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Microsoft Workers Arrested After Occupying C-Suite to Protest Israel's Use of Azure in Gaza
"Brad Smith is the face of human rights at Microsoft," said one No Azure for Apartheid protester. "And yet Microsoft every day continues to abet this genocide."
Aug 27, 2025
Seven current and former Microsoft workers were arrested Tuesday after occupying the office of president Brad Smith to protest the company's complicity in "the first AI-powered genocide" as Israel kills and ethnically cleanses hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.
The protesters gathered at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington and declared a "Liberated Zone" inside Building 34, which they renamed the Mai Ubeid building in honor of a Palestinian software engineer killed by Israel in Gaza in 2023. Demonstrators sounded noisemakers, draped banners, and delivered a "People's Court Summons" to Smith. They chanted, "Microsoft, Microsoft, you can't hide, we charge you with genocide!"
Seven protesters who locked themselves inside Smith's office were arrested by Redmond police. Other current and former Microsoft workers joined community members at a rally outside the building.
"Microsoft continues to militarize its campus to harass, brutally attack, and violently arrest its workers and community members," No Azure for Apartheid organizer and former Microsoft worker Abdo Mohamed told the Seattle Times.
The arrests came on the same day that Bloomberg revealed that Microsoft asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation for intelligence on pro-Palestinian protesters targeting the company, worked with local law enforcement in a bid to thwart demonstrations, and deleted internal emails containing protest details and words like "Gaza."
Tuesday's action followed a protest last week at which around 20 No Azure for Apartheid activists were arrested after setting up an encampment on the grounds of Microsoft headquarters. Earlier this month, protesters staged a demonstration at a Microsoft data center in the Netherlands that is reportedly being used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to plan airstrikes on Gaza.
The No Azure for Apartheid protesters are calling on Microsoft to "cut ties with Israel, call for an end to the genocide and forced starvation, pay reparations to the Palestinians, and end the discrimination against workers."
"We are here because Palestine must be free, the genocide must end, the apartheid must end, and everything that's happened to the Palestinian people over the past 75 years must end," declared one No Azure for Apartheid organizer in a video of Tuesday's occupation that was posted online. "It must end and this is how we must end it. We must occupy the people who are letting it happen."
"We are here today not because we want to be here, it's because we need to be here," he said. "Brad Smith is the face of human rights at Microsoft. And yet Microsoft every day continues to abet this genocide."
"Every Palestinian phone call in the last few years has been stored on Microsoft servers," he continued as the other protesters shouted, "Shame!"
"That is a disgrace! That is untenable! There is no way to justify that," the protester asaid. "Every time we have come with these problems... Microsoft has dragged their feet."
The activist also pointed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and the IDF's largest intelligence unit.
"Satya has dragged his feet. Brad has dragged his feet. Satya met with the head of Unit 8200 and that led to this plan to store Palestinian phone calls on Microsoft servers," he said.
A a joint investigation published earlier this month by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call revealed that Unit 8200 is storing 11,500 terabytes of data containing roughly 200 million hours of Palestinians' phone call recordings on the Azure servers in the Netherlands. According to the article, former Unit 8200 head Yossi Sariel traveled to Microsoft headquarters in 2021 to meet Nadella.
"What happens as a result is that every phone call is recorded, it is transcribed from Arabic, it is translated, and it is used for targeting," the protester said.
Earlier this year, an Associated Press investigation detailed how Israeli forces are using artificial intelligence and cloud computing systems sold by US tech giants including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Open AI—which makes the popular ChatGPT chatbot—for the mass surveillance and killing of Palestinians in Gaza.
In addition to US tech, the IDF uses its own AI system called Habsora to automatically select airstrike targets at an exponentially faster rate than ever before. A November 2023 investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call cited an Israeli intelligence source who said that Habsora has transformed the IDF into a "mass assassination factory" in which the "emphasis is on quantity and not quality" of kills.
Following the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, IDF officers were told they could order any number of strikes as they believed were legal, with no effective limits on civilian harm. This led to massacres in which dozens or more civilians were killed in single strikes, often using US-supplied 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs.
