Truthout: “Ahead of its annual shareholders meeting on December 5, Microsoft is coming under mounting pressure to reconsider its relationship with the Israeli military, which has used the tech giant’s products to carry out the genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.

In an open letter to the company released on Tuesday, December 2, an international coalition of legal aid groups said Microsoft and its executives potentially face legal liability for “aiding and abetting … atrocity crimes” committed by the Israeli military against Palestinian civilians.

‘Over the last few months, it has become exceedingly clear that Microsoft’s services and technologies have been used to violate Palestinian human rights, and shareholders should be aware of just how much this opens up the company to legal liability,’ said Eric Sype, U.S. national organizer at 7amleh–The Arab Center for Social Media Advancement, in a statement on December 2.

Microsoft provides “major services” to other Israeli ground, air, and naval forces despite widespread agreement among experts that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, according to the legal aid groups. The letter lists multiple examples, including Mamram, the Israeli military’s central computing system and ‘weapons platform’ that assisted the assault on Gaza with AI support and cloud services. Microsoft provided ‘rapid support’ to Mamram during the initial months of the genocide to keep systems from crashing, according to the letter.

As Truthout has reported, products provided by Big Tech are so integral to Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine that the mass killings and near-total destruction of infrastructure in Gaza are often described as ‘the first AI-powered genocide.'”

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