Palantir, from the genocide in Palestine to the NHS, UK. Palantir, del genocidio palestino al Servicio Nacional de Salud británico. ENG ESP

Photo 2 June 2025
Palantir kills in Gaza (and at home, USA)
No Tech for Apartheid, and Extinction Rebellion Disrupt Palantir Head of Defense Mike Gallagher and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan at AI Expo. WASHINGTON–Anti-war and climate activists with CODEPINK, No Tech for Apartheid, and Extinction Rebellion disrupted Mike Gallagher, Head of Defense for Palantir, and John Phelan, the Secretary of the Navy, at the AI+ Expo in Washington, DC.

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Palantir and its role in the Palestinian genocide. AI-powered surveillance firms are gunning for a share of the Gaza spoils
The presence of Palantir and Dataminr at the new U.S. military compound in Israel offers a glimpse of how tech companies are cashing in on the genocide.

A “Maven Field Service Representative” has been present at the The Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) (Israel). Built by the U.S. tech company Palantir, whose logo was visible in presentations given inside the Center, Maven collects and analyses surveillance data taken from warzones to speed-up U.S. military operations, including lethal airstrikes. The platform sucks information from satellites, spy planes, drones, intercepted telecommunications, and the internet, and “packages it into a common, searchable app for commanders and support groups,” according to U.S. defense outlets. 
The U.S. military calls Maven its “AI-powered battlefield platform.” It has already been deployed to guide U.S. airstrikes across the Middle East, including in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq. Palantir has marketed its technology as shortening the process of identifying and bombing military targets — what the company’s CTO recently described as “optimizing the kill chain.” Over the summer, Palantir scored a $10 billion contract to update and refine the Maven platform for U.S. armed forces.  

Palantir has also worked closely with Israel’s military since January 2024, when the two parties entered into a “strategic partnership” for “war related missions.” The company has been aggressively recruiting employees to staff its Tel Aviv office, which first opened in 2015 and has expanded significantly over the last two years. Justifying its stalwart commitment to Israel in spite of mounting charges of war crimes and genocide, Palantir CEO Alex Karp recently said his company was the first to be “completely anti-woke.”

Palantir: The Silicon Valley Company Adopted by the CIA and Mossad

Palantir was founded in 2003 by Alex Karp, its current CEO, along with Peter Thiel, the controversial Silicon Valley businesswoman known for co-founding PayPal and for her far-right political views.

From its inception, Palantir Technologies was funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital firm, which is also linked to Mossad and the creation of tools like Google Maps. This powerful data analytics and artificial intelligence platform rose to prominence when it was credited with playing a key role in the capture of Osama Bin Laden, refining an information extraction system initiated by Rear Admiral John Poindexter within the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program, a direct precursor to the mass surveillance tools later exposed by Edward Snowden.

What is Palantir and how does it work? Palantir is not conventional software: it's a pioneering system for integrating, managing, and analyzing large-scale data using AI. Its technology allows for cross-referencing military intelligence, financial records, communications, activist profiles, political data, and, in the current context, the entire population of Gaza.

According to the specialized website Xataka, Palantir collects:

Personal data: name, address, license plate number, national identity number.

Digital data: emails, phone numbers, travel history, social media photos.

Relationships: potential family members, professional or personal ties.

The objective: to create detailed maps of social relationships and anticipate movements to direct military operations.

Anonymous vs. Palantir: the WikiLeaks threat In 2011, the group Anonymous began lobbying Palantir after documents were released linking it to an attempt to neutralize WikiLeaks. Barrett Brown, a member of Anonymous and a journalist for publications such as Vanity Fair and The Guardian, denounced Palantir as a direct threat to press freedom and transparency.

Although Anonymous denied launching direct cyberattacks, it warned that it would be closely monitoring the corporation: “No one controls Anonymous… we are on a war footing,” Brown declared.

Palantir in Gaza: Artificial Intelligence at the Service of Genocide According to a report published by The Guardian and cited by The British Tribune, Israel used artificial intelligence on a massive scale for the first time during the 2021 Gaza War.

The Palantir software played a key role in:

Selecting bombing targets based on data analysis.

Classifying civilians as “potential threats” based on relationship and location patterns.

One of the most egregious attacks attributed to this artificial intelligence was the intentional bombing of the World Central Kitchen humanitarian convoy, an organization that distributed food in Gaza. The toll: seven aid workers murdered to ensure that, under no circumstances, food reached the population of Gaza.

Furthermore, Palantir has been instrumental in identifying and directing attacks against:

Palestinian journalists.

Human rights activists.

Maternity centers.

Unarmed women, girls, and civilians.

Each target is pre-screened and marked by the platform. Israel knows exactly who it is killing and does so deliberately as part of its Zionist campaign of ethnic extermination against Palestine.

The meaning of Palantir: "the all-seeing one" The company's name is not accidental. In the "Lord of the Rings" universe, Palantir is the name of magical stones that allow one to see distant and secret events. The company chose this name to represent its capacity for total surveillance of any targeted person or population.

