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19-03-2026
LONDON/ NEW YORK: Ties between the US tech giant Palantir and the United Kingdom government are coming under increased scrutiny following the arrest of former UK ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson over his links to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Palantir, which was a client of Mandelson’s recently-shuttered consultancy company Global Counsel, has been instrumental in supporting Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and continued occupation of the West Bank.
Despite its public criticism of both Palantir and Mandelson, the UK government has entered into extensive contracts with the US tech giant, signing a defence contract worth 240 million pounds ($323m) in January. The contract was awarded to Palantir directly, while another, worth 330 million pounds ($444m) and involving the UK’s Ministry of Health, was awarded in November 2023 following a bidding process. The latter contract’s contents, campaigners say, remain heavily redacted.
Support for Israel
In addition to its role supporting US President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, which has resulted in killings and unlawful deportations, Palantir has partnered extensively with the Israeli military and its operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Established in 2003 by a cohort of technology entrepreneurs, including Peter Thiel and current CEO Alex Karp, Palantir opened its first office in Israel in 2015.
According to Open Intel, a platform tracking corporate involvement in the Gaza genocide, Palantir has actively recruited veteran members of Israel’s cyber intelligence wing, Unit 8200. After agreeing to what its website refers to as a “strategic partnership” with Israel in January 2024, the company significantly stepped up its operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, combining various data sets from intercepted communications, satellite and other online data to compile targeting, or “kill lists”, for the Israeli military.
While Palantir characterises its technology as an analytical tool rather than a direct targeting system, its integration into Israeli command-and-control workflows has drawn criticism from human rights researchers. Senior figures at the United Nations have also argued that technologies such as Palantir’s materially shape the pace and scale by which the Israeli army is able to target people.
In May last year, responding to heckles from an audience in Washington, DC, over his company’s role in the Gaza genocide, a laughing Karp said that “the primary source of death in Palestine”, where Israel accepts that 70,000 people were killed during its military campaign, “is the fact that Hamas has realised that there are millions and millions of useful idiots”.
Responding to media’s request for comment, a spokesperson for Palantir UK said: “As a company, Palantir does support Israel. We’ve chosen to support them because of the appalling events of October 7th. And more broadly, we’ve chosen to support them because we believe in supporting the West and its allies and Israel is an important ally of the West.”
Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza began after Hamas-led fighters killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
Scrutiny over Mandelson, Palantir, and its relationship with the UK government gained new urgency after the ex-ambassador’s arrest in late February over allegations contained in the Epstein files millions of documents detailing the disgraced financier’s activities that Mandelson had maintained a relationship with Epstein after his 2008 sex offence conviction and may have shared with Epstein market-sensitive information of financial interest to him. (Int’l News Desk)
