A woman cleans the storefront of Amazon’s home after activists sprayed paint on its logo during a protest on the opening day of the 55th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 20, 2025.
Yves Herman | Reuters
Amazon has 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 at Amazon’s Whole Foods business in Seattle, received an email Monday informing him of his layoff. When he was suspended in September, Amazon said the decision was a result of messages Shahrour posted on Slack criticizing the company’s ties to Israel.
Amazon said its investigation found that Shahrour had violated the company’s standards of conduct, written communications policy and acceptable use policy, alleging that he “has misused company resources, including by posting numerous non-work-related messages related to the Israel-Palestine conflict.”
“In the next 24 hours 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 Shahrour that was obtained by CNBC. “We appreciate the contributions he has made during his time at Amazon and wish him the best in his future endeavors.”
An employee group associated with Shahrour issued an afternoon news release saying 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 claims constitutes collaboration in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
Shahrour had urged the company to abandon the contract that involves Amazon providing the Israeli government with artificial intelligence tools, data centers and other infrastructure. He also protested and leafleted at Amazon’s headquarters in downtown Seattle.
In a statement to CNBC, Shahrour said his firing is “a blatant act of retaliation designed to silence dissenting Palestinian voices within Amazon and protect Amazon’s collaboration in the genocide from internal scrutiny.”
Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser told CNBC in a statement that the company does not tolerate “discrimination, harassment, or threatening behavior 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,” Glasser said.
Shahrour’s firing comes on the same day that the Palestinian militant group Hamas freed the first seven surviving Israeli hostages, marking the first stage of a ceasefire agreement negotiated with the help of US President Donald Trump. As part of the deal, Israel was also scheduled to release nearly 2,000 Palestinian detainees and prisoners later in the day.
The war began just over two years ago, when Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking hundreds of hostages. Israel followed up with a sustained attack 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 that the company continues to sell cloud services to the Israeli military and that executives will not discuss the war in Gaza. Scott Sutfin-Glowski, a senior software engineer, informed his colleagues in a letter that “I can no longer agree to allow what could be the worst atrocities of our time.”
In the letter, he referred to an Associated Press article from February that said Israel’s military had at least 635 Microsoft subscriptions, and stated that 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 fired 28 employees following a series of protests against working conditions and its participation in Project Nimbus.
Amazon has not acknowledged the Nimbus contract beyond stating that it provides technology to customers “wherever they are.” Google has previously said it provides generally available cloud computing services to the Israeli government that are not “targeted at military, classified or highly sensitive workloads.” Microsoft said in August that most of its work with the Israel Defense Forces involves cybersecurity for the country and that the company intends to provide technology ethically.
— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
LOOK: Is a ceasefire in Gaza sustainable?
