Microsoft Cuts Off Israeli Military’s Access To Tech Used In Palestinian Surveillance: Report
Technology giant Microsoft has blocked Israel’s Unit 8200, its elite military intelligence wing, from using some of its cloud and artificial intelligence services after revelations that the unit was running a vast surveillance system on Palestinians reported The Guardian.
According to the investigation, the system intercepted and stored millions of phone calls made by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank every day. The surveillance project was so large that Unit 8200 officers described it internally with the phrase: “A million calls an hour.”
The Guardian reported that Microsoft informed Israel’s Defence Ministry last week that Unit 8200 had violated its terms of service by using Azure cloud servers to store a massive trove of intercepted civilian communications. The data, estimated at up to 8,000 terabytes, was initially stored in a Microsoft data centre in the Netherlands.
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After the revelations were published, the report said, Unit 8200 quickly shifted the data out of the EU and began moving it towards Amazon Web Services. Neither Amazon nor the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) commented on this transfer.
The Guardian’s joint investigation with +972 Magazine and Local Call revealed that the project started in 2021, after a meeting between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and the then commander of Unit 8200, Yossi Sariel.
With Azure’s massive storage and computing power, the Israeli military built a new system that allowed intelligence officers to collect, replay, and analyse the phone conversations of Palestinians. While initially focused on the West Bank, intelligence sources told The Guardian the system was also used during the Gaza offensive to prepare airstrikes.
In response to the findings, Microsoft launched an external inquiry, carried out by US law firm Covington & Burling. The company’s vice-chair and president, Brad Smith, told staff in an internal email that Microsoft had “ceased and disabled a set of services to a unit within the Israeli Ministry of Defence.”
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“We do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians. We have applied this principle in every country around the world, and we have insisted on it repeatedly for more than two decades,” Smith added.
According to The Guardian, this marks the first known case of a US technology company cutting services to the Israeli military since the Gaza war began nearly two years ago.
The revelations have triggered protests by Microsoft employees and campaign groups, including No Azure for Apartheid, which had demanded the company end its contracts with the Israeli military.
The Guardian report also noted that a UN commission of inquiry recently accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza – an allegation Israel strongly denies. More than 65,000 Palestinians have been killed in the offensive so far, most of them civilians, alongside widespread starvation and destruction.
While Microsoft has not ended all of its work with the Israeli defence establishment – the IDF remains a commercial client – the decision to suspend services to Unit 8200 is likely to spark debate inside Israel over the risks of storing sensitive military data on