Microsoft said earlier this month that it has launched an investigation into how Unit 8200 is using Azure. This, after the company said in May that an internal review "found no evidence to date that Microsoft's Azure and [artificial intelligence] technologies have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza."
Big Tech's profiteering from Israel's annihilation of Gaza and occupation, settler colonization, and apartheid in the West Bank has sparked numerous protests, including by employees of complicit companies. At least dozens of workers at companies including Google, Meta, and Microsoft have been fired for Palestine advocacy. Others have resigned in protest.
Hossam Nasr, a former Microsoft software engineer, was fired after organizing an October 2024 "No Azure for Apartheid" vigil. Microsoft engineer Ibtihal Aboussad and another worker, Vaniya Agrawal, were fired after interrupting speeches by company executives.
Responding to Tuesday's protest, Smith said, "Obviously, when seven folks do as they did today—storm a building, occupy an office, block other people out of the office... that's not okay."
"There are many things we can't do to change the world, but we will do what we can and what we should," Smith added. "That starts with ensuring that our human rights principles and contractual terms of service are upheld everywhere, by all of our customers around the world."
Tuesday's protest came as the IDF ramped up Operation Gideon's Chariots 2—the US-backed campaign to conquer and occupy Gaza and ethnically cleanse around 1 million Palestinians—and amid a worsening famine that has killed hundreds of people, many of them children.
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Probes Reveal Depth of Big Tech Complicity in Israel's AI-Driven Gaza Slaughter
"Many nations are looking to Israel and its use of AI in Gaza with admiration and jealousy," said one expert. "Expect to see a form of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon-backed AI in other war zones soon."
Feb 18, 2025
Several recent journalistic investigations—including one published Tuesday by The Associated Press—have deepened the understanding of how Israeli forces are using artificial intelligence and cloud computing systems sold by U.S. tech titans for the mass surveillance and killing of Palestinians in Gaza.
The AP's Michael Biesecker, Sam Mednick, and Garance Burke found that Israel's use of Microsoft and OpenAI technology "skyrocketed" following Hamas' October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
"This is the first confirmation we have gotten that commercial AI models are directly being used in warfare," Heidy Khlaaf, chief artificial intelligence scientist at the AI Now Institute and a former senior safety engineer at OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, told the AP. "The implications are enormous for the role of tech in enabling this type of unethical and unlawful warfare going forward."
As Biesecker, Mednick, and Burke noted:
Israel's goal after the attack that killed about 1,200 people and took over 250 hostages was to eradicate Hamas, and its military has called AI a "game changer" in yielding targets more swiftly. Since the war started, more than 50,000 people have died in Gaza and Lebanon and nearly 70% of the buildings in Gaza have been devastated, according to health ministries in Gaza and Lebanon.
According to the AP report, Israel buys advanced AI models from OpenAI and Microsoft's Azure cloud platform. While OpenAI said it has no partnership with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), in early 2024 the company quietly removed language from its usage policy that prohibited military use of its technology.
The AP reporters also found that Google and Amazon provide cloud computing and AI services to the IDF via Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract signed in 2021. Furthermore, the IDF uses Cisco and Dell server farms or data centers. Red Hat, an independent IBM subsidiary, sells cloud computing services to the IDF. Microsoft partner Palantir Technologies also has a "strategic partnership" with Israel's military.
Google told the AP that the company is committed to creating AI "that protects people, promotes global growth, and supports national security."
However, Google recently removed from its Responsible AI principles a commitment to not use AI for the development of technology that could cause "overall harm," including weapons and surveillance.
The AP investigation follows a Washington Post probe published last month detailing how Google has been "directly assisting" the IDF and Israel's Ministry of Defense "despite the company's efforts to publicly distance itself from the country's national security apparatus after employee protests against a cloud computing contract with Israel's government."
Google fired dozens of workers following their participation in "No Tech for Apartheid" protests against the use of the company's products and services by forces accused of genocide in Gaza.
"A Google employee warned in one document that if the company didn't quickly provide more access, the military would turn instead to Google's cloud rival Amazon, which also works with Israel's government under the Nimbus contract," wrote Gerrit De Vynck, author of the Post report.
