Yitzy Hammer was itching to get back to work. For the last two weeks, Hammer, a lawyer who works with emerging tech companies in Israel, had been home with his four kids who weren’t in school during the Jewish high holidays. This week was supposed to be their first back, and Hammer had a packed schedule planned for the days ahead.
But since Saturday—when Hammer and his wife awoke to the sound of bombs falling and spent part of the day huddled with their family in a shelter inside their home in the central Israeli city of Modi’in—Hammer says, “Work has been the last thing on my mind.”
Instead, on Sunday, Hammer, who is a reservist with the Israeli Defense Forces, left his home and headed about an hour south to a military base on the Gaza border, where he is now spending 12-hour shifts working out of what he describes as a “fortified caravan,” serving as a legal advisor to the IDF. Hammer is not alone. “Everybody here with me is part of the tech industry in some way or another,” he tells Fast Company.
In a country where the tech sector accounts for roughly one-fifth of the annual GDP and 10% of of the labor force, Hammer is just one of many business leaders, investors, and workers in Israel’s booming tech industry who have been drawn into the conflict since Hamas launched an attack on civilians near the Gaza border Saturday morning, killing some 1,200 people in Israel, most of them civilians, and taking at least 150 people hostage. The attacks have prompted a declaration of war by the Israeli government, which has since pounded the Gaza strip with its own series of air strikes in what Israel’s defense minister has warned will be a “complete siege” of the Palestinian region. Already, the death toll from Israel’s strikes in the Gaza Strip has climbed to at least 950 people, with another 5,000 wounded, 60% of whom include women and children, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
In addition to volunteers, the Israeli military has since called up more than 300,000 reservists, many of whom are executives, founders, or employees who make up Israel’s so-called “startup nation,” or who work at the Israeli headquarters of some of the world’s biggest tech firms. For Dor Serero, Monday was supposed to be his first day working for Microsoft, but he was called into the reserves before he had a chance to start. “[A]s I am writing this post, sirens are going on and off, and I can hear rockets exploding in the distance,” Serero wrote on LinkedIn.
But it’s not just Amazon and Microsoft. Google, Meta, Nvidia, and more all have offices in Israel. After the attacks began, Nvidia canceled a planned AI conference scheduled to begin in Tel Aviv next week. And on Tuesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted that the company has made contact with all of its roughly 2,000 employees in Israel. “It’s unimaginable what they’re experiencing,” Pichai wrote. “Our immediate focus since Saturday has been on employee safety.”
Even for those who haven’t been directly drawn into military action, the war has been all-consuming. David Stark, a general partner at the U.S.-Israeli venture capital firm Ground Up Ventures, recently moved his family—including four children between the ages of seven and six months old—out of their apartment in Jerusalem to make room for a bereaved family. One of his children’s babysitters is believed to be among the hostages abducted from the music festival on the Israel-Gaza border Saturday. And between his own team and his firm’s portfolio companies, there are endless stories of people grappling with displacement, relatives killed, and spouses or loved ones being drafted. “It is impossible to not be impacted,” he says.
