Amazon has suspended an employee for criticizing its relationship with the Israeli government.

First shared on newsletter platform BeeHiiv, the employee shared his views with senior executives via email, and posted to multiple internal Slack channels.

Ahmed Shahrour, an Amazon software engineer based in Seattle but with family in Palestine, wrote that his belief that the company was "driving innovation" had been "shattered."

Shahrour wrote that, following the October 7 attack on Israel, CEO Andy Jassy “sent an email expressing sympathy for Israeli hostages without a single acknowledgment of Palestinian life,” which he described as "a blatant act of white supremacy signaling that brown lives are worth less. My family is less. I am less."

According to Shahrour, he has seen "Zionist Amazon employees spew racist vitriol in public Slack channels with impunity. I saw Palestinians referred to as 'human animals who deserve nothing but death' and jokes cracked about the terrorist pager attacks in Lebanon," while Palestinian support posted on the same channels was censored.

"The racist double standard is not an oversight; it is policy. It protects the perpetrators and silences the victims."

Beyond this, Shahrour noted Amazon's role in the Project Nimbus contract, in which it offers cloud computing services to the Israeli military and government. "Our technology subsidizes this genocide. The contract guarantees uninterrupted service — even amid ongoing war crimes — ensuring the IDF has the low-latency infrastructure needed for its genocidal assault."

In 2024, an investigation found that the Israel Defense Forces were using AWS to power their efforts in the ongoing war in Gaza, Palestine.

Regarding previous efforts to protest this, Shahrour wrote: "We, the workers, have tried the appropriate channels. We circulated a petition that gathered 1,700 Amazonian signatures, calling on Andy Jassy to rescind all contracts with the Israeli military and demand an immediate, durable ceasefire. It was ignored. We have submitted shareholder proposals, like the 2024 call for an independent investigation of AWS customers committing human rights abuses. It was rejected."

He calls on Amazon executives to drop Project Nimbus, and for fellow colleagues to either leave the company, or "organize to dismantle Nimbus."

According to BeeHiiv, the employee was suspended with pay "until further notice" for the posts.

Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser said: "We don’t tolerate discrimination, harassment, or threatening behavior or language of any kind in our workplace, and when any conduct of that nature is reported, we investigate it and take appropriate action based on our findings.”

Amazon is not alone in facing internal backlash for ties to Israel. In August, several Microsoft employees were arrested during protests against the company's ties with Israel.

Microsoft is currently conducting an internal investigation into how Israel's military surveillance agency is using its cloud platform.