On what was supposed to be a routine celebration at Microsoft’s headquarters on April 4, 2025, commemorating the company’s 50th anniversary, an unexpected act of protest disrupted the tech giant’s glossy narrative. Ibtihal Abu Al-Saad, a Moroccan software engineer working in Microsoft’s AI division, walked toward the stage and shouted at AI division head Mustafa Suleyman — a British-Syrian executive — in front of stunned employees and press:
“Shame on you!”
In front of a packed audience of executives and journalists, Ibtihal’s voice cut through the staged pleasantries:
“You claim to build AI for good, yet Microsoft is arming the Israeli military with artificial intelligence. Fifty thousand lives taken — and Microsoft is enabling genocide in our region.”
Security quickly moved in to remove her, but not before she declared:
“You are war profiteers. Stop using AI to commit genocide. The blood is on your hands — all of Microsoft. How dare you celebrate. Shame on you.”
She wasn’t alone. Later in the event, another employee, Vania Agrawal, interrupted a segment featuring Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and current CEO Satya Nadella. These weren’t isolated protests, but part of a growing internal campaign dubbed #NoAzureForApartheid — a movement demanding Microsoft sever its tech ties with the Israeli military.
Microsoft and the Gaza War: What’s the Connection?
On January 23, 2025, The Guardian published a damning exposé based on leaked documents revealing Microsoft’s deepening involvement in Israel’s military operations in Gaza.
The investigation, conducted in collaboration with +972 Magazine and Local Call, outlined how Microsoft ramped up its cloud and AI services to meet Israeli military demand, particularly following the October 7, 2023 assault on Gaza.
The documents showed:
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- Cloud computing contracts worth over $10 million were secured,
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- Thousands of hours of technical support were provided,
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- And a massive spike in demand for data storage and AI-powered military infrastructure occurred during the deadliest phases of the war.
According to interviews with Israeli military and intelligence personnel, the Israeli army leaned heavily on U.S. tech giants, including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, to fuel its digital warfare against Gaza.
Inside the AI War Machine: How Microsoft Supports Israeli Operations
The leaked reports outlined how Microsoft’s Azure cloud, AI tools, and technical services were embedded into Israeli military units, including:
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- Cyber Intelligence Unit 8200 and Unit 81, which develop and deploy surveillance technologies.
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- Use of Azure in managing military intelligence operations, where AI tools were used to analyze data and select bombing targets.
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- The Israeli Air Force’s “Ofek” unit relied on Microsoft tools for operational infrastructure, including email and coordination of airstrike targets.
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- A secretive collaboration allowed Microsoft to enable offline AI systems to aid military decisions.
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- Between October 2023 and March 2024, Israeli military use of Microsoft AI surged by 6400%, and cloud usage increased by 60%.
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- Microsoft reportedly granted access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 model to Israeli forces, after OpenAI reversed its policy prohibiting military collaboration.
In a separate February 2025 investigation, Associated Press confirmed that Microsoft and OpenAI’s technologies were used in targeting systems deployed in Gaza and Lebanon — including one airstrike that killed three Palestinian girls and their grandmother in southern Lebanon.
Weaponising Artificial Intelligence
The reports paint a chilling picture of how Silicon Valley technologies have become militarised:
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- Project Rolling Stone: A surveillance program used to track Palestinians’ movements in Gaza and the West Bank, powered by Microsoft infrastructure.
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- Cloud platforms serving as “weapons platforms”, according to Israeli military presentations, integrating live drone footage, targeting systems, and strike coordination interfaces.
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- AI-enabled systems used for facial recognition, location tracking, and rapid target selection — all fed into databases through Azure and AWS.
One Israeli intelligence officer told reporters:
“The pressure on young officers to find targets fast means mistakes happen. Civilian deaths are inevitable.”
Not Just Microsoft: Amazon and Google Are Also Complicit
A +972 Magazine investigation in August 2024 uncovered Israel’s parallel use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud for similar purposes. A leaked military presentation by Colonel Raheli Dembinsky, head of the Israeli Army’s tech command, confirmed:
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- Amazon, Microsoft, and Google all provided cloud infrastructure used to coordinate airstrikes and store vast intelligence on Palestinians.
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- Their tools were used to run drone surveillance, manage target databases, and streamline real-time military communications.
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- Internal military systems couldn’t handle the scale of data from the invasion — so Israel turned to commercial cloud platforms to compensate.
Dembinsky described these commercial clouds as “highly operational weapons platforms.”
Three intelligence sources confirmed that Amazon provided physical servers to store intelligence data — enabling what one source called “limitless surveillance on almost every person in Gaza.”
Who Holds These Corporations Accountable?
The real question now is: Who will hold these corporations responsible for facilitating genocide?
Microsoft, once praised for “empowering people worldwide,” now faces accusations of empowering mass murder. Executives hide behind the line: “We just build the tools — we don’t decide how they’re used.”
But that argument collapses when faced with employees like Ibtihal Abu Al-Saad, who refuse to remain silent while their work is repurposed into weapons of war.
These tech companies are not neutral. When they knowingly provide infrastructure to militaries engaged in ethnic cleansing, surveillance apartheid, and indiscriminate bombing, they become active participants in the violence.
While Microsoft continues to develop AI under the banner of progress, the world must ask:
What happens when the tools of “progress” become the tools of oppression?
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