 

Introduction, Palantir in the UK, National Health Service

A coalition of leading human rights, health groups and trade unions has urged NHS England to cancel its contract with Palantir based on serious risks to the NHS. Medact has sent its new briefing document, Concerns Regarding Palantir Technologies in NHS Data Systems, to all NHS trust and Integrated Care Board CEOs.
It urges them to exercise their local autonomy and not comply with NHS England’s instruction to adopt Palantir’s Federated Data Platform.

Palantir: Coalition urges NHS (National Health Service, UK) organisations to refuse to use controversial tech giant’s software
BMJ 2026; 392 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.s481 (Published 12 March 2026) Cite this as: BMJ 2026;392:s481
Stephen Armstrong

Every hospital in England has been urged to disobey an NHS directive to use software operated by controversial US analytics software company Palantir.

A coalition of human rights, health and patient organisations, and unions sent out the plea to NHS trusts by email, out of concern over Palantir’s federated data platform (FDP).

They urged hospitals to not follow NHS England’s instructions to sign a memorandum of understanding to use the FDP, as set out in planning guidance issued in October.1

This guidance said all trusts should be using FDP “core products” from April, although this, NHS sources indicated, was a policy decision rather than an enforceable instruction.

The FDP was created during the covid pandemic with the aim of helping manage a federalised, siloed health service at a time of national crisis. Palantir won the now £1bn contract to supply the service using its Foundry software, a platform that can connect incompatible databases and allows customers to integrate and analyse data from across many different sources.23

In the post-covid NHS this involves monitoring things such as waiting lists, hospital supplies, and available beds and operating theatres.

But a new briefing document from the health worker campaign group Medact, called Concerns Regarding Palantir Technologies in NHS Data Systems,4 emphasises that hospitals have the ability to refuse NHS England’s directive and urges them to do so.

The document, shared with The BMJ and Guardian, outlines concerns over Palantir’s past behaviour, data security of the FDP platform, potential harm to trust among patients, and the risk of the FDP being used by other government departments to access people’s health data.

“We know the FDP rollout is not going to plan, and we know that NHS England is under intense pressure to cancel the contract when it reaches its break clause in February 2027,” said Medact’s Rhiannon Osborne.

She spoke for a collection of groups concerned about Palantir, including Amnesty International, the Good Law Project, Privacy International, Just Treatment, Corporate Watch, and the United Tech and Allied Workers Union.

She added, “Fifty thousand patients have written formal complaints to their hospitals, and the BMA is telling members to explore ways around using Palantir products.

“It’s a key time for local hospitals to exercise their autonomy when NHS England isn’t listening.”

Medact is also concerned that, with Palantir systems in place, the Home Office border control, police forces across the country, and current or future UK governments could use NHS data for other purposes.

Some political parties have already indicated a potential willingness to use health data in this manner.

For example, Reform has announced plans to share data between the Home Office, NHS, HM Revenue and Customs, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, banks, and the police as part of a proposed UK Deportation Command “to identify illegal migrants and deport them.”5

But NHS England sources have said that, as Palantir was appointed in line with public contract regulations, it must operate only under the instruction of the health service when processing data and that strict stipulations in the contract about confidentiality would prevent such data sharing.

Palantir was founded in 2003 by the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, former philosophy academic Alex Karp, and computer scientist Stephen Cohen, with financial backing from the CIA.

It initially supplied software platforms to governments and military and law enforcement organisations. Customers include the US Army and Department of Defense, the UK and Israel defence ministries, and NATO, as well as most NATO members and the Ukrainian military.

Palantir also works with law enforcement in the UK and the US. In the US it controversially provided services for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

In January it emerged that US immigration agents were using an app developed by Palantir that draws on the health records of millions of Americans to find and detain people they deemed illegal immigrants.6

In the wake of this, the BMA (British Medical Association) chair of council, Tom Dolphin, warned that the use of Palantir in the NHS could risk patient safety.

“If patients no longer feel able to trust the NHS to handle their data confidentially or worry that the personal information they share with their doctor will be used for purposes which they do not expect, this will undermine public trust in a confidential health service,” he wrote in a rapid response to The BMJ.7

Dolphin added, “It is the view of the BMA that doctors working in the NHS can no longer provide the tacit endorsement that using a product implies and must immediately take steps to explore refusing any non-direct care usage of Palantir’s federated data platform, with a view to moving away from the platform entirely in time, when a suitable alternative can be put in place.”

He later told The BMJ directly, “The BMA will provide guidance to members on what this means in practice, including whether there is an option to not use Palantir’s platform in such situations.”

The FDP rollout in the NHS is incomplete, but NHS England said that more trusts were signing up to the system, which had clear benefits,8 a spokesperson said.

“The FDP is already delivering for patients and the NHS—helping to join up care, increase hospital productivity, speed up cancer diagnosis, and ensure thousands of additional patients can be treated each month,” an NHS England spokesperson told The BMJ. “The platform is now being used by over 150 NHS organisations across England, with another 57 signed up to implement it in the next few months.”

However, some trusts, including Royal Marsden, Great Ormond Street, Leeds Teaching Hospitals, and Nottingham University College, have not adopted the platform, with some, including Leeds and Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board, saying their existing systems were superior.9

Palantir has rejected the claims in Medact’s document, including that its engineers were accessing patient identifiable data.

