How Palantir infiltrated the state

Plus: how Israel destroyed Gaza’s buildings

Nov 12, 2025

There’s nothing like the smell of a magazine, fresh off the printing press. Our new issue hits the shelves today. For the cover, Mark Wilding investigates Palantir, the tech company founded by one Peter Thiel—an almost cartoonishly sinister man. He is a billionaire with an apparent desire to live forever, who named his company after the Dark Lord Sauron’s spying tools from the Lord of the Rings novels and has suggested that Greta Thunberg might be...an antichrist.

For six years, Palantir worked on a secret programme in New Orleans, building a tool to predict future perpetrators of crime, which critics alleged had entrenched racial discrimination (claims that Palantir denies). Now its surveillance technology is being used by ICE to facilitate Trump’s zealous deportations programme.

The firm has spent the past decade lobbying for and winning UK government contracts, with clients ranging from the Ministry of Defence to the NHS. During the Covid-19 crisis, the government handed our data to the controversial company. But will it ever let go? And should we be concerned?

Palantir has also emerged as a particularly vocal supporter of Israel during its genocidal war on Gaza, supplying technology for war-related missions. Also in the magazine, Prospect’s Alona Ferber reports how the Israeli military razed large swathes of Gaza, destroying schools, churches, mosques, hospitals and homes.

Israeli soldiers say they have been told to burn buildings they have stayed in by pouring oil on curtains, books and mattresses. Ferber explains why the evidence points towards systematic destruction, or a “domicide” (a word for the purposeful destruction of homes) as well as an “urbicide”, a word referring to the deliberate destruction of cities.

She also speaks to Gazans about their memories, often of hardship during an 18-year blockade, but with moments of ordinary happiness: weddings, barbecues by the sea, buying chips or coffee on the beach. “Gaza was once a happy place with a happy people who had a great sense of humour and led lives like other seafaring people,” Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh says. “But this was many decades ago”.

On a different kind of homesickness, in this month’s diary column, former New York Times editor Bell Keller writes about moving to a new continent and coming to terms with his mortality, since living with Parkinson’s.

And in today’s Insider, Andrew Adonis analyses chancellor Rachel Reeves’s apparent change of heart on the two-child benefit cap and explains why the U-turn has nothing to do with public opinion.

Pop over to your nearest newsagents and pick up a copy of Prospect for yourself—if you’re a print subscriber, your copy is on its way. Conversely, digital types can read the magazine online here. And if you’re intrigued by its glossy purple cover, our creative director Mike Turner writes the On the Cover newsletter explaining his design process for our paid subscribers. I’m a big fan of the purple. I hope you are too.