Ireland Calls Out Microsoft’s Role in Gaza Genocide

Last week saw a major development in the fight against Big Tech when the Irish Council for Civil Liberties launched a complaint against Microsoft with the European Data Protection Commission for unlawful processing of data by the Israeli Defense Forces. The case comes in the wake of revelations in August that, beginning in 2021, the tech behemoth helped develop and supply Microsoft Azure cloud services that were used by Unit 8200 — Israel’s version of the National Security Agency — to collect and store data on millions of phone calls in Gaza per day. Insiders told reporters these calls were used to conduct lethal military operations against Palestinians.

The ICCL alleges that Microsoft has aided and abetted “war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, all of which are criminal under Irish and international law.” The case could stain the reputation of the company and set a precedent for further cases against the myriad of tech corporations also supporting Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza.

The reports sent Microsoft into public relations mode. It denied knowledge of Unit 8200’s mobile phone surveillance in Gaza, blocked its access to “certain” (not all) Azure Cloud storage and artificial intelligence services, set up a “Trusted Technology Review” system for employees to raise concerns about human rights abuses and commissioned a legal review by the law firm Covington & Burling.

This flurry of actions was designed to obscure the fact that Microsoft continues to aid and abet genocide, apartheid and settler colonialism. It is crucial, then, to understand how the company moves to protect its image, including the manipulation of “criticism” by major nonprofits such as Human Rights Watch, Electronic Frontier Foundation and others, leaving activists on the ground to pressure for a full end to Microsoft’s business with Israel, and to press for criminal prosecutions and reparations. 

Microsoft has been a part of Israel settler-colonialism and apartheid for decades. In 1991, it opened its first research center outside the U.S. in Israel. In 2002, the year of the Jenin massacre, Microsoft scored a $35 million contract that provided services to the Israeli army and defense ministry. Over the years, Microsoft has acquired multiple startups connected to the IDF, and it provides cloud computing services to the Israeli police.

In addition to Unit 8200, other military units, programs and applications serviced by Microsoft include the Ministry of Defense (which uses artificial intelligence to carry out genocide in Gaza), the Ofek Unit of the Israeli air force (managing its target bank), Unit 81 (which develops surveillance technology), Rolling Stone (a registry tracking Palestinian movements), Mamram (a weapons platform for Israel’s central military computing unit) and Al-Munaseq (an application used to manage permits and biometric smart cards to maintain Israeli apartheid).

Such a wide range of support for Israeli aggression prompted the BDS Movement website to declare, “Microsoft is perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide.”

Despite Israel’s track record of war crimes, unlawful settlement and apartheid over the past century, Microsoft’s top brass has lavished praise on the country. After the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks, Nadella decried the “horrific terrorist attacks on Israel,” but has never condemned Israeli aggression, colonization and apartheid spanning the past century.

During Nadella’s 2016 visit to Tel Aviv, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared Israel’s relationship “a marriage made in heaven but recognized here on Earth.”

In other words, Microsoft’s connection to Israel has only strengthened over time, including during its genocidal campaign in Gaza.

For those who watch the company closely, this should come as no surprise. Microsoft services police, prisons, immigration authorities and the military industrial complex across the planet.

For this reason, Microsoft pours immense resources and effort into maintaining a pristine image, perhaps more than any other Big Tech transnational. Recall that in the 1990s, it became known for monopolizing computer operating and web browsing (through its Internet Explorer). This culminated in widely publicized antitrust cases that fizzled out with the emergence of new competitors (Google, Facebook and so on). An over-the-top, bull-headed Steve Ballmer took over as CEO in 2000, and the company floundered for lack of vision. Yet this was temporary. Microsoft launched the Azure cloud in 2010, and in 2014 began rebranding behind the image of a young, hip Indian American, Satya Nadella, as CEO.

During the 2010s, Microsoft also began pumping money into “digital justice” scholars (e.g., danah boyd, Kate Crawford, Tarleton Gillespie) and research institutions (e.g., Data & Society, AI Now, the University of Washington, NYU). In the digital justice community, attention shifted from the Free Software Movement’s focus on public ownership and control of the means of computation and knowledge to the use of Big Data (subsequently rebranded as AI) and shallow identity politics. By the late 2010s, Big Tech’s public image moved from hip and progressive to monopolistic and evil. Yet Microsoft escaped unscathed, thanks in large part to its capture of intellectual circuits. In 2019, The New York Times noted that unlike Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple, Microsoft was “conspicuously absent from most of that criticism.”

With its support for Israeli genocide (in addition to its heavy-handed support for OpenAI), Microsoft’s brand is once again on the line, and it is scrambling to save face. Toward this end, it is deploying a number of tactics.

Microsoft has a “Global Human Rights Statement,” in which it professes a commitment to “serve people,” “advance human dignity” and “respect human rights.” Because genocide is the crime of all crimes, its first rule of damage control is obvious: Deny. 

