Chipmaking giant Intel fired an Israeli software engineer after he reported his boss for “liking” social-media posts “cheering” the deaths of Israelis and celebrating Hamas terrorists, a new lawsuit alleges.
Alaa Badr, Intel’s vice president of customer success, liked several posts on X that praised Hamas’ killing of Israeli armed forces — including an illustration of one of the Palestinian terror group’s soldiers pressing his foot on the neck of an Israeli soldier lying face down in the dirt, the suit claims.
“Praise be to God, the trampling was done. May God bless you, our Qassams!” reads the Dec. 29, 2023, post, referring to Hamas’ military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, that Badr liked on his X account, according to the suit filed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court.
Other posts on X that were liked by Badr include an image of an Israeli soldier being strangled by a hand with the word “Gaza” written on it and a post that used a “fire” emoji to cheer the bombing of a building purportedly containing five “Zionist soldiers,” who would be “sent to hell,” the suit says.
Badr’s alleged embrace of violent anti-Israel rhetoric was incredibly “disturbing” for the unnamed engineer, a former Israeli Defense Force soldier whose immediate family still lives in Israel and was injured and nearly killed when a Hamas missile tore through their building in February, according to the lawsuit.
Intel turned a “blind eye” to Badr’s troubling social-media activity after being told about it in late 2023 and even assigned Badr to become the Israeli engineer’s direct manager in his Manhattan office in January 2024, the suit claims.
“He was reporting to, and forced to interact daily with, an individual whom he knew would celebrate the murder, and even the burning alive, of his immediate family members,” reads the suit, filed on behalf of the engineer — identified only as John Doe — by the law firm Wigdor LLP.
Badr, an Egyptian Muslim, publicly portrayed himself as someone dedicated to “bridging divides” and “advocating for cross-cultural competence” between Muslims and non-Muslims, the suit says.
But his “carefully crafted persona” fell apart shortly after Israel launched a military campaign in the Gaza Strip — sparked by Hamas’ Oct. 7 siege in southern Israel, where terrorists murdered roughly 1,200 people and kidnapped another 250, according to the suit.
In the 10 months since, the Israeli military has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians, including women and children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, an agency of the Hamas-controlled government.
But Badr “did not simply sympathize with the plight of innocent Gazans stuck in the middle of Hamas and Israel,” the suit reads.
“Rather, he openly advocated for and celebrated the murder of Israelis like John Doe and the members of his family,” the suit alleges.
Badr also “pressured” the anonymous engineer to tell him whether other Intel employees were Israeli and “sneered that there were ‘so many Israeli employees in our company,’” the suit alleges.
The anonymous engineer had moved to New York City to expand the US presence of a startup that improved processor engines, the suit says. Intel bought the company, which the suit does not identify, shortly after his arrival in the Big Apple, according to the suit.
The engineer’s former boss at that startup, who had also been hired by Intel, filed an internal complaint on the engineer’s behalf this past February, sending the company screenshots of the violent posts allegedly liked by Badr, the suit says.
But Intel did not discipline the executive, the suit alleges. Instead, the company fired the Israeli employee in April, claiming a “need to cut costs,” despite the employee’s history of promotions and glowing performance reviews, court papers claim.
Badr and his manager, Intel’s vice president of business sales Abdul Jarrar, then replaced the Israeli with another employee who had also liked anti-Israel posts on his X account, including one calling Israel a “terrorist organization,” the suit says.
The Israeli engineer’s suit demands that his job be reinstated and asks the court to order Intel, Badr and Jabbar to pay him punitive damages for the alleged illegal discrimination and retaliation.
The engineer is attempting to pursue the case anonymously as a “John Doe,” arguing that he would face possible harassment and physical violence if he is publicly named as a former Israeli solider.
The request cites what the NYPD has called a spike in attacks on Jews that has erupted amid the Israel-Hamas war.
An Intel spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit Tuesday but said, “As a company, we have a longtime culture of diversity and inclusion and we do not tolerate hate speech of any kind.”
Badr and Jarrar could not immediately be reached.
The suit rips Intel, which had 2023 revenues of $54.3 billion, for allegedly doing “nothing to protect its Israeli employees” despite its reliance on more than 10,000 Israeli staffers across the globe.
Intel has relied “heavily” on Israelis and Jews since its founding, and its first employee hired in 1968 was Andy Grove, a Jew who survived Nazi occupation and escaped Communist-controlled Hungary at the age of 20, the suit says.
“While the rise in antisemitism around the world is alarming, it is inexcusable that Intel not only condones this type of behavior but retaliated against a former member of the Israel Defense Force for complaining about deeply disturbing tropes that were posted on social media by his boss,” said Douglas Wigdor, the lawyer who filed the suit, in a statement.
“Intel must be held accountable for permitting this to happen and we intend on doing just that,” Wigdor added. “This must stop.”
Badr disbanded his X account by this March, according to the suit. In June, X announced that it was changing its policy to make a user’s “likes” private.
