The scale and speed of destruction would not have been possible without the support of international Big Tech. Its cloud services and AI comprise what UN human rights rapporteur, Francesca Albanese calls part of a “joint criminal enterprise” enabling war and genocide. From the US to Israel, via the EU and the Netherlands, we begin to unravel the complex web linking international Big Tech to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. We consider the consequences for Gaza and for the future of warfare itself, discuss questions of accountability, and assess the role Dutch and European citizens can play in helping challenge this “criminal enterprise.”
Lydia de Leeuw is a criminologist and lawyer, specialized in international criminal law: her focus includes international crimes and state-corporate crime. She currently works as a researcher at SOMO, where she has contributed to several reports presenting evidence of corporate complicity in Israel's genocide, most recently "Behind the Barrel: The Oil Traders Fueling Israel's Genocide”. She has spent time in Gaza and the West Bank herself, having lived and worked in Nablus and in the Gaza Strip. She is also chair of Stichting Kifaia, which works to provide medical aid in the Gaza Strip.
Dr. Bassam Abu Hamad is a Gaza-based public health and education management specialist, and Professor and General Coordinator at the School of Public Health at Al-Quds University, where he manages the Gaza branch. He is also Regional Director for the MENA region of the Gender and Adolescence: Global Evidence (GAGE) research programme, and has spent more than 40 years working across academia, government, NGOs, and INGOs on public health systems, social policy, and humanitarian interventions in Palestine and the wider region. He has published more than 100 works, including a co-authored book and twelve book chapters. His most recent research, with Nicola Jones and Joost Vintges, examines the health and psychosocial risks facing young people with disabilities in the war on Gaza.
Dr. Toufic Haddad is a Palestinian American academic and author. He holds a PhD in Development Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and is the author of Palestine Ltd: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory (I.B. Tauris, 2016), as well as co-author, with Tikva Honig-Parnass, of Between the Lines: Israel, the Palestinians, and the US War on Terror. He has worked across the Occupied Palestinian Territories as a journalist, researcher, consultant, editor, and publisher, including in Gaza for several UN bodies. From 2020 to 2024, he directed the Kenyon Institute in Jerusalem. Most recently, he was a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh.
Mark B. Taylor Mark B. Taylor is an analyst and researcher focused on human rights, international crimes, illicit financial flows, and responsible business. For two decades, his research on war economies and corporate accountability has informed case building and advice to governments, civil society, trade unions, and companies. He was previously a senior analyst at the Clooney Foundation for Justice, where he investigated commercial and other enablers of international crimes, and held research and management positions at the Fafo Institute in Oslo. He currently advises Norad’s Nansen Programme for Support to Ukraine on anti-corruption risk management. He is the author of War Economies and International Law: Regulating the Economic Activities of Violent Conflict (Cambridge, 2021).