A ‘customer success story’: leaked documents show Cisco doubled down on Israeli military deals during Gaza 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.”

The September 2025 draft memo was part of a trove of internal documents leaked by Cisco workers furious with the company’s ties to Israel’s military three years into the war, which has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians.

Cisco, one of the largest tech companies in the world and at one point the single most valuable, is often described as selling the “plumbing” of the internet. It provides the routers, servers and communications systems that move data for companies, governments and militaries around the globe. While its business ties to the Israeli military have received less scrutiny than those of other tech giants, the company has worked with the Israeli security state for years. Israel’s military intelligence contracts alone generated about $67m in business in three years, according to a 2025 document reviewed by the Guardian.

While Cisco’s involvement with Israel’s military before and since 2023 has been documented before, the leaked documents obtained by the Guardian reveal the lengths the company went to in order to preserve and expand the relationship as the war in Gaza dragged on. They also show that earlier this year, Splunk – a Cisco subsidiary platform that can process and analyze massive volumes of machine-generated data – made a pitch to join the controversial cloud computing contract between the Israeli government, Google and Amazon known as Project Nimbus.

Cisco pursued these opportunities as the mass killing of civilians in Gaza was amply documented, international organizations and governments began to refer to Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, and the company itself was roiled by internal turmoil over its own role in the war.

Cisco did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Israeli military wrote in a statement to the Guardian: “The [Israel Defense Forces] is assisted by services provided by a range of companies to meet its ongoing needs and objectives. The IDF does not intend to comment on matters relating to contracts or services provided by other entities.”

Members of Bridge to Humanity, a group of current and former Cisco workers who have objected to the company’s role in the Gaza war, called the company’s work with Israeli intelligence a “shocking and complete contradiction of values Cisco sells to us employees and externally to its customers, investors, and the public”. They said the company, which pitches itself internally and to the public as an ethics-driven company, had become “an instrument of genocide”.

“Cisco has been able to skate under the radar because they sell hardware and software,” the group wrote in a statement to the Guardian, adding that its business with Israeli intelligence made it “no different to an arms company that is supplying the bombs and fighter jets”.

Earlier this year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) found reasonable cause to believe that, following the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on southern Israel, and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza, Cisco oversaw a hostile work environment rife with racist rhetoric that violated the rights of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim employees. Cisco previously told the Guardian that it disagreed with the EEOC’s findings and that it is committed to being an equal opportunity employer.

The Bridge to Humanity members alleged that the treatment they endured was linked directly to Cisco’s business interests.

“While Cisco leadership was constantly dismissing our concerns about how it was enabling the horrors we were witnessing,” they wrote, “they were behind the scenes going above and beyond to actively continue to expand their business relationship with the Israeli military and ensure they did not lose a cent of business.”

‘Never let a good crisis go to waste’

When repeated technical failures presented a “risk to operations” during the war, Israeli intelligence leaders threatened to cancel their business.

Cisco went into crisis mode.

In the documents obtained by the Guardian, Cisco referred to its client as the Israel Intelligence Force, or IIF, a body it described as responsible for “delivering critical network infrastructure for various intelligence departments within the Israeli Ministry of Defense”. Several branches of Israel’s government and military are dedicated to intelligence operations, but the IIF appears to be a reference to the IDF’s military intelligence directorate, known as Aman in Israel.

According to Cisco workers familiar with the technical issues, the outages and blackouts endangered intelligence forces’ access to military data.

The leaked documents also reveal that the company activated senior staff in an effort to salvage what it described as a “critical” account, and that it mobilized multiple internal teams over several months to fix the bugs. Cisco also sent staff to meet on site with a secretive Israeli military unit, known as Sapir, which since the 7 October attacks has reportedly been responsible for moving Israel’s intelligence apparatus underground. According to the Cisco documents, fixing the technical issues and training the customer “required site visits by Cisco under extreme security due to ongoing war”.

Cisco’s goal, according to the documents, was to restore “customer confidence” and reverse “negative sentiment”. After fixing the technical issues and helping Sapir return to “business as usual”, between 2024 and the summer of 2025, Cisco noted the client was satisfied and billed the damage control effort as a “customer success story” in an internal presentation.

The leaked documents detail dozens of deals Cisco worked on in 2026 with different Israeli government clients, including the intelligence community, air force and navy, many of which were tagged as “AI” deals. They include evidence that executives for the Cisco-owned Splunk platform sought to join Project Nimbus, though it is not clear whether the deal went through.

Watchdogs that document the private sector’s involvement in Israel’s occupation have found that Cisco has long provided Israel with technological support for its surveillance of Palestinians. Earlier this year, Drop Site News cited Cisco documents which noted that investment in technology had become as important to the military “as the focus on aircrafts, tanks, and any other essential military tools”. It also reported on a company presentation featuring the quote: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

Cisco is only the latest tech giant to face the anger of its employees over work with Israel’s military. Since October 2023, tech workers across the sector have denounced what they view as their employers’ complicity in Israeli crimes enabled by the tech products they develop and sell.

“At the same time, we’ve seen more and more reporting coming out showing that a lot of these companies have increased their revenue streams through larger military contracts with the Israeli military,” said Eric Sype, a US-based organizer with the Palestinian digital rights non-profit 7amleh, which has documented several companies’ repressive response to workers’ activism. “The tech sector is moving more and more aggressively into military contracting, and these companies are becoming weapons manufacturing companies.”

Cisco in particular has come under increasing public pressure over its role in the war. A group of investors has called on the company to commission an independent human rights assessment of its business with the Israeli military, and shareholders are expected to vote on a proposal requiring the company to do so at its upcoming general meeting this month.

While Microsoft, Google and Amazon have faced far more scrutiny and backlash over their business with Israel’s military, those companies’ contracts “would mean nothing without the physical hardware and infrastructure that Cisco provides”, Sype said.

“Cisco is at the foundational level facilitating all of these atrocity crimes that are happening and should be talked about and referenced in the same way.”