Microsoft must immediately end any involvement with the “Israeli authorities’ systemic repression of Palestinians” and work to prevent its products or services being used to commit further “atrocity crimes”, civil society groups have urged.
In a joint letter sent to the tech giant at the end of September 2025, which has now been made publicly available, six civil society groups called on the company to stop providing artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing technologies that they say are facilitating what the United Nations (UN) has described as Isreal’s genocide against Palestinians.
Signed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Fight for the Future and 7amleh, the letter cites numerous media reports detailing how the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) is using Microsoft’s AI and cloud capabilities to conduct mass surveillance of Palestinians and facilitate lethal airstrikes on civilians.
The publication of the letter follows Microsoft’s decision to restrict “a unit within the Israel Ministry of Defense” from using its services, after an ongoing internal review “found evidence that supports elements” of an investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call.
Published in August 2025, that investigation alleged that Israeli military intelligence and surveillance agency Unit 8200 was using Microsoft’s Azure cloud services to store and process vast quantities of communications data from millions of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.
According to the Unit 8200 sources cited, data stored on the Azure platform has helped directly shape the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF’s) military operations by facilitating the preparation of deadly airstrikes.
The investigation noted that although Israeli authorities have long controlled Palestinian telecommunications infrastructure, allowing it to regularly intercept phone calls in the occupied territories, the “indiscriminate” new system allows Unit 8200 intelligence officers to play back the phone conversations of a much larger pool of Palestinian civilians.
By July 2025, the millions of calls recorded via the Azure-based surveillance system amounted to 11,500 terabytes of data.
Microsoft said that it was not aware of the civilian surveillance taking place, and that despite meeting with Israeli spy chief Yossi Sariel in late 2021 about the provision of cloud services, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella was also unaware of what types of data Unit 8200 planned to store on Azure.
Prior to this, an Associated Press investigation from February 2025 found the IDF was using Microsoft Azure to compile, transcribe and translate the data of Palestinians – including phone calls, texts and audio messages – which is then cross-checked with Israel’s in-house artificial intelligence (AI) targeting systems to pinpoint target locations for attack, according to internal Microsoft information reviewed by the media outlet.
While Microsoft vice-chair and president Brad Smith announced in a blog post on 25 September that the firm had “ceased and disabled a set of services” to Unit 8200 following The Guardian’s reporting, the civil society groups say the suspension of some of its services is “long overdue” given the company’s potential complicity in human rights abuses.
Heightened due diligence needed
The letter states: “Microsoft’s September 25 statement and the aforementioned media reports stand in contrast to Microsoft’s public statement on May 15, 2025, in which the company claimed to have found no evidence that its Azure or AI technologies were being used to target or harm people in Gaza.”
Highlighting its responsibilities under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) – which the company publicly endorses – the groups said that while Microsoft should have conducted heightened due diligence given the clear risk of gross human rights abuses occurring, it has not openly disclosed what steps it has taken to cease or prevent its technologies from contributing to such abuses.
“The allegations in the media reports of Israel’s use of Microsoft’s technologies would indicate failure by the company to respect human rights and uphold its responsibilities under the UNGPs,” they wrote.
“They would also contravene Microsoft’s own self-proclaimed commitments to advance human dignity and respect human rights across the company’s value chain, operations and technologies as stated in the Microsoft Global Human Rights Statement.”
They added that, given Unit 8200’s documented history of surveillance on Palestinian communities, on top of “Israel’s long-established record of serious violations of international law”, the risks of complicity were “foreseeable and preventable”.
“Therefore, claiming that it was not aware of the Israeli military’s use of its cloud system for mass surveillance purposes and to facilitate other abuses does not absolve Microsoft from its responsibility,” they said.
Following its decision to restrict Unit 8200’s use of Azure, the groups say Microsoft must now examine all of its Israeli military and government contracts, and suspend them where there is evidence that its business activities are contributing to abuses.
The groups are also calling on Microsoft to publish the full findings of its internal review, explain what steps it will take to suspend its business activities in the region, conduct an additional human rights review, and detail how it is planning to provide “effective remedy, including reparations”, to affected Palestinians.
While the groups gave the company until 10 October 2025 to respond, Microsoft is now expected to do so by the end of the month. Computer Weekly contacted Microsoft about the contents of the letter, but the tech giant declined to comment.
In an investigative report published on 30 June examining “the role of corporate entities in sustaining the illegal Israeli occupation and its ongoing genocidal campaign in Gaza”, Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur for the “human rights situation in Palestine”, outlined the key role the technology sector plays in “sustaining the Israeli settler-colonial project of displacement and replacement”.
Noting that technology firms globally are actively “aiding and abetting” Israel’s “crimes of apartheid and genocide”, she highlighted how the “repression of Palestinians has become progressively automated” by the increasing supply of powerful military and surveillance technologies to Israel, including drones, AI-powered targeting systems, cloud computing infrastructure, data analytics tools, biometric databases and high-tech weaponry.
She said that if the companies supplying these technologies had conducted the proper human rights due diligence – including IBM, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Palantir – they would have divested “long ago” from involvement in Israel’s illegal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.
