A ‘customer success story’: leaked documents show Cisco doubled down on Israeli military deals during Gaza war
Current
and former Cisco workers have objected to the company’s role in the
Gaza war, calling it a ‘shocking and complete contradiction of values’
Tech giant leaped to shore up relationship even as company was roiled by worker protest over its role in the war
A year into the war in Gaza, the networks of Israel’s
military intelligence community were plagued with technical problems.
There were major, multi-hour outages to their systems, and repeated
crashes. Built-in debugging mechanisms failed.
The
problems, which started as intelligence operations were undergoing
updates to digital infrastructure, became so persistent as to undermine
the “confidence” of Israeli intelligence agencies in one of their top
network providers: the multinational tech conglomerate Cisco.
“This
series of events happened during the period of war, deeply impacting
customer sentiment,” warned a confidential memo drafted by Cisco
and obtained by the Guardian. “During a period of national conflict,
these repeated outages severely impacted critical operations.”
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Tech
stocks have lost trillions while voters have rejected the industry’s
political champions. The billionaire-led boom is facing a democratic
reckoning
This
week’s midterms showed that the political bill for the AI boom is
falling due. The Democratic sweep intensified fears over runaway
spending, mounting debt and resistance to datacentres, sending tech
shares tumbling. On Thursday Wall Street suffered its worst day since
the pandemic as $3.2tn was wiped from markets. Anthropic, developer of the Claude chatbot, is hoping to float within the next fortnight for $1.5tn (£1.1tn), but it may not now get even a trillion dollars. The dominant AI chipmaker Nvidia saw its value crash by more than $400bn. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, lost $113bn in two days.
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Children
watch Israeli security forces deploying in al-Mughayyir on 29
September, when dozens of settlers from hilltop outposts raided the
village, leaving at least five burnt-out cars. Photograph: Zain Jaafar/AFP/Getty Images
This year, parents in al-Mughayyir had to be
persuaded to send their children back to school. Israeli settlers had
killed five teenage students last academic year – one of them at the
school gates.
To reassure parents, teachers of
the public secondary school gave a tour of the facilities, which they
had spent the summer break fortifying. Metal fences now towered over the
schoolyard’s walls and the door had been replaced by a sturdy metal
gate. A new wall shielded the classrooms from a hilltop where last
academic year a settler had shot dead two people, including a student.
Al-Mughayyir,
a town of about 3,000 people north-east of Ramallah in the occupied
West Bank, is under a siege by Israeli settlers. Armed settlers
regularly raid the village, assaulting residents, attacking homes and
seizing livestock. Israeli soldiers set up checkpoints that prevent
people from entering or leaving for hours at a time.
The school is isolated on the very edge of the
village, close to its entrance. Settlers stage their raids around the
school, attacking under the watchful eye of the Israeli military.
A
single Israeli soldier stands at the entrance of the village, his rifle
slung over his shoulder as he paces back and forth idly. It is he who
decides who can come and go in the village. The excited shouting of
schoolchildren playing can be heard from where he stands; the children’s
voices echo across the otherwise quiet village, most shops shuttered
despite it being a weekday.
Residents say the violence is part of a wider project to displace Palestinians from their land,
one that has already driven smaller communities from their homes. Now,
they fear the same tactics are being turned against an entire village in
an attempt to make life so intolerable that residents leave.
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It is shameful that the world failed to prevent genocide, failed to shelter Gaza's civilians from Israel's bombs, and is now failing even to lift the blockade on basic supplies that would protect children and their families as rain floods the camps of displaced people across Gaza.
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Every
morning, I look at myself and my neighbours standing in the queue for
water, and remember how each of us once had a life of our own, our
privacy, our own toothbrush, our own home and our own bathroom. How we
used to wash our faces and drink clean water without ever imagining that
a day would come when these simple routines would become a battle with
ourselves and with every drop of water. Even standing beneath a hot
shower has become a dream postponed until further notice.
War
is not simply the bombing of buildings or the evacuation of a
residential neighbourhood. There are small wars inside this one enormous
war. The tent is a war. The surveillance drone – the zannana,
as we call it, for its incessant buzzing – is a war. Queueing for water
is a war. Waiting to use the toilet is a war. The death of privacy is a
war. Thirty people crammed into a single room is a war.
Every
morning, the same question follows me: what will happen today? Will my
children return from what remains of their school to what remains of our
home, having walked along what remains of a street, when bombardment
could take them from me at any moment?
They
walk long distances because transport is difficult and expensive amid
fuel shortages, repeated border crossing closures and the trickle of
essential supplies into Gaza. It is as though life itself is being rationed to us, drop by drop.
In
Gaza, waking up alive is not enough. You must also make sure that the
place where you slept is still somewhere you can spend the following
night. You must hope that your children can dream of an ordinary day –
one in which obtaining a loaf of bread, an education or medical
treatment is not an achievement worthy of celebration.
It is as though the ceasefire never happened. The
sounds of bombardment, explosions and surveillance drones have
continued to accompany our days and nights. What remains of our homes
and tents trembles – and so do our hearts.
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... Within hours, the whole city of 250,000 people had been sealed off [by Israeli forces] and
the neighbourhood of Farsh al-Hawa [Palestine], closest to the site of Friday’s
attack [on Israeli forces at one of the many Israeli checkpoint chokeholds on Palestine], had been flattened. By Sunday morning, there was nothing left
but rubble of an industrial area that had been full of car workshops, a
big ceramics plant and other enterprises.