In response to the August exposés, Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith, found “evidence that supports elements of The Guardian’s reporting” about phone data collection, but denied any knowledge that the IDF was using Azure for “broad or mass surveillance of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank.” In the wake of the reports, Microsoft is conducting a “review” to investigate the issue. Smith added that “we do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians” and “we respect and protect the privacy rights of our customers.”

Microsoft is gaslighting the public on so many levels, it’s hard to fathom. Let’s unpack it.

For starters, Israel has long been known to mass-record phone calls in the occupied territories. Given that Nadella met with the commander of Unit 8200, Yossi Sariel, in 2021 to move top-secret intelligence data to Azure, and given that Microsoft engineers helped design the security upon which the mass surveillance system was built with instructions from Unit 8200, it seems unlikely that Microsoft had no knowledge of what the system was for.

But even if Microsoft was truly in the dark about the phone surveillance project, that is beside the larger point that the company provides a wide array of technologies supporting Israeli apartheid, settler colonialism and genocide, all of which have been thoroughly documented by respected sources prior to the August 2025 reports. Smith’s strategy is to evade culpability by narrowing the goalposts: There is no smoking gun to show exactly what Microsoft did and did not know about this one project (mass mobile phone call surveillance), and we will likely never get an answer without a subpoena, if there is a paper trail still on record.

The same strategy was deployed earlier this year in response to reports about general Azure services to the Israeli military (e.g., storage, compute, speech and voice services). This includes a “drastic increase” in the use of Azure and multiple contracts signed between the Israeli military and Microsoft after Oct. 7. In response, Microsoft claims its “internal assessments” and “external review” found “no evidence to date that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza.”

The targeting and harm to Gazans is ostensibly in reference to the use of AI to target and murder alleged Hamas militants and their families, first reported in late 2023. We are still unsure which companies supplied technology in support of these specific programs, but it is highly likely that they utilized technologies provided by multiple Big Tech corporations because Israel does not have the means to handle these AI systems on its own private clouds.

Microsoft was finally forced to acknowledge that its technologies are indeed used for harm in this recent episode simply because a specific Israeli surveillance program of interest was exposed. The company remains silent about other programs listed earlier in this article.

The reaction by Microsoft to cut off some (not all) services to the Israeli military is a narrow response to a broad-based problem artificially narrowed by Microsoft. It beggars belief that Microsoft did not know Israel is guilty of war crimes, gross human rights abuses and, most recently, genocide. Why continue to supply Israel with technology for anything whatsoever?

The additional measures — creating a portal for employees to report human rights abuses and commissioning a legal investigation by Covington & Burling — are also corporate PR. The former will do nothing to curtail abuses, as Microsoft already knows if its clients violate human rights. The latter cannot be trusted, as the same firm already exonerated Microsoft of human rights abuses in the two cases it investigated for its dealings with Israel, including the investigation from earlier this year.

The statement by Smith that Microsoft respects privacy and does not supply technologies for mass surveillance is absurd on its face. As I exposed in The Intercept and Al Jazeera, Microsoft provides cloud-based services that blanket cities and prisons with physical surveillance sensors (e.g., smart camera networks, drones, automatic license plate readers, etc.) and pool massive troves of data about citizens and suspected undocumented immigrants into a centralized repository for real-time alerts, investigations and data analytics. There is nothing else to call this but mass surveillance. 

The Irish Council for Civil Liberties’ complaint to the European Data Protection Commission, launched on Dec. 4, is a welcome attempt to create some accountability for Microsoft’s service to Israel. Yet it is narrowly tailored to address violations of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, with a request to immediately suspend processing operations in the EU, delete unlawfully collected data stored in EU-based data centers and levy fines for violating the GDPR as a form of civil liability.

A more substantial response was launched by a coalition of legal aid groups on Dec. 2. In an open letter to Nadella and Smith, they stated there is a “credible basis” that Microsoft has knowingly aided and abetted genocide and grave human rights violations against the population of Gaza, while also suggesting civil and criminal liability for its assistance to Israel. In this scenario, Microsoft could be tried in U.S. and European courts. A warrant for the arrest of high-level executives like Nadella and Smith could also be issued by an international governmental body like the International Criminal Court.

The organizations called for Microsoft to terminate the “provision of all products, services, and business activities potentially contributing to Israel’s human rights violations in Gaza,” in addition to an independent investigation and “measures to provide restitution to those harmed.”

It is not clear why these groups did not demand the cessation of all business with Israel (government and business) until a just transition to a democratic state is materialized and reparations delivered to Palestinians. Likewise, major human rights organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now, Human Rights Watch, Fight for the Future and 7amleh, made the narrow demand that Microsoft investigate the matter and “suspend business with Israel” in cases where there is “evidence indicating that business is contributing to grave human rights abuses and international crimes.”

This is a moral failure reflecting the corrupt nature of the nonprofit industrial complex. What more do these organizations need to see? There is a two-year genocide still unfolding that has obliterated the Gaza Strip, an apartheid state and the expansion of settlements in Palestinian territory. Why not heed the calls of BDS and demand Microsoft boycott Israel altogether?