Microsoft cloud in Ireland under fire for hosting Israeli app used to monitor Palestinians in occupied West Bank

Microsoft software plays a key part in running an app used by Israel to control Palestinian mobility in the occupied territories, a new report found. Al Munasseq, meaning ‘The Coordinator’ in Arabic, is an app launched by Israel’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (COGAT) unit in 2019 to manage the movement of Palestinians for work, healthcare, prayer, and everyday tasks. A report published on Tuesday (3 November) by global consumer group Ekō found Microsoft to be hosting key components of Al Munasseq in data centres in Ireland, effectively enabling what is feared to be mass surveillance. The corporate watchdog found Microsoft’s cloud solutions Azure Functions and Azure Monitor, used to create functional code and monitor user activity, facilitate Israel’s overview of the over one million people using it. “For Palestinians, Al Munasseq is the gatekeeper to ordinary life. A cancer patient who needs radiotherapy in Jerusalem, a worker who needs to feed his family, a daughter who wants to sit beside her mother in hospital – all of them must ask Israel’s military for a permit to move across their own stolen land, and that permission runs through the Al Munasseq app,” said Ekō senior campaign director, Rewan Al-Haddad. “If a Western tech giant can host the machinery powering apartheid in Ireland, inside the EU, and face no consequences, every other company will learn it can do the same,” Al-Haddad told EUobserver. Deputy Sinead Gibney, who serves on the Irish parliament's AI committee, called for an investigation in light of the report findings.