The Operating System of Empire: How the UK Embraced Palantir’s Gaza-Tested Tech 

The UK government has quietly deepened its reliance on the US tech giant Palantir—a company instrumental in Israel’s military operations in Gaza—through massive, uncontested contracts with the Ministry of Defence and the NHS, even as senior officials publicly express concern over the war. Former UK ambassador Peter Mandelson, whose consultancy worked for Palantir, was present with Prime Minister Keir Starmer at a meeting with the firm months before the defence deal was signed, and his recent arrest over ties to Jeffrey Epstein has intensified scrutiny of the relationship. While Palantir’s technology has been used to generate targeting data in Gaza—contributing to what human rights groups call an enabled genocide—it now holds access to sensitive British health and security data, prompting fears of “vendor capture” and raising urgent questions about the government’s ethical due diligence and its complicity in outsourcing state infrastructure to a company forged in conflict.

The Operating System of Empire: How the UK Embraced Palantir’s Gaza-Tested Tech 

The paradox of modern geopolitics often lies not in the overt declarations of war, but in the quiet, transactional relationships that sustain them. For months, the United Kingdom has stood on a political tightrope. From the floor of Parliament, ministers have expressed “deep concern” over the civilian death toll in Gaza. In private, leaked WhatsApp messages revealed a senior cabinet member admitting to witnessing “war crimes” unfold in real-time. 

Yet, behind the rhetoric, a different reality is being coded into existence. The UK government is not merely turning a blind eye to the technological machinery enabling the war on Gaza; it is actively purchasing it, integrating it, and making it the backbone of its own public services. The recent arrest of Peter Mandelson, the former UK ambassador to the US, over his ties to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, has ripped the lid off a deeper, more troubling entanglement: the alliance between the British state and Palantir, the American data-mining giant that helped build Israel’s “kill lists.” 

This isn’t a story of rogue actors or isolated contracts. It is a story about how a company accused of enabling genocide has successfully positioned itself as the “operating system” of the British government—and how the political class, from the Prime Minister down, has facilitated this capture, often while the rest of us were distracted by a global pandemic or the promise of digital efficiency. 

The Mandelson Connection: A Web of Influence 

Peter Mandelson is a master of British political intrigue, a man who has been a cabinet minister, a European Trade Commissioner, and the UK’s ambassador to the United States. He is also, according to recently unsealed documents from the Epstein files, a man who maintained a relationship with the convicted sex offender long after his 2008 conviction, allegedly sharing market-sensitive information. 

While the criminal allegations surrounding Mandelson are severe, for the purposes of understanding the UK’s tech policy, his role as a bridge between the government and Palantir is critical. His now-shuttered consultancy, Global Counsel, counted Palantir as a client. More importantly, Mandelson was present at a pivotal moment in February 2025, when he and Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited Palantir’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. 

Eleven months later, Palantir was awarded a £240 million defence contract with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) without a competitive bidding process. 

The government insists the meeting was “informal” and that Mandelson played no role in the subsequent contract. But in the world of government procurement—particularly for technology that defines national security—there is no such thing as an informal meeting between a prime minister, his ambassador, and the CEO of a company poised to win a massive state contract. 

This is the essence of “vendor capture”: the process by which a private company becomes so embedded in the fabric of government operations that the government can no longer conceive of functioning without it. By the time the MoD signed the cheque in January 2026, Palantir had already spent years cultivating relationships, hiring former officials, and, crucially, proving its worth in the most brutal laboratory imaginable: Gaza. 

The Gaza Laboratory: Algorithms of Annihilation 

To understand what Palantir offers the UK, one must first understand what it has done in Palestine. Palantir’s software, Gotham and Foundry, are not simply analytical tools; they are data-fusion engines. They take intercepted communications (thanks to Unit 8200, Israel’s equivalent of the NSA), drone footage, satellite imagery, and a sea of other digital exhaust—phone signals, social media posts, movement patterns—and synthesize them into a single, actionable picture. 

In the context of the Israeli military, this manifests as what Open Intel and other tracking groups have described as “kill lists.” While Palantir insists it provides a platform for analysis, not autonomous targeting, human rights researchers argue that this distinction is semantic sophistry. When the system is designed to identify targets faster, with greater volume, and with less human oversight, it fundamentally changes the nature of warfare. It shifts the scale of violence from precision strikes to mass casualty events. 

The United Nations has noted that technologies like Palantir’s materially shape the pace and scale of targeting. In Gaza, where the International Court of Justice is investigating genocide, this technology has been the accelerator. It allowed the Israeli military to process the vast, chaotic data of a dense urban environment into a conveyor belt of targets. 