As the bulldozers were at work there, another
district a few kilometres away was being systematically emptied. Ein
Deir Baha was allegedly home to at least one of the two men involved in
the attack (both of whom were killed on the spot), and on Friday its
residents paid the price.
Fahed
Ahmaro, who was forced to flee his home in the Deir Baha area of Hebron
by Israeli security forces, looks at his house from a distance. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum/The Guardian
The imam from the
local mosque, Fahed Ahmaro, was woken at about midnight by the
loudspeakers from military vehicles patrolling the street, telling [Palestinian] homeowners to vacate their homes immediately for their own safety.
Ahmaro had 30 members of his family living in his
house. He rushed his frail mother and some of his grandchildren to his
daughter’s house in another part of Hebron, and was on his way back in
the hope of picking up some of his possessions when his neighbour phoned
him.
“He told me not to come back, and the [Israeli] army had blown up the gates to the house. I don’t know what they have
done to it by now. I heard they destroyed the furniture,” Ahmaro said.
“You don’t know what you have until you lose it. Now I realise how
devastating it is to lose your home.”
At midday on Sunday, he was in a Hebron market
shopping for a change of clothes for his grandchildren, uncertain how
long the family’s exile would last.
He had
heard that the house was being used as a base by Israeli soldiers and
looking up at the house, perched on the side of a steep hill, he could
see some lights on but no sign of life.
The
Hebron municipality said that 370 families, nearly 2,000 people, had
been displaced by the army sweep through Ein Deir Baha. In its official
comments, the Israeli army had said that the displaced population had
left voluntarily, that “civilians who wished to evacuate were permitted
to temporarily leave the area”.
Ahmaro was outraged at the suggestion that he had any choice about fleeing.
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Israeli soldiers raze neighbourhood in Hebron, driving families from homes
PM Benjamin Netanyahu vows ‘to destroy this place’ in retaliation for militant attack on army checkpoinks
Israeli troops have levelled a neighbourhood in Hebron, driving out hundreds of families in collective punishment for a militant attack on an army checkpoint outside the West Bank city, local Palestinian authorities said.
The
Hebron municipality estimated that 35 hectares (86 acres) had been
destroyed or marked for destruction and about 1,500 people had been
evicted from their homes by Saturday afternoon in the district of Ein
Deir Baha. The whole city of 250,000 people was sealed off by
checkpoints on every point of entry.
Videos
sent by a Hebron resident showed a substantial area of devastation with
every house over several blocks flattened in an urban area. One video
showed soldiers marking Palestinian houses with a sprayed black cross,
another showed a bulldozer tearing down a stone wall on a hillside and
another showed a large residential building festooned with Israeli
flags... READ MOREhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/24/israel-soldiers-raze-west-bank-neighbourhood-hebron-families-from-homes
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Our latest highlights key findings from Francesca Albanese’s report, “Truth Under the Rubble: Media in the Time of Genocide”, exposing the systemic silencing of Palestinian journalists & the suppression of truth. Reshare to amplify findings & demand press freedom & accountability
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This report examines how the destruction of truth has
become integral to the destruction of a people. It identifies three
interconnected patterns: the elimination of Palestinian media workers –
through killing, maiming, arbitrary detention, torture, intimidation and
the systematic labelling of them as “terrorists” – to suppress the
documentation of crimes; the construction of an information regime in
Israel through media restrictions, censorship, propaganda, hate speech,
genocidal incitement and denial; and the role of influential
international media and digital platforms in marginalizing Palestinian
voices and reproducing Israeli narratives, normalizing legal
distortions, which ultimately legitimized atrocities. Together, these
practices have not merely accompanied genocide but have facilitated its
commission and obstructed accountability. Some aspects of this assault
on truth might be described as “mediacide”.
Issued By:
Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967
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Israeli authorities have severed Hebron from the rest of the occupied West Bank, sealing the governorate behind 106 iron gates and blocking 16 major access roads with earth mounds.
Israel seals Hebron with 106 iron gates and moves to annex Ibrahimi Mosque amid West Bank siege
——
Israeli authorities have severed Hebron from the rest of the occupied West Bank, sealing the governorate behind 106 iron gates and blocking 16 major access roads with earth mounds.
Hebron Governor Khaled Dodin revealed during a press conference that the sweeping military closure serves as a physical framework for the systematic annexation of the historic Ibrahimi Mosque, according to Anadolu Agency.
Occupation forces have advanced unauthorized construction on the sanctuary's roof while seizing municipal infrastructure, water networks, and electrical controls.
The administrative takeover was codified when Tel Aviv stripped the Hebron Municipality of its legal management powers, transferring jurisdiction directly to the nearby illegal Kiryat Arba settlement.
Palestinian officials denounced the move as a flagrant assault on the historical status quo of the holy site, noting that occupation forces have banned the Muslim call to prayer for ten consecutive days and barred local worshippers.
The siege on the sanctuary unfolds alongside a broader colonial land grab that has seen the establishment of over 20 new illegal settlement outposts and more than 700 recorded occupation and settler attacks across the governorate.
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...READ MORE