A person walks by The Spheres at the Amazon.com Inc. headquarters in Seattle, Washington, on Nov. 14, 2022.
Amazon suspended a software engineer who protested the company's work with the Israeli government, CNBC has confirmed.
Ahmed Shahrour, a Palestinian engineer who works for Amazon's Whole Foods business and is based in Seattle, was informed Monday morning that he was being suspended with pay "until further notice" after he posted messages on Slack criticizing the company's ties to Israel.
"It has come to Amazon's attention that a post you made in multiple internal company Slack channels may violate multiple policies," an Amazon human resources representative wrote in a message, which was viewed by CNBC. The company said in the message that it's investigating the incident.
Earlier Monday, Shahrour posted messages across several internal Slack channels and sent a letter to Amazon executives, including CEO Andy Jassy, detailing his concerns.
Shahrour urged the company to drop Project Nimbus, Amazon and Google's joint $1.2 billion cloud computing contract launched in 2021 to provide the Israeli government with artificial intelligence tools, data centers and other infrastructure.
"Every day I write code at Whole Foods, I remember my brothers and sisters in Gaza being starved by Israel's man-made blockade," Shahrour, who joined Amazon three years ago, wrote in the letter. "I live in a state of constant dissonance: maintaining the tools that make this company profit, while my people are burned and starved with the help of that very profit. I am left with no choice but to resist directly."
The letter was earlier reported by independent journalist Kali Hays.
Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser didn't specifically address Shahrour's situation.
"We don't tolerate discrimination, harassment, or threatening behavior or language of any kind in our workplace, and when any conduct of that nature is reported, we investigate it and take appropriate action based on our findings," Glasser wrote in an email to CNBC.
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