Amazon suspends Palestinian engineer for protesting against company’s work with Israeli government

Ahmed Shahrour, who worked for Amazon's Whole Foods division in Seattle, was placed on paid suspension.

E-commerce giant Amazon has suspended a Palestinian software engineer who, through internal communication, protested the company’s work with the Israeli government, according to a report by CNBC.

Ahmed Shahrour, who worked for Amazon's Whole Foods division in Seattle, was placed on paid suspension following posts on company Slack channels and a letter to executives including CEO Andy Jassy.

“It has come to Amazon’s attention that a post you made in multiple internal company Slack channels may violate multiple policies,” Shahrour received in a message from an Amazon HR rep, as per CNBC. The company, as per the message, is said to be investigating the matter.

In an interview with CNBC, Shahrour, who has been working at Amazon for the past three years, said that the company revoked his access to the official email and tools and removed his Slack posts as part of the suspension. He claimed that Amazon didn’t state what policies his posts violated.

This came after Shahrour wrote messages in several internal Slack channels and sent a letter to Amazon executives, including CEO Andy Jassy, on Monday, highlighting his concerns.

He asked Amazon to call off Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract launched in 2021 by Amazon and Google to supply the Israeli government with artificial intelligence tools, data centres, and other infrastructure.

“Every day I write code at Whole Foods, I remember my brothers and sisters in Gaza being starved by Israel’s man-made blockade,” the report quoted Shahrour's letter.“I live in a state of constant dissonance: maintaining the tools that make this company profit, while my people are burned and starved with the help of that very profit. I am left with no choice but to resist directly," he added.

Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser didn’t specifically address Shahrour’s situation.

“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,” Glasser wrote in an email to CNBC.

Tech workers at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Palantir and other companies have become more outspoken in their criticism of business dealings with the Israeli military.

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