aeA group of global legal and human rights organisations have written to tech giant Microsoft for its alleged complicity in aiding the mass killings of civilians in Gaza by Israel. The coalition have sent a notice to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, president Brad Smith and chief responsible AI officer Natasha Crampton demanding that the company terminates all services and products that are contributing to the human rights violations in Palestine.
In a 19-page letter detailing how Microsoft has aided the Israel military by providing it products and services, the coalition of legal and human rights organisations has said that the company has aided war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide knowingly.
“We are writing to provide you with notice that Microsoft Corporation’s (“Microsoft”) past and continued provision of services—including cloud technology, artificial intelligence, and data processing—to the Israeli military, intelligence, and other governmental branches opens your company up to civil and criminal liability for aiding and abetting, contributing to, or otherwise being complicit in Israel’s commission of atrocity crimes and grave human rights violations against the Palestinian population of Gaza,” stated the coalition in its letter.
Stating that there is credible reason to believe that played a direct role in Israel’s committing “grave crimes” against Palestinians in Gaza, the coalition said that Microsoft’s technology also supports Israel’s commission of illegal, and oppressive surveillance as well.
“By providing such assistance to the Israeli military, intelligence, and governmental branches that has a
substantial effect on Israel’s ongoing crimes against Palestinians, Microsoft has exposed itself, its leadership, and its individual officers to wide-ranging criminal and civil legal liability, including in domestic courts in the United States and the European Union, and before various international bodies,” it added.
The letter was delivered on December 2 by the groups which include Avaaz, Center for Constitutional Rights, the European Legal Support Center, GLAN (Global Legal Action Network), etc. In its letter the organisations said that the deals with Israel place Microsoft and its senior executives on notice of their potential exposure to civil and criminal liability under international and domestic law.
The letter in detail lists the various deals Microsoft has made with the Israeli military over the years. “In 2021, Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s cyber warfare and intelligence unit, concluded a deal
with Microsoft enabling the Unit to collect and store phone calls made by the entire Palestinian
population,” it stated,adding that the Unit sought to develop the capability to collect these calls at a rate of “a million calls an hour,” as per Israeli intelligence sources.
The letter stated that the then Israeli commander Yossi Sariel finalized the agreement with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in Seattle in November 2021. “Microsoft engineers, including alumni of Unit 8200, worked directly with Unit 8200 to customize services to the Unit’s specifications, creating a segregated area within Azure—Microsoft’s cloud computing platform—including specially-designed security features, with this customized platform becoming operational in 2022,” it claimed.
Many critics of tech giants have pointed out that Microsoft has profited from the Israeli attack on the population of Gaza, which has now been recognised as a genocide by some quarters. “The scale and speed of Israel’s genocide would have been impossible to execute without Microsoft’s intervention,” the letter to the company concluded.
