The Irish Council for Civil Liberties has called on the Irish government to launch a formal investigation into Microsoft, alleging that the tech giant aided Israel during the war in Gaza.
The complaint was submitted to Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), the European body legally responsible for overseeing all data processing conducted within the EU.
The demand for an investigation follows an August report by The Guardian and the website 972+, which claimed that Microsoft stored thousands of phone calls made by Palestinian Arabs on its cloud platform, thereby helping Israel process "unlawful" data and spy on Palestinian Arabs' communications.
According to The Guardian, leaked documents indicated that the IDF’s Unit 8200 cooperated with Microsoft to store this phone-call data on the company’s cloud infrastructure.
Joe O’Brien, Executive Director of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, said: “Microsoft’s technology has placed millions of Palestinians at risk. Data processing has facilitated war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide by the Israeli military. These are not abstract data-protection failures - these are violations that enabled real-world violence. When EU infrastructure is used to enable surveillance and targeting, the Irish Data Protection Commission must intervene and use its full authority to hold Microsoft accountable.”