"As recently as November 2024, by which time a year of Israeli airstrikes had turned much of Gaza to rubble, documents show Israel's military was still tapping Google for its latest AI technology," De Vynck added. "Late that month, an employee requested access to the company's Gemini AI technology for the IDF, which wanted to develop its own AI assistant to process documents and audio, according to the documents."
Previous investigations have detailed how the IDF also uses Habsora, an Israeli AI system that can automatically select airstrike targets at an exponentially faster rate than ever before.
"In the past, there were times in Gaza when we would create 50 targets per year. And here the machine produced 100 targets in one day," former IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi told Yuval Abraham of +972 Magazine, a joint Israeli-Palestinian publication, in 2023. Another intelligence source said that Habsora has transformed the IDF into a "mass assassination factory" in which the "emphasis is on quantity and not quality" of kills.
Compounding the crisis, in the heated hours following the October 7 attack, mid-ranking IDF officers were empowered to order attacks on not only senior Hamas commanders but any fighter in the resistance group, no matter how junior. What's more, the officers were allowed to risk up to 20 civilian lives in each strike, and up to 500 noncombatant lives per day. Days later, that limit was lifted. Officers could order any number of strikes as they believed were legal, with no limits on civilian harm.
Senior IDF commanders sometimes approved strikes they knew could kill more than 100 civilians if the target was deemed important enough. In one AI-aided airstrike targeting one senior Hamas commander, the IDF dropped multiple U.S.-supplied 2,000-pound bombs, which can level an entire city block, on the Jabalia refugee camp in October 2023. According to the U.K.-based airstrike monitor Airwars, the bombing killed at least 126 people, 68 of them children, and wounded 280 others. Hamas' Qassam Brigades said four Israeli and three international hostages were also killed in the attack.
Then there's the mass surveillance element. Independent journalist Antony Loewenstein recently wrote for Middle East Eye that "corporate behemoths are storing massive amounts of information about every aspect of Palestinian life in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and elsewhere."
"How this data will be used, in a time of war and mass surveillance, is obvious," Loewenstein continued. "Israel is building a huge database, Chinese-state style, on every Palestinian under occupation: what they do, where they go, who they see, what they like, what they want, what they fear, and what they post online."
"Palestinians are guinea pigs—but this ideology and work doesn't stay in Palestine," he said. "Silicon Valley has taken note, and the new Trump era is heralding an ever-tighter alliance among Big Tech, Israel, and the defense sector. There's money to be made, as AI currently operates in a regulation-free zone globally."
"Think about how many other states, both democratic and dictatorial, would love to have such extensive information about every citizen, making it far easier to target critics, dissidents, and opponents," Loewenstein added. "With the
far right on the march globally—from Austria to Sweden, France to Germany, and the U.S. to Britain—Israel's ethno-nationalist model is seen as attractive and worth mimicking.
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Israel's AI-Aided Bomb Targeting Creates Massacre 'Factory' in Gaza
"This is the first AI-facilitated genocide in history," said one observer.
Dec 01, 2023
As Israel on Friday resumed bombarding Gaza following a weeklong pause, a joint investigation by a pair of progressive Israeli media outlets sheds new light on the Israel Defense Forces' use of artificial intelligence to select targets, essentially creating what one former Israeli officer called a "mass assassination factory."
The Israeli sites +972 Magazine and Local Call interviewed seven current and former Israeli intelligence officials including participants in the current war on Gaza, who spoke under condition of anonymity. Their testimonies—as well as official statements by Israeli officials, interviews with Palestinians, documentation from the besieged strip, and data—show how Israeli leaders know roughly how many Palestinian civilians are likely to be killed in each of its attacks, and how the use of AI-based systems is accelerating a noncombatant casualty rate that more resembles the indiscriminate bombing of World War II than the modern era of codified civilian protection under international humanitarian law.
"Nothing happens by accident," another source stressed. "When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it's because someone in the army decided it wasn't a big deal for her to be killed—that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target."
"We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets," the source added. "Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home."
In one case, sources said Israeli officials approved an attack they knew would kill up to hundreds of civilians in a bid to assassinate a single Hamas military commander. More than 120 civilians were killed in the October 31 bombing of the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp with at least two 2,000-pound bombs.
