Leaked documents show Cisco sought to expand business with Israeli military intelligence during Gaza war

The Guardian published an investigation into Cisco’s dealings with the Israeli military, based on documents obtained from employees opposed to the company’s ties with Israel. Current and former Cisco workers objected to the company’s role in the Gaza war, calling it a “shocking and complete contradiction of values,” according to the Guardian’s second report, which described the workers as having leaked a trove of internal documents three years into the war.

According to the Guardian’s account, Israel’s military intelligence networks suffered major, multi-hour outages and repeated crashes a year into the war in Gaza. The Guardian said Cisco deployed senior executives and technical teams to resolve the operational failures affecting its Israeli military clients, and that the company then undertook a months-long effort to restore the confidence of Israel’s military intelligence directorate. The first report said Cisco also reportedly deployed personnel to work directly with Sapir, which it described as a secretive Israeli military unit.

The documents cited by the Guardian included a confidential memo from September 2025. One report quotes it as stating, “This series of events happened during the period of war, deeply impacting customer sentiment.” The second report describes the same memo as a draft, drafted by Cisco, that warned repeated outages had deeply affected customer sentiment during the period of war.

The Guardian cited a 2025 internal document stating that Cisco’s business with the Israeli military intelligence directorate generated approximately $67 million over three years. The Guardian’s reports say Cisco pursued dozens of additional deals with Israeli bodies in 2026, including the espionage community, the air force and the navy. The second report links these pursuits to the period in which the war in Gaza, which it says has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, continued. That casualty figure is the Guardian’s own reporting in its second article and is not independently verified here.

The reports also describe Cisco’s subsidiary Splunk, a data analysis platform, seeking to join Project Nimbus, the cloud computing contract between the Israeli government, Google and Amazon. The second report says Splunk made the pitch earlier in 2026. The first report says it remains unclear whether the deal was finalized.