Amazon Restricts Workers From Supporting Israeli Hostage

By Charlie McCarthy    |   Monday, 27 May 2024 | NEWSMAX

Amazon has forbid employees from hanging signs showing the number of days one of their co-workers has been held hostage by Hamas, according to a Hebrew-language newspaper.

Sasha Troufanov, a hardware engineer at Amazon, was among the roughly 250 people taken hostage by the Hamas terrorists after they attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

Troufanov works in the company's Annapurna division, one of the profitable units responsible for developing the artificial intelligence chips of its cloud servers.

During the war's early weeks, members of a Jewish Affinity group of Amazon employees outside of Israel were advised by group organizers not to hang posters expressing identification with Troufanov, at the request of the company's senior human resources.

"There was an initiative to hang signs indicating how long Sasha has been working at Amazon versus how many days he has been kidnapped," one worker said, Globes reported.

When group leaders asked management to put the order in writing, they were refused, the outlet reported.

Nevertheless, Amazon employees in Israel began hanging signs identifying with Troufanov, as well as a poster calling regular meetings "Coffee for Sasha."

Amazon has been criticized for refusing to comment on Troufanov since the beginning of the war and for not holding any public actions calling for his release.

It now appears that silence is a matter of policy, Globes reported.

In December, The Times of Israel reported that some of Troufanov's friends attended an Amazon conference in Las Vegas and hired trucks on which they placed pictures of Sasha and handed out T-shirts with his picture and the slogan "I wish I were here."

Amazon employees worldwide have expressed fear of performing such identification operations. Several of them told Globes there is frustration with the silence of the global management.

"Until today, we have not heard anything about Troufanov from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy or any person who is not at Amazon Israel," one employee said, Globes reported.

"In fact, there were Jewish workers in the world who didn't even know two or three months after the massacre that Amazon had an employee kidnapped in Gaza."