical of the UAE, where he previously lived. The UAE designated his organization, the Cordoba Foundation — which works to promote dialogue and rapprochement between Islam and the West — as a terrorist group in 2014. In response, the organization issued a statement calling the country a “despotic regime seeking to silence any form of dissent.” He made similar declarations about the UAE over the following years.

Four years later, Altikriti, an Iraqi-born British citizen and vocal critic of the United Arab Emirates, is filing a report to the Metropolitan Police in London accusing the Israeli spyware firm NSO Group of complicity in the targeted hacking of his phone. On Wednesday, he filed the complaint about NSO and its associates alongside three fellow U.K.-based human rights defenders whose phones were also hacked.

Assembled with the help of advocates from GLAN on behalf of the victims, the extensively footnoted filing sent to the Metropolitan Police, which was obtained by The Intercept, puts the ball in the police’s court. The police now have discretion over whether to open an investigation and subsequently bring charges.

The US has imposed sanctions on yet another Israeli spyware firm, Intellexa, citing the “threats” that it poses to national security. The move comes in the wake of the ongoing global scandal surrounding Israeli spyware companies, most notably NSO Group, which has been accused of selling espionage technology to some of the world’s most repressive regimes to target journalists, critics and human rights activists. NSO was put on Washington’s blacklist in 2021, again over national security concerns.

Three years on from the global NSO scandal, the proliferation of Israeli spyware continues to pose a menace, as the US Treasury Department announced yesterday the expansion of personal sanctions against officials linked to the offensive cyber-arms firms Cytrox and Intellexa, developers of the Predator spyware software used for mobile phone surveillance.

Investigations by journalists have revealed that Intellexa’s Predator spyware was sold to a Sudanese militia and even to militants in Bangladesh, highlighting the ongoing concerns about the lack of oversight and regulation around Israel’s cyber-surveillance industry. The most high-profile case of espionage involving NSO technology was that of Jamal Khashoggi.

Meta’s company-funded oversight body ruled Wednesday that the social media giant shouldn’t automatically take down posts using the phrase “from the river to the sea,” a decades-old rallying cry for Palestinian nationalism that has reignited a national debate about the boundaries of acceptable speech.

Meta’s Oversight Board, an independent collection of academics, experts and lawyers who oversee thorny content decisions on the platform, said posts they examined using the phrase didn’t violate the company’s rules against hate speech, inciting violence or praising dangerous organizations.

“While [the phrase] can be understood by some as encouraging and legitimizing antisemitism and the violent elimination of Israel and its people, it is also often used as a political call for solidarity, equal rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people, and to end the war in Gaza,” the board said in its ruling.