Hundreds of protesters shut down traffic at the foot of Market Street on Thursday evening, chanting and waving flags in front of Google’s San Francisco offices and demanding an end to its work with the Israeli government.

Activists say their long-running complaint against the company and its billion-dollar software contract with Israel has taken on new urgency since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s military retaliation, which together have left tens of thousands of civilians dead or injured.

Police initially tried to confine protesters to the sidewalk, but they poured into the street between Spear and Steuart streets waving Palestinian flags and banners emblazoned with the word “genocide” and blocking buses and streetcars.

Prior to the event, organizers pointed to reporting on NPR and elsewhere that Israel has been using artificial intelligence systems to rapidly decide which targets to strike in Gaza. That technology, reportedly called “the Gospel,” appears to be separate from the work Google’s Cloud unit is doing for Israel, dubbed Project Nimbus. But organizers said there was “no guarantee Google’s products are not being used to support this genocidal effort.”

Protester Rami Abelkarim said Thursday evening that Google is well-known as a search engine but “nobody thinks of Google as a war profiteer.”

About a dozen demonstrators performed a “die-in” to protest against the war by lying on the ground draped in white sheets emblazoned with a mock version of the Google logo spelling out the word “genocide.”

Alex Hanna, a former Google worker who quit the company’s ethical AI team over what she said was its failure to promote diversity or deal with the potential harms from its products, spoke at the protest in support of the Palestinian cause.

News organization The Intercept previously reported that Project Nimbus technology can recognize faces and discern emotions from expressions, as well as track objects in videos. “The contract effectively allows for the development and sale of high-tech software with an explicit military use-case to the apartheid state of Israel,” organizers said before the Dec. 14 San Francisco protest.