Inside the Campaign to End Microsoft’s Collaboration with the Israeli Army

It was early 2025, and Ibtihal Aboussad couldn’t believe what she had just read.

The company at which she had spent the past three years working as a software engineer in the AI department was actively providing the Israeli military with the AI infrastructure to carry out what several leading human rights groups and experts have described as a “genocide” in Gaza.

In the stream of stories she had parsed through, Abbousad found that through an initiative called Project Azure, Microsoft was providing a range of computing services to support Israel’s military operations, including AI operations that helped the Israeli military conduct operations in Gaza.

These products, including a suite of communication technology, were being used by the Israeli army’s notorious Unit 8200 and Unit 81, as well as an air force unit, known as the Ofek, to build “kill lists”.

She was horrified. Not only was she an employee at Microsoft, she was part of the AI division itself.

Microsoft is a household name around the world for popular software like Office or its operating system, Windows, or for being the parent company of the X-box console, or for best-selling games like Candy Crush. Aboussad told Middle East Eye that like many others, she was unaware that they were also providing cloud storage, computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and facial recognition, among a collection of services for the Israeli military.

She was even more shocked to find that as the war on Gaza expanded, so too did Microsoft’s entanglements with the Israeli military.

The Israeli military’s usage of the company’s cloud storage facilities in the first six months after 7 October 2023 was 60 percent more than the four months preceding it. Leaked documents show that the Israeli military’s usage of Microsoft’s AI products also ticked up in the same period.

The 25-year-old Aboussad, who worked in the AI division in which she was involved in converting speech to text, says she hadn’t realised she “signed up to work on code that directly powers war crimes”.  This realisation spurred her into action.

She joined and began organising with the No Azure for Apartheid campaign, which was created in late 2023 by a group of Microsoft employees who wanted the company to end its contracts with Israel and uphold its own stated values.

Together with other employees, including a colleague, Vaniya Aggraval, Aboussad said that over the past several months, they tried to address their concerns through the proper channels.

They wrote to management, tried meeting with the CEO, and even sent questions to “Ask me anything” forums, only to be rebuffed and ignored.

As news of the company’s complicity in Gaza became increasingly public, employees noted that Microsoft appeared more galvanised to suppress and censor internal efforts that tried to draw attention to it. 

When Israel cut aid and supplies and began bombarding Gaza again in mid-March, killing up to 100 children a day, both Aboussad and Agrawal decided they had had enough.

‘Shame on you Mustafa’

In actions captured on video and seen by millions of people around the world, on 4 April, Abbousad and Agrawal – in two separate events – disrupted proceedings at Microsoft’s 50th anniversary event at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

In the first incident, Abbousad confronted Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s AI CEO, as he addressed the audience.  

“Mustafa, shame on you!” Abbousad says. “You claim that you care about using AI for good, but Microsoft sells AI weapons to the Israeli military. Fifty-thousand people have died and Microsoft powers this genocide in our region,” Abbousad, the Canada-based Morrocan national cried out to him as security approached her.

A visibly frazzled Suleyman is seen replying to Abbousad: “Thanks for your protest. I hear you.”

In the next incident, Agrawal approaches the platform where former CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer together with current CEO Satya Nadella are seated in conversation with one another.

The trio fell silent and sheepishly waited for Agrawal to be escorted out before they resumed their conversation.

Agrawal said that “50,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been murdered with Microsoft technology. How dare you? Shame on all of you for celebrating on their blood”.

‘I just found it more and more difficult to continue giving my time, my energy and my care to a company that was just so clearly on the wrong side of history’

– Vaniya Agarwal, ex-Microsoft employee

Immediately after their disruptions, Agarwal and Abbousad both sent a mass email to Microsoft colleagues explaining their actions.

The emails, the duo said, were meant for those who were still purportedly in the dark about Microsoft’s links to the Israeli military industrial complex. 

Within hours, Microsoft reportedly shut down the email thread and then locked them out of their account.

On Monday, both Abbousad and Agrawal were fired.

Microsoft wrote that they had terminated their jobs over “just cause, wilful misconduct, disobedience or wilful neglect of duty”.

“It’s ironic,” Abbousod says.

“At the event where we disrupted leadership, they were distributing mugs that literally said, ‘Speak your mind at Microsoft’.”

“And so it’s like, ‘Oh, speak your mind’, but when we are vocal about how our work is being used, it’s always just retaliation.”

Microsoft did not reply to MEE’s request for comment.
 

 

‘I wanted to expose the CEOs’

Agarwal, the 30-year-old software engineer who took part in the protest, told MEE she had joined Microsoft just as Israel’s war on Gaza began.

She said she watched as the “unspeakable suffering” of the Palestinians was met with the company adopting retaliatory tactics against anyone, including employees, who dared to question the company’s role in the horrific events unfolding in Gaza.

Those who asked questions on internal discussion boards were even approached by HR to explain themselves.

