Blood tech: The UK ambassador, the sex offender, Palantir, and Gaza 

This is the second part in Al Jazeera’s Blood Tech series, looking at how governments around the world – including those who have criticised Israel – are still using the technology it has tested on Palestinians. You can read the first part, which looks at how the UK has utilised Israeli military spyware, here.

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 Al Jazeera’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.

Mandelson ties

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.

Numerous UK opposition MPs and trade groups have called for a full review of Palantir, with some lawmakers describing it as “ghastly” and “a highly questionable organisation”. Of concern to many is the visit Mandelson and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer paid to Palantir’s headquarters in Washington, DC, in February 2025, 11 months before the UK selected the American company in an uncontested bidding process to provide artificial intelligence to its armed services.

Requests from tech fairness group Foxglove, The Good Law Project and Al Jazeera have yet to reveal details of that meeting. However, responding to a Freedom of Information request by the Good Law Project in April 2025, the UK’s Cabinet Office described it as an “informal” and un-minuted meeting between the UK prime minister, its ambassador and a US company that, by that time, was already accused of participating in war crimes in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

Responding to Al Jazeera’s questions for details of the meeting, a government spokesperson said: “Ministers engage with a range of companies as part of their international travel, to promote trade and investment links for the UK.

“We also utilise a range of international suppliers based on operational requirements, value for money, and compliance with our security and legal obligations, with all suppliers subject to rigorous due diligence.”

Palantir and the NHS

Palantir’s contract with the UK’s health service has also been called into question.

Foxglove and other NGOs, including the human rights-focused pressure group MedAct, have raised specific questions over Palantir initially accepting just 1 pound ($1.35) in March 2020 for an emergency contract to help the National Health Service (NHS) handle the COVID pandemic. The contract allowed Palantir to access NHS data, and the company was eventually handsomely rewarded – the current deal between Palantir and the NHS is worth 23.5 million pounds ($31.6m).

In September 2022, reporters from Bloomberg claimed to have seen documents suggesting a “secret plan” from Palantir to further entrench itself within the NHS without public scrutiny, a tactic typically referred to as “vendor capture”.

An email, cited by Bloomberg, from Palantir’s regional head, Louis Mosley, titled “Buying our way in…!” reportedly outlined a strategy of “hoovering up” smaller rival businesses serving the NHS to “take a lot of ground and take down a lot of political resistance”.

A spokesperson for the company later said the choice of language was “regrettable”.

Nevertheless, Palantir has since continued to expand its footprint in the NHS, including sending delegates to a dinner hosted by Mandelson’s Global Counsel in February 2023, where the NHS’s chief data and analytics officer, Ming Tang, was listed as the “guest of honour”.

This was roughly nine months before Palantir was selected to lead the NHS’s new Federated Data Platform, a contract worth hundreds of millions of pounds.

Neither the UK ministers for defence nor health, John Healey and Wes Streeting, respectively, have responded to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

However, speaking to Bloomberg in February, Healey claimed that Mandelson had no role in securing Palantir’s uncontested contract with the Ministry of Defence and that the decision had been his alone.

While acting as an opposition minister in June 2024, Streeting, who, in private WhatsApp messages to Mandelson in July, conceded that Israel was “committing war crimes before our eyes”, had rejected criticism of Palantir and its access to the NHS data systems, saying such concerns didn’t “wash with me”.

Streeting had told journalists: “There’s been a national decision taken with significant investment of public money. This is of vital importance to patients. Go further, faster.”

Anna Bacciarelli, a senior AI researcher at Human Rights Watch, told Al Jazeera that successive UK governments are to blame for Palantir’s access to public service data.

“Thanks to successive UK governments, Palantir has a strong foothold in multiple public services, while also contracting with other governments carrying out abuses, including Israeli attacks on Gaza and the US administration’s immigration crackdown,” Bacciarelli said.

“All companies have a responsibility to ensure that their products and services are not causing or contributing to human rights abuses. The UK government should undertake thorough due diligence for all contractors, but especially so given Palantir’s current access to the UK population’s sensitive health data and UK national security data.”

Despite what Palantir may claim its motivation to be, concerns are growing among activists, rights groups and end users over the UK’s association with the company.

“We’re seeing what appears to be vendor lock-in at the MoD [Ministry of Defence], and it seems clear that Palantir’s intention is to make as much of the UK government as reliant on its products as possible,” Tom Hegarty, the head of communications at Foxglove, told Al Jazeera in emailed comments.

He then turned to some of the resistance Palantir has faced from within the UK’s health service, itself prompted by perceptions of the US company, as well as questions over what value Palantir’s technology would add to the existing systems of hospital and regional health authorities in Leeds and Manchester.

“Palantir has explicitly said in the past it aims to become the ‘operating system’ of governments. It’s also been making inroads with the Met Police and at local council level, notably in Coventry [in the UK’s midlands],” he said.

“Whether or not that is a reason for the UK government to stop handing them fat contracts is a matter for ministers,” Hegarty added.