"The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage," one source said.
One reason for the staggering Palestinian civilian death toll—over 15,000 people as of December 1, most of them women and children—is Israel's use of a platform called Habsora, or "Gospel," which is largely built on AI and can generate targets at what the report states is "almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible."
A source interviewed in the report said that "in the past there were times in Gaza when we would create 50 targets per year," but with AI-driven systems, it is possible to produce 100 targets in a single day.
"It really is like a factory," the source said. "We work quickly and there is no time to delve deep into the target. The view is that we are judged according to how many targets we manage to generate."
According to the report :
The increasing use of AI-based systems like Habsora allows the army to carry out strikes on residential homes where a single Hamas member lives on a massive scale, even those who are junior Hamas operatives. Yet testimonies of Palestinians in Gaza suggest that since October 7, the army has also attacked many private residences where there was no known or apparent member of Hamas or any other militant group residing. Such strikes, sources confirmed to +972 and Local Call, can knowingly kill entire families in the process.
One source said that a senior intelligence officer told his subordinates after October 7 that the goal was to "kill as many Hamas operatives as possible," leading to "cases in which we shell based on a wide cellular pinpointing of where the target is, killing civilians."
"This is often done to save time, instead of doing a little more work to get a more accurate pinpointing," the source added.
Another source said that the "emphasis is on quantity and not on quality." A human "will go over the targets before each attack, but it need not spend a lot of time on them."
The result of the new Israeli policy is the killing and maiming of civilians at a rate with few if any parallels in modern history. Since October 7, when Hamas-led attacks killed 1,200 Israelis and others in southern Israel, nearly 50,000 Palestinians have been killed, wounded, or left missing by IDF attacks. Over 300 families have lost at least 10 members, which the report notes is 15 times higher than during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, when the IDF killed more than 2,300 Palestinian civilians in what was at the time its deadliest attack on Gaza.
In the wake of the horrific October 7 attacks—plans for which were known to Israeli leaders but dismissed as too audacious, according to new reporting by The New York Times—Israeli officials publicly stated how they would retaliate, sometimes using language rife with genocidal intent.
"The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy," IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari explained on October 9.
Israeli forces answered the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust with the worst mass murder of Palestinians since the 1947-48 Nakba, or "catastrophe," when Jews—many of them Holocaust survivors—killed 15,000 Arabs and ethnically cleansed more than 750,000 others from Palestine while establishing the modern state of Israel.
IDF bombs and bullets have killed nearly as many civilians in 56 days as the U.S.-led coalition did in Afghanistan in 20 years. During the first two weeks of the Israeli onslaught, nearly all the bombs dropped by the IDF were either 1,000- or 2,000-pound bombs made by the United States—which, although it has killed more foreign civilians this century than any other armed force in the world, eschews using such massive ordnance in civilian areas.
Israeli military officials said the IDF dropped 6,000 bombs weighing a total of 4,000 tons on Gaza during the first five days of the war alone, destroying entire neighborhoods.
In addition to bombing tactical and undergound targets—which often lie beneath homes and other civilian structures—the IDF is destroying so-called "power targets," which include high-rise and residential towers in the center of densely populated cities, and other civilian structures likes universities, banks, and government offices. The idea, intelligence sources said in the report, is to foment "civil pressure" against Hamas, whose political wing governs Gaza.
The IDF also targets the homes of Hamas and Islamic Jihad personnel, but Palestinians interviewed in the report said some of the families killed by Israeli bombing had no members who were in militant groups.
"We are asked to look for high-rise buildings with half a floor that can be attributed to Hamas," said one source. "Sometimes it is a militant group's spokesperson's office, or a point where operatives meet. I understood that the floor is an excuse that allows the army to cause a lot of destruction in Gaza. That is what they told us."
"If they would tell the whole world that the [Islamic Jihad] offices on the 10th floor are not important as a target, but that its existence is a justification to bring down the entire high-rise with the aim of pressuring civilian families who live in it in order to put pressure on terrorist organizations, this would itself be seen as terrorism. So they do not say it," the source added.
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