“As time went on, I just found it more and more difficult to continue giving my time, my energy and my care to a company that was just so clearly on the wrong side of history,” Agarwal told MEE.

She said that though she wasn’t directly working within AI or with Project Azure, she still felt complicit.

“I still felt as though my labour is tacit support for what this company is doing, and any work and effort and labour I put towards this company is only fuelling the system.”

She said that leaving Microsoft was the obvious choice.

“I felt like I wanted to do what I could in my last few days to blast this message and to expose Microsoft for who they are and expose the CEOs for what they’re doing,” she added.

‘[It’s] just something that I could not silently live with’

– Ibtihal Abbousad, former Microsoft employee

Abbousad’s reasoning is no different.

She says that she had had an inkling that she would lose her job, but to remain at Microsoft in an AI department headed by someone who was half-Syrian, whom, she says, would have some familiarity with the Palestinian cause, was simply untenable.

“I specifically had in mind that I would address him because it’s, it’s my code that he’s allowing to be used for crimes,” Abbousad said, adding that she wanted the head of the department to know they were being held accountable.

She said that she didn’t feel like she had the option of looking away – especially when human rights violations were taking place through her work – in an environment where she’d be forced to question whether her labour was being used by Israelis to kill Palestinians.

“That is just something that I could not silently live with. I had to, at the very least, say something and spread awareness. Going into the event and with the intention to disrupt, in my head, even if 10 new people learn about Microsoft’s complicity and Microsoft completely retaliates against me, it will have been worth it.

“I think when it comes to like human rights and people losing their lives, we don’t really have a choice to prioritise comfort or luxury over lives being lost,” she added.

Far and wide

Over the past five years, there have been growing concerns over the role of big tech in Israel’s growing military-industrial complex. 

Both Google and Amazon have been under the microscope by employees and anti-war activists over their ties to the Israeli military, specifically, Project Nimbus, a $1.2bn deal that would see the two tech behemoths provide Israel and its military with a bouquet of services, including cloud computing and AI services. 

The use of AI has come under immense scrutiny over the past 18 months over reports that Israel has increasingly turned to AI to surveil, monitor, control, and curtail Palestinian life both in the occupied West Bank as well as in the formation of kill lists in Gaza.

Journalists and researchers following the developments say such services provided by the tech giants have turned Palestinians into “data points for a state that views them as deserving of dehumanisation or death”. 

“Big tech is happy to assist, both out of a desire to make money and ideological affinities with Israel’s cause,” Antony Loewenstein wrote.

Earlier this week, the Palestinian-led Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement added Microsoft gaming products like Xbox and the games Minecraft, Call of Duty and Candy Crush to what it called a “priority target”.

The push to hold Microsoft accountable began shortly after the events of 7 October 2023 and the war on Gaza that followed, when Hossam Nasr, then an employee at the company, co-founded No Azure for apartheid campaign.

Nasr told MEE that Aboussad’s and Agrawal’s brave actions came after months of campaigning and efforts to persuade the company to alter course. 

In February, the campaign confronted Nadella at a townhall with coordinated T-shirts that spelt: “Does Our Code Kill Kids Satya?”

The employees were escorted out.

 

In March, in an event also marking Microsoft’s 50th anniversary, employees disrupted the event, raising concerns about the company’s role in enabling Israel’s war on the enclave.

Nasr, who, along with Abdo Mohamed, was fired in October 2024 for holding a lunchtime vigil for “the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian victims of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, enabled by Microsoft’s Azure cloud technology”, said that at the very least, the events of the past days meant that Microsoft could no longer hide behind “their fancy brand image”.

He said it was worth noting that in addition to the two employees who disrupted the event, there had also been more than two dozen Microsoft workers and community members who rallied outside the event, in scenes that were reportedly so loud, they could actually be “heard on the Microsoft livestream of the event”.

“They can no longer hide behind their brand recognition and pretend that they are not participating in genocide and that they are not arming a genocidal army,” Nasr said.

Nasr said that the fact that employees were increasingly taking action, knowing full well they could be fired for dissent, illustrated a rejection of the company’s position.

The company’s cowardly response, Nasr said, in which it proceeded to fire Abbousad and Agarwal for Friday’s disruption as well as continued to pretend on its public platforms that there wasn’t a wave of dissent brewing internally, further illustrated that they were in fact afraid of facing up to the worker movement and the growing demands for accountability.

Abbousad, who is now back in Canada where she lives, recalls that in the days and weeks before the protest, she had reflected on how, as a potential employee, Microsoft had marketed the opportunity to join their AI team.

She said that they framed working in AI as a means to create applications to help people who have disabilities or accessibility issues. In other words, creating tech that would benefit the world. The last thing she expected was to build applications that would facilitate death and destruction.

“They never market the other side of it, which is really the side that they’ve been shown to prioritise in their business decisions,” she added.

“I think they’ve crafted like a really deceptive image of being the place where all innovation for social impact happens.