This is the second part of Al Jazeera’s Blood Tech series, which looks at how governments around the world, including those critical of Israel, are still using the technology they experimented on Palestinians. The first part, which looks at how the UK exploited Israeli military spyware, can be read here.
U.S. tech giant Palantir’s relationship with the British government has come under increased scrutiny following the arrest of former British ambassador to the United States Peter Mandelson over his links to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
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Palantir was a client of Mr. Mandelson’s recently shuttered consultancy Global Counsel, which helped support Israel’s genocidal war in the Gaza Strip and continued occupation of the West Bank.
Despite public criticism of Mr. Palantir and Mr. Mandelson, the British government has struck a wide range of deals with the American tech giant, awarding defense contracts worth 240 million pounds ($323 million) in January. This contract was awarded directly to Palantir, while a separate contract worth £330 million ($444 million) involving the UK Department of Health was awarded in November 2023 following a tender process. Campaigners say the contents of the latter contract remain heavily redacted.
support for israel
In addition to its role in supporting U.S. President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown that has resulted in killings and illegal deportations, Palantir has extensive coordination with the Israeli military and its operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Palantir was founded in 2003 by a group of technology entrepreneurs, including Peter Thiel and current CEO Alex Karp, and opened its first office in Israel in 2015.
Palantir has been actively recruiting veteran members of Unit 8200, Israel’s cyber intelligence arm, according to Open Intel, a platform that tracks corporate involvement in the Gaza massacre. After agreeing to what the company’s website calls a “strategic partnership” with Israel in January 2024, the company significantly increased its operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, combining various datasets from intercepted communications, satellites, and other online data to create a targeting, or “kill list” for the Gaza Strip. Israeli army.
Although Palantir characterizes its technology as an analytical tool rather than a direct targeting system, its integration into Israel’s command and control workflows has drawn criticism from human rights researchers. U.N. officials also argue that technology like Palantir will greatly influence the pace and scale at which Israeli forces target people.
Last May, in response to jeers from a Washington, D.C., audience about his company’s role in the Gaza massacre, Karp laughed and said that while Israel acknowledged that 70,000 people were killed during military operations, “the main cause of death in Palestine is the fact that Hamas recognizes that there are millions of useful idiots.”
In response to Al Jazeera’s request for comment, a Palantir UK spokesperson said: “As a company, Palantir does support Israel. We choose to support them because of the horrific events of October 7th. And more broadly, we choose to support them because we believe in supporting the West and its allies. And Israel is a key ally of the West.”
Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza began on October 7, 2023, after Hamas-led fighters killed around 1,200 people in southern Israel.
mandelson tie
The scrutiny of Mr. Mandelson’s relationship with Mr. Palantir and the British government has taken on new urgency since the former ambassador’s arrest in late February on charges contained in the Epstein files, millions of documents detailing the disgraced financier’s activities. Mr. Mandelson maintained a relationship with Mr. Epstein even after his 2008 sex-crime conviction and may have shared financially sensitive market-sensitive information with him.
Many opposition MPs and industry groups in the UK are calling for an overhaul of Palantir, with some MPs describing it as “appalling” and a “highly questionable organization”. Of concern to many is the February 2025 visit by Mandelson and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to Palantir’s headquarters in Washington, DC. This comes 11 months before the UK selected Palantir in a non-competitive tender process to provide artificial intelligence to the military.
Requests from technology fairness groups Foxglobe, the Good Law Project and Al Jazeera have not yet disclosed details of the meeting. However, in response to a freedom of information request by the Good Law Project in April 2025, the UK Cabinet Office described it as an “informal” and unrecorded meeting between the British prime minister, the ambassador, and a US company that by then had already been accused of participating in war crimes in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
In response to Al Jazeera’s questions about details of the meeting, a government spokesperson said: “Ministers are interacting with a range of businesses as part of their overseas trips to promote the UK’s trade and investment links.
“We also use a wide range of international suppliers based on operational requirements, value for money, security and compliance with legal obligations, and all suppliers are subject to rigorous due diligence.”
Palantir and NHS
Questions have also been raised about Palantir’s contract with the UK Health Service.
Foxglove and other NGOs, including human rights pressure group MedAct, have raised specific questions about Palantir’s initial acceptance of just £1 ($1.35) in March 2020 as an emergency contract to help the NHS deal with the coronavirus pandemic. The deal gave Palantir access to NHS data and ultimately earned the company a handsome fee. The current contract between Palantir and the NHS is worth £23.5 million ($31.6 million).
In September 2022, Bloomberg reporters claimed to have seen documents suggesting Palantir’s “secret plan” to further entrench itself within the NHS without public oversight. This tactic is commonly referred to as “bender capture.”
An email from Louis Mosley, Palantir’s regional director, titled “Buying our way in…!” was quoted by Bloomberg. He reportedly outlined a strategy to “crack down” on smaller rivals providing services to the NHS, “gain a lot of ground and quash a lot of political resistance”.
A company spokesperson later said the wording choice was “unfortunate.”
Nevertheless, Palantir has continued to expand its footprint in the NHS since then, and in February 2023 it sent a delegation to a banquet hosted by Mandelson’s global advisers, where NHS chief data and analytics officer Ming Tan was the ‘guest of honor’.
This was around nine months before Palantir was chosen to lead the NHS’s new Federated Data Platform, a contract worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
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British Defense Minister John Healy and Health Minister Wes Streeting did not respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment.
But Mr. Healy told Bloomberg in February that Mr. Mandelson had no role in securing a non-contested contract between Palantir and the Department of Defense, and that the decision was Mr. Mandelson’s alone.
Mr Streeting, who was opposition minister in June 2024, acknowledged in a private WhatsApp message to Mr Mandelson in July that Israel was “committing war crimes right under our noses”, but rejected criticism of Palantir and its access to NHS data systems, saying such concerns were “not on my mind”.
Mr Street told reporters: “A national decision has been taken with significant public funding. This is vitally important for patients. Let’s go further, go faster.”
Anna Bacciarelli, a senior AI researcher at Human Rights Watch, told Al Jazeera that successive British governments are responsible for Palantir’s access to public service data.
“Thanks to successive British governments, Palantir has a strong foothold in multiple public services, while also contracting with other governments that have committed human rights abuses, such as Israel’s attack on Gaza and the US government’s crackdown on immigration,” Bacciarelli said.
“All companies have a responsibility to ensure that their products and services do not cause or contribute to human rights abuses. The UK government should conduct thorough due diligence on all contractors, especially given Palantir’s current access to sensitive health data of British citizens and UK national security data.”
Despite how Palantir claims its motives, there are growing concerns among activists, rights groups and end users about the UK’s relationship with the company.
“We have identified what appears to be vendor lock-in at the MoD, and it is clear that Palantir’s intention is to make the UK government as dependent on its products as possible,” Tom Hegarty, head of communications at Foxglove, told Al Jazeera in an emailed comment.
He then looked at some of the resistance from within the UK health service caused by perceptions of Palantir as an American company, and questions about what value Palantir’s technology would add to the existing systems of hospitals and local health authorities in Leeds and Manchester.
“Palantir has stated in the past that it aims to become the government’s ‘operating system’ and is also expanding into the Metropolitan Police and local authority level, particularly in Coventry (in central England),” he said.
“Whether that is a reason for the UK government to stop handing them big contracts is a matter for ministers,” Mr Hegarty added.
