Israel uses Microsoft's cloud to collect information on Palestinians

The Israeli army's elite cyber warfare unit uses Microsoft's cloud servers to store huge amounts of information on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, used to plan air strikes and define military operations. This was revealed in an investigation conducted by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and the Guardian, which conducted interviews with 11 Microsoft and Israeli sources, as well as gaining access to a number of internal Microsoft documents.

According to the Israeli newspaper +972 Magazine, the Unit 8200, which has functions roughly equivalent to the US National Security Agency (NSA), transferred audio files of millions of Palestinian calls to Microsoft's cloud platform, Azure, 'operating what is probably one of the largest and most invasive collections of surveillance data on a single population group'.

The collaboration began in 2021 when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella received the commander of Unit 8200, Yossi Sariel, in Seattle. On that occasion, writes the Guardian, Sariel gained Nadella's support for a plan that would grant his unit access to a customised area within the Azure platform. 'Thanks to Azure's almost unlimited storage capacity, Unit 8200 began developing a powerful new tool for mass surveillance: a comprehensive and intrusive system that collects and archives recordings of millions of mobile phone calls made every day by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank,' the British newspaper pointed out.

Microsoft's immense storage and computing capacity enabled what several Israeli sources described as the ambitious goal of the project: to store 'one million calls per hour'. And according to three sources in Unit 8200, the platform facilitated the preparation of air strikes and planned military operations in Gaza and the West Bank.

According to the investigation, after the 2021 meeting, a dedicated team of Microsoft engineers started working directly with Unit 8200 to build a model that would allow the intelligence unit to use the American company's cloud services from its own bases. According to an intelligence source, some of these Microsoft employees were former members of Unit 8200, which made collaboration 'much easier'.