Microsoft is a long-standing partner of the Israeli military. In 2002, Microsoft participated in the largest software deal in Israel at the time. The $35 million contract provided the Israeli military and government with “unlimited products’’ and committed to “broadly exchange ‘knowledge’ with the army.” Microsoft has since expanded its partnerships with the Israeli apartheid regime by providing the Israeli military with Azure cloud, AI, and storage services, which are crucial in automating Israel’s war crimes in Gaza.
The Israeli military uses AI and cloud technologies, including from “civilian clouds”, such as Azure, to construct a “weapons platform” and a “mass assassination factory” that automate and accelerate Israel’s war crimes against Palestinians through systems such as the Gospel, Lavender, and Where’s Daddy. These systems use Israel’s vast surveillance records of Palestinian civilians to create targets and human hit lists for Israel’s bombing campaign. Lavender, for example, uses WhatsApp contacts and Facebook friends to calculate a “threat” rating, from 1 to 100 for each Palestinian added to the system.
The Israeli military’s reliance on Microsoft’s Azure cloud technology and AI services has surged during the Gaza genocide. According to usage data from March 2024, the Israeli military’s usage of Microsoft and OpenAI artificial intelligence spiked nearly 200 times higher than pre-October 2023. By the end of March 2024, the Israeli military’s monthly consumption of Azure’s suite of machine learning tools was 64 times higher than in September 2023, demonstrating Microsoft’s technological support of Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinains in Gaza. The Israeli military’s average monthly consumption of Azure storage services in the first six months of the genocide was 60% higher than in the four months leading up to the assault on Gaza. By July 2024, the amount of data the Israeli military stored on Microsoft servers doubled to more than 13.6 petabytes (13,600,000 gigabytes).
The International Court of Justice findings in January 2024, that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza, and in July 2024, that it is practicing apartheid and its entire occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is illegal and must be terminated, have not dissuaded Microsfot from continuing its criminal complicity in Israel’s illegal occupation, apartheid or genocide.
Microsft’s partnership with the Israeli military began long before the Gaza genocide. It has a “footprint in all major military infrastructures” in Israel. The Israeli military’s service agreements with Microsoft include more than 635 individual subscriptions listed under specific divisions, units, bases or project code words such as:
- Mamram– the military’s central computing unit responsible for the military’s tech infrastructure
- Unit 8200 and Unit 81– military intelligence units that develop spy technology for Israel’s intelligence community and are implicated in crimes against Palestinians, Lebanese and others
- Highly classified unit inside the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office where Microsoft employees with security clearance are required to sign off and oversee the provision of cloud services
- Army units that maintain the “Rolling Stone” system– used by the army to manage the population registry and movement of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza
- Air Force’s Ofek Unit, which is responsible for managing large databases of potential targets for lethal airstrikes (known as the “target bank”)
- Matspen Unit– responsible for the development of operational and combat support systems
- Sapir Unit– maintains the ICT infrastructure in the Military Intelligence Directorate
- Military Advocate General’s Corps– tasked with prosecuting Palestinians and lawbreaking Israeli soldiers in the illegally occupied Palestinian territory
Microsoft embeds its workers in Israeli military units to work on sensitive and highly classified projects such as “a surveillance system used to monitor Palestinians” where they work closely with the Israeli military’s intelligence directorate, including its elite surveillance division, Unit 8200. Within Israel, a Microsoft team is dedicated to serving the Israeli military’s account. The team includes a senior executive who served 14 years in Unit 8200 and a former IT leader for military intelligence. Microsoft’s staff and contractors provide specialized consulting and technical support both remotely and on military bases. Microsoft engineers provided support to Israeli military intelligence units such as Unit 8200 and Unit 9900 – which collects and analyzes visual intelligence – to support their use of cloud infrastructure. Between October 2023 and June 2024 alone, the Israeli military spent $10 million to purchase 19,000 hours of engineering support from Microsoft.
Additionally, Microsoft works in collaboration with the Israeli military’s Center of Computing and Information Systems (known by its acronym Mamram). The unit is responsible for the IOF’s computing software and is essential for every modern function performed by the Israeli military. As highlighted by Mamram officials, “It is the cloud platforms that the Mamram Unit creates that enable weapons in the field or command headquarters or autonomous military systems, which are growing, to operate.” In November 2024, Microsoft sponsored the “I Love Mamram” conference in Israel to celebrate the unit and sent representatives of the company to lead workshops during the conference. Similarly, In April 2024, Microsoft Israel hosted a group from the "Combatants to Hi-Tech" program, held in collaboration with the Israeli Ministry of Defense and the Israeli army, for a TypeScript workshop developed in Microsoft, a lecture and a tour given by the company's employees. The "Combatants to Hi-Tech" program is a prestigious program designed to integrate combat fighters into the high-tech industry using their combat experience.
Microsoft Azure currently hosts the IOF Reservists portal which has received a six-fold increase in visits since the start of the genocide and serves as the key website for reservists to sign up, process documents, view payslips, etc. Azure also hosts software used for training of Israeli Occupation Forces. Elbit Systems is one of Israel's largest military contractors providing military technology. In 2022, Elbit Systems announced that their new military simulation software, OneSim, would run on Microsoft Azure. As part of a $107 million contract, OneSim is used in advanced IDF training centers to mimic real-life “battle scenarios” for tank crews, thereby enabling IDF's ongoing occupation.
In addition to directly partnering with the Israeli military, Microsoft also provides cloud infrastructure to Palantir, a company dubbed “the AI arms dealer of the 21st Century.” The Israeli military uses Palantir's AI targeting platform powered by massive troves of data collected on Palestinians and hosted in part on Microsoft servers. Palantir's CEO Alex Karp openly admits that the product is “used on occasion to kill people.”
Microsoft proudly partners with Israel’s apartheid government. The "Al Munaseq" app, hosted on Microsoft Azure and developed by the Israeli Ministry of Defense, is used by the Israeli “Civil Administration” to manage apartheid permits for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli military uses the app to collect surveillance data such as personal data, notifications received, files downloaded, and the device's camera and makes use of the information collected for any purpose, as cited in app’s End-User-License Agreement (EULA).
