For 16 months, the retail giant kept quiet about the Israeli hostage because it said it didn’t want to endanger him.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
Amazon headquarters has finally spoken out after its employee, Alexandre (Sasha) Troufanov, was released Saturday as part of the first phase of the Israel-Hamas hostage and ceasefire deal.
CEO Andy Jassy wrote an email to the international retail giant’s entire workforce, saying, “I’m incredibly relieved to share the news that our AWS teammate, Sasha Troufanov, who had been held hostage since the October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, has been released from captivity.”
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides cloud computing services to its clients, and Troufanov worked for the Annapurna Labs subsidiary in Israel that designed a new chip for the company.
When the company held a conference that featured the chip during the week in November 2023 that Israel and Hamas had their first hostage deal, in which Troufanov’s mother, grandmother and girlfriend were released, among others, friends of the captive paid to have trucks with screens bearing Troufanov’s face drive around outside the Las Vegas hall.
Amazon itself did not comment on the kidnapping, nor did it condemn Hamas, angering many Jewish employees in various countries, who said that for the first few months they did not even know that their colleague was among those forcibly taken into Gaza.
Only the company’s Israeli employees were allowed to show Troufanov’s picture on their walls and speak about their colleague.
In Saturday’s message, Jassy insisted that Amazon had “had a dedicated team working behind the scenes with experts to support efforts to secure [the Troufanovs’] release and to ensure that we did the right thing for them and their safety.”
This included, he added, “painfully not commenting publicly for fear that we would negatively impact their ability to be released or how they were treated in captivity.”
The CEO thanked “all who tirelessly advocated” for Troufanov’s safe return.
One of these was a close friend of the Russian-Israeli engineer, Neta Yesood Alon, who angrily told Globes in May that the company “had explained to activists and the family that any public activity in Amazon’s name was liable to put Troufanov at risk, and that they didn’t want to turn Sasha into the poster child of the hostages, because that would raise his value.”
When Globes contacted Amazon for a comment, it vaguely stated that “We continue to focus all the time on all the efforts to bring Sasha back home safely,” and said it was “support[ing] the family at this difficult time.”
In the email, Jassy repeated that his company “will continue to support them and do everything we can to help them heal” now that Troufanov was free.
He ended with a general message that his “heart goes out to everyone impacted by the war” and that he hoped for peace, while still not condemning the terrorists who were the cause of his employee’s horrific ordeal.
