Amazon fires employee for protesting company’s work with Israel, amid tech-wide unrest at Google, Microsoft

Amazon fired a Palestinian engineer who was suspended last month after he protested the company’s work with the Israeli government.

Ahmed Shahrour, who worked as a software engineer in Amazon’s Whole Foods business in Seattle, received an email on Monday informing him of his termination. When he was suspended in September, Amazon said the decision was the result of messages Mr Shahrour posted on Slack criticising the company’s ties to Israel.

Amazon said its investigation found Mr Shahrour had violated the company’s standards of conduct, written communication policy and acceptable use policy, alleging that he “misused company resources, including by posting numerous non-work-related messages pertaining to the Israel-Palestine conflict.”

“In the next 24hrs you will receive an email with detailed information about your termination, including information about your benefits and final pay,” an Amazon human resources employee wrote in a message to Mr Shahrour that was obtained by CNBC.

“We appreciate the contributions you’ve made during your time with Amazon and wish you the best in your future endeavours.”

An employee group associated with Mr Shahrour put out an afternoon press release saying that he was fired after a five-week suspension “for protesting Amazon’s $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government and military, known as Project Nimbus, which he states constitutes collaboration in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

Mr Shahrour had urged the company to drop the contract that involves Amazon providing the Israeli government with artificial intelligence tools, data centres and other infrastructure. He also protested and handed out flyers at Amazon’s downtown Seattle headquarters.

In a statement to CNBC, Mr Shahrour said his firing is “a blatant act of retaliation designed to silence dissent from Palestinian voices within Amazon and shield Amazon’s collaboration in the genocide from internal scrutiny.”

Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser told CNBC in a statement that the company doesn’t tolerate “discrimination, harassment or threatening behaviour or language of any kind in our workplace.”

“When any conduct of that nature is reported, we investigate it and take appropriate action based on our findings,” Mr Glasser said.

Mr Shahrour’s termination comes on the same day that Palestinian militant group Hamas released the first seven surviving Israeli hostages, marking the first stage of a ceasefire deal brokered with the help of US President Donald Trump.

As part of the agreement, Israel was also scheduled to free nearly 2,000 Palestinian detainees and prisoners later in the day.

The war started just over two years ago, when Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing roughly 1,200 people and taking hundreds of hostages. Israel followed with a sustained assault that killed more than 67,000 Palestinians, including thousands of civilians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

Across the tech industry, workers have become more outspoken in their criticism of business dealings with the Israeli military.

On Thursday, a Microsoft engineer resigned after 13 years at the software giant, claiming the company continues to sell cloud services to the Israeli military and that executives won’t discuss the war in Gaza.

Scott Sutfin-Glowski, a principal software engineer, informed colleagues in a letter that, “I can no longer accept enabling what may be the worst atrocities of our time.”

In the letter, he referred to a February Associated Press article that said Israel’s military had at least 635 Microsoft subscriptions, and he claimed the vast majority of them remain active.

Microsoft fired two employees in August who participated in a protest inside the company’s headquarters. In April 2024, Google terminated 28 employees after a series of protests against labour conditions and its involvement in Project Nimbus.

Amazon hasn’t acknowledged the Nimbus contract beyond stating that it provides technology to customers “wherever they are located.”

Google has previously said it provides generally available cloud computing services to the Israeli government that aren’t “directed at highly sensitive, classified or military workloads.”

Microsoft said in August that most of its work with the Israel Defence Forces involves cybersecurity for the country, and that the company intends to provide technology in an ethical way.