Yet, when asked about his company’s role in the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians, Palantir CEO Alex Karp laughed. Speaking in Washington, D.C., he dismissed the suffering as the fault of “useful idiots” who believed Hamas was not responsible for the death toll. It was a moment of chilling candor—a billionaire technologist absolving his algorithm of bloodshed. 

“Buying Our Way In”: The NHS and the Data Grab 

If the MoD contract represents the tip of the spear, Palantir’s presence in the National Health Service (NHS) represents the quiet occupation of the homeland. 

The relationship began under the cover of crisis. In March 2020, as the UK went into lockdown for COVID-19, Palantir offered its services for a token sum of £1. It was a classic Silicon Valley disruption tactic: get in the door during a disaster, become indispensable, then monetize. 

By 2022, Bloomberg had obtained internal emails revealing a “secret plan” titled “Buying our way in…!” authored by Palantir’s regional head, Louis Mosley. The strategy was to “hoover up” smaller competitors serving the NHS, “take a lot of ground and take down a lot of political resistance.” The company later called the language “regrettable,” but the strategy worked. 

In 2023, Palantir was awarded the contract to build the NHS’s Federated Data Platform—a system designed to unify patient data across the sprawling health service. The contract is worth hundreds of millions of pounds. Crucially, the bidding process concluded just nine months after Mandelson’s Global Counsel hosted a dinner where the NHS’s chief data and analytics officer was the “guest of honour.” 

The implications are staggering. The NHS, a national institution held sacred in the UK, is now handing the keys to its most sensitive data to a company that has profited from the immigration crackdown in the US (which has led to unlawful deportations) and the war in Gaza. 

Human rights groups like Foxglove and MedAct have raised alarms not just about data privacy, but about the normalization of a company with such a track record. As Anna Bacciarelli of Human Rights Watch noted, successive UK governments are to blame for this foothold. “All companies have a responsibility to ensure that their products and services are not causing or contributing to human rights abuses,” she said. But when the UK government is the client, it is also the enabler. 

The Human Cost of Efficiency 

There is a tendency in tech journalism to focus on the “efficiency” gains—the terabytes processed, the seconds saved. But this misses the point entirely. The argument for Palantir in the NHS is that it will reduce waiting lists and streamline care. The argument for Palantir in the MoD is that it will enhance national security.

But we have seen what this “efficiency” looks like in Gaza. It looks like the destruction of every university in the strip. It looks like the bombing of hospitals. It looks like a death toll that health officials accept exceeds 70,000, buried under rubble that the algorithms classify as “collateral damage.” 

When UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting—who privately acknowledged Israel’s war crimes—dismissed concerns about Palantir, saying they didn’t “wash with me,” he was engaging in a dangerous form of compartmentalization. He was separating the “clean” use of the tech in a British hospital from the “dirty” use of the same tech in a Palestinian refugee camp. 

But technology does not work that way. The algorithms trained on the dense urban data of Gaza—the patterns of life, the movement of civilians, the layout of hospitals—are the same algorithms being deployed to analyze the data of British citizens. The engineers who wrote the code for targeting systems are often the same engineers sitting in Palantir’s London office. 

As Tom Hegarty from Foxglove put it, Palantir’s intention is to make the UK government as reliant on its products as possible, becoming the “operating system” of the state. When a single company becomes the operating system—whether for the military, the health service, or the police—democracy suffers. Accountability becomes impossible because the mechanisms of governance are hidden inside proprietary black boxes. 

A Reckoning Denied 

The arrest of Peter Mandelson, the exposure of the Epstein files, and the mounting death toll in Gaza should have been a reckoning for the UK government. Instead, we have seen deflection. Ministers claim Mandelson had “no role” in the contracts. They claim the bidding processes were fair. They claim that “rigorous due diligence” is applied. 

But the Freedom of Information requests tell a different story. The meeting between Starmer and Palantir remains un-minuted—a ghost meeting that officially didn’t happen but materially changed the trajectory of UK defense procurement. The NHS contracts remain heavily redacted, with the public barred from seeing exactly what the government has sold to the company. 

The war on Iran—the latest ticker on the news feed—threatens to expand the conflict even further. If that happens, Palantir’s technology will likely be at the center of it, analyzing targets in Tehran as it did in Gaza. 

For citizens in the UK, the question is no longer whether their government is complicit in the suffering in Gaza. The documents, the contracts, and the meetings prove that it is. The real question is whether the British public is willing to accept that the “operating system” running their hospitals and their army was forged in the fires of a genocide. 

Until that question is answered, the UK will continue to be a buyer of blood tech—paying billions for the privilege of outsourcing its ethics to a corporation whose CEO laughs at the dead.