Complaint filed against Microsoft in Ireland for allegations of "facilitated war crimes" and "obscured evidence of illegal data processing"
"Irish authorities asked to investigate Microsoft over alleged unlawful data processing by IDF" 4 December 2025
The complaint has been made by the human rights group the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) to the Data Protection Commission, which has legal responsibility in Europe for overseeing all data processing in the European Union.
It follows revelations in August by the Guardian with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew outlet Local Call that a giant trove of Palestinians’ phone calls was being stored on Microsoft’s cloud service, Azure, as part of a mass surveillance operation by the Israeli military.
The ICCL alleges that the processing of the personal data “facilitated war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide by Israeli military”. Microsoft’s European headquarters are located in Ireland...
...[A cache of leaked documents] showed how Microsoft’s storage facility had been used by Unit 8200 to store an expansive archive of everyday Palestinian communications, facilitating targeted airstrikes and other military operations. In response to the revelations Microsoft ordered an urgent external inquiry to review its relationship with Unit 8200. Its initial findings led the company to cancel the unit’s access to some of its cloud storage and AI services.
ICCL claims that Microsoft facilitated critical components of Israel’s military surveillance “Al Minasseq” system. It says the alleged “removal” of the records of intercepted phone calls from EU servers to Israel obscured evidence of illegal processing before investigations could commence within the EU and claims that unlawful processing was a breach of the EU’s general data protection regulation (GDPR) governing use of personal data...
...Microsoft has been approached for comment...