-By ScheerPost - Mike Ludwig / Truthout - December 4, 2025

Ahead of its annual shareholders meeting on December 5, Microsoft is coming under mounting pressure to reconsider its relationship with the Israeli military, which has used the tech giant’s products to carry out the genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.

In an open letter to the company released on Tuesday, December 2, an international coalition of legal aid groups said Microsoft and its executives potentially face legal liability for “aiding and abetting … atrocity crimes” committed by the Israeli military against Palestinian civilians.

“Over the last few months, it has become exceedingly clear that Microsoft’s services and technologies have been used to violate Palestinian human rights, and shareholders should be aware of just how much this opens up the company to legal liability,” said Eric Sype, U.S. national organizer at 7amleh–The Arab Center for Social Media Advancement, in a statement on December 2.

Microsoft provides “major services” to other Israeli ground, air, and naval forces despite widespread agreement among experts that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, according to the legal aid groups. The letter lists multiple examples, including Mamram, the Israeli military’s central computing system and “weapons platform” that assisted the assault on Gaza with AI support and cloud services. Microsoft provided “rapid support” to Mamram during the initial months of the genocide to keep systems from crashing, according to the letter.

As Truthouthas reported, products provided by Big Tech are so integral to Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine that the mass killings and near-total destruction of infrastructure in Gaza are often described as “the first AI-powered genocide.”

By providing technology services to the Israeli government, Microsoft has exposed both the company and its leadership to “wide-ranging criminal and civil legal liability” both internationally and within domestic courts in the United States and European Union, the legal aid groups say.

“The EU dimension is devastatingly critical here — significant infrastructure powering Israel’s military targeting is hosted and processed in Europe, including by Microsoft,” said Gearóid Ó Cuinn, founding director of the Global Legal Action Network. “European law is explicit: if your systems materially enable atrocity crimes or unlawful population-level surveillance, you inherit serious legal exposure.”

Norway’s $2.1 trillion sovereign wealth fund, the largest in the world and a major Microsoft shareholder, announced on December 2 that its annual meeting would hold a vote on a shareholder proposal requiring Microsoft to issue a report on the risks of operating in countries with significant human rights concerns. While the proposal does not appear to single out Israel by name, it requires Microsoft to be transparent about the process used to identify dangers to human rights posed by the company’s products, and whether the tech giant’s internal controls are effective at preventing abuses. 

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other international human rights groups had issued a statement on October 10 urging Microsoft to “suspend business activities” that are contributing to “grave human rights abuses and international crimes by the Israeli military and other Israeli government bodies.” Meanwhile the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top Israeli leaders accused of war crimes, and Israel faces charges of genocide at the UN International Court of Justice.

After conducting an internal review in response to protests by employees and explosive media reports, Microsoft recently blocked a notorious Israeli cyberwarfare unit from using the cloud service Azure to intercept and store audio from millions of phone calls made by Palestinians in the occupied territories.

In August, an investigation by The Guardian, Local Call,and +972 Magazine found that the operation was likely “one of the world’s largest and most intrusive collections of surveillance data over a single population group.” (Israel also uses AI tools to identify targets for assassination with airstrikes that have laid Gaza to waste and killed or maimed thousands of innocent people, but the AI in that case does not appear to be Microsoft’s.)

In a memo made public on September 25, Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith told employees that the mass surveillance of civilians violates the company’s terms of service, and that the company must also protect the privacy of its customers. After an internal investigation, Microsoft stopped providing cloud services to the Israeli cyberwarfare unit conducting mass surveillance in Gaza and the West Bank, but Smith wrote that the decision “does not impact the important work that Microsoft continues to do to protect the cybersecurity of Israel and other countries in the Middle East.”

Microsoft’s media relations team told Truthout in an email that a review of the allegations surrounding Israel’s use of its products to surveil Palestinians is ongoing, and the company has created an online platform for employees who wish to report information about practices they believe violate Microsoft’s policies and terms of use.

No Azure for Apartheid, an activist group that is part of a broader movement of tech workers and allies, is circulating a petition demanding that Microsoft stop selling AI and cloud services to Israel. The group is also demanding protections for pro-Palestine speech at Microsoft as well as for Arab and Muslim employees and their allies.

A video posted online by No Azure for Apartheid appears to show police breaking up a peaceful pro-Palestine protest staged by employees outside a Microsoft conference on November 23. Members of the group could not be immediately reached for comment.

Microsoft is far from alone among Big Tech companies serving Israel. In September, hundreds of employees at Google and Amazon launched protests against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract between the two companies and the Israeli government for cloud infrastructure and data services.

In a report released June 30, UN human rights expert Francesca Albanese named more than 60 companies across various industries as having advanced Israel’s destruction of Gaza, settlement building in the West Bank, and mass forced displacement of Palestine. The report includes U.S.-based companies Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft.

“As revealed by employee activists, journalists, and others, Israel’s genocide would be impossible without private Big Tech firms equipping the Israeli military with everything from cloud storage to surveillance technology,” said Bassel El-Rewini, human rights fellow at Abolitionist Law Center, in a statement.

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Mike Ludwig

Mike Ludwig is a staff reporter at Truthout based in New Orleans. He is also the writer and host of “Climate Front Lines,” a podcast about the people, places and ecosystems on the front lines of the climate crisis. Follow him on Twitter: @ludwig_mike. Author Site