The company stated that Palantir engineers were able to access data only under the direction of NHS England data controllers and only for appropriate engineering activities.

“Palantir software is playing an important role in improving patient care through the NHS federated data platform,” a Palantir spokesperson told The BMJ, “helping to deliver 100 000 additional operations, a 12% reduction in discharge delays, and the removal of 675 000 patients from waiting lists.

“That role has been publicly recognised by a large number of trusts. How the software is used is entirely under the control of the NHS, with data only able to be processed in accordance with their strict instructions.

“We have no intention of and no means of using the data in the way that the Medact report is suggesting. To do so would be illegal and in breach of contract. The software has world leading, fully auditable data security and governance capabilities.”

References

    ↵NHS England. Medium term planning framework—delivering change together 2026/27 to 2028/29. Updated Dec 2025. https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/medium-term-planning-framework-delivering-change-together-2026-27-to-2028-29
    ↵Talora J. Exclusive: Full cost of federated data platform to exceed £1bn. HSJ. Aug 2025. https://www.hsj.co.uk/technology-and-innovation/exclusive-full-cost-of-federated-data-platform-to-exceed-1bn/7039871.article
    ↵Hasking C. What does Palantir actually do? Wired. Aug 2025. https://www.wired.com/story/palantir-what-the-company-does
    ↵Medact. Briefing: Concerns regarding Palantir Technologies and NHS data systems. 12 Mar 2026. https://www.medact.org/briefing-palantir-fdp
    ↵Reform. Our plan to deport all illegal migrants in the UK, and secure our borders. https://www.reform-oxfordshire.co.uk/operation-restoring-justice
    ↵
        Taylor L. ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants. BMJ2026;392:s168. doi:10.1136/bmj.s168 pmid:41592818
    
    ↵Dolphin T. BMA responds to Palantir’s involvement with ICE and questions their increasing centrality in the NHS [rapid response]. BMJ 2026. https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s168/rr-2
    ↵NHS England. NHS federated data platform uptake and benefits. https://www.england.nhs.uk/digitaltechnology/nhs-federated-data-platform/impact/fdp-uptake-and-benefits
    ↵
        Limb M. Palantir and NHS: BMA to tell members to limit use of tech system. BMJ2026;392:s246. doi:10.1136/bmj.s246 pmid:41644151

A spokesperson for the United Tech and Allied Workers Union said:

    Palantir’s encroachment into public services should be of utmost concern to the public and the government. The question of control is critical to maintaining both infrastructure and healthcare delivery.

    Our members in the tech sector understand the importance of trust and oversight in tech, and this company has repeatedly proven itself to be untrustworthy and scruple-less.

    Our NHS systems should be built and owned with public oversight and accountability. We should be leveraging and building in-house NHS technology expertise to deliver the data system we rely on, rather than giving Palantir profit and control of our private health data.

Hope Worsdale of Just Treatment said:

    The trust between a patient and their doctor is paramount: it is the bedrock of the health service. Placing Palantir at the heart of our NHS – despite its immoral business practices, deadly products, anti-democratic leadership, and ineffective services – will have an irreparable, corrosive effect on that trust.

    It begs the question: why have the lines of lobbyists mattered more to this government than the lives of patients?

    We call on everyone with power within the NHS to heed this report’s warning, and resist at every possible point the imposition of Palantir’s control over patient data.

    We call on parliamentarians to demand the government rips up its contract with Palantir, and develops a data processing system owned and controlled by our health service focused solely on the interests, needs, and rights of NHS patients.

 

ESPAÑOL

Foto 2 de junio de 2025 Palantir asesina en Gaza (y en Estados Unidos) No Tech for Apartheid y Extinction Rebellion interrumpen la intervención de Mike Gallagher, jefe de defensa de Palantir, y John Phelan, secretario de la Marina, en la AI+ Expo. WASHINGTON – Activistas pacifistas y climáticos de CODEPINK, No Tech for Apartheid y Extinction Rebellion interrumpieron la intervención de Mike Gallagher, jefe de defensa de Palantir, y John Phelan, secretario de la Marina, en la AI+ Expo en Washington, D.C.

NOTA

Palantir y su implicación con Israel para el genocidio en Gaza. Las empresas de vigilancia impulsadas por IA buscan hacerse con una parte del botín de Gaza. La presencia de Palantir y Dataminr en el nuevo complejo militar estadounidense en Israel ofrece una muestra de cómo las empresas tecnológicas se están lucrando con el genocidio.

Introducción, Palantir en el Servicio Nacional de Salud del Reino Unido:

Una coalición de destacadas organizaciones de derechos humanos, salud y sindicatos ha instado al NHS England a cancelar su contrato con Palantir debido a los graves riesgos que supone para el NHS. Medact ha enviado su nuevo informe, «Preocupaciones sobre las tecnologías de Palantir en los sistemas de datos del NHS», a todos los directores ejecutivos de los fideicomisos del NHS y de las juntas de atención integrada. En él, se les insta a ejercer su autonomía local y a no acatar la instrucción del NHS England de adoptar la plataforma de datos federados de Palantir.