Microsoft Israel CEO Alon Haimovitz is leaving the company after an internal review of the local office’s work with Israel’s defense establishment, the Israeli business daily Globes reported on Sunday.
The company’s global management has transferred responsibility for the Israel branch to the France office for the duration of an internal probe on whether some uses of the company’s cloud services by Israeli security agencies have violated Microsoft’s ethical guidelines and transparency requirements, particularly regarding the storage of surveillance-related data on Palestinians, the report said.
Several managers in Microsoft Israel’s government division also reportedly left their positions.
The reported review follows mounting scrutiny inside Microsoft over contracts with the Israeli government and military. In September 2025, Microsoft reportedly terminated a cloud-services agreement with Unit 8200, the Israel Defense Forces’ main outfit for gathering signal intelligence. That move followed a Guardian investigation claiming that 8200 had used Microsoft Azure systems to store data collected through surveillance of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as in Judea and Samaria.
According to the Globes report, the global management of Microsoft had limited trust in the Israeli management team, relating to the team’s dealings with the defense establishment.
Anti-Israel activists disrupted Microsoft’s developer conference in Seattle last year, and shareholder groups in Europe and the United States have pressed the company over its presence in some countries, reportedly including Israel.
Despite tensions over the Unit 8200 dispute, Israel’s Defense Ministry is expected to seek renewal of key Microsoft contracts later this year, though likely on a reduced scale, the report said. Some Israeli defense cloud infrastructure has already been migrated to Amazon and Google in recent months.
Microsoft declined to comment on the reported investigation and referred Globes to its earlier announcement that Haimovitz would step down at the end of the month after four years as CEO of Microsoft Israel, the report said.
JNS queried the Asia, Europe and global branches of Microsoft for a comment and further information on the circumstances of Haimovitz’s departure. The company did not reply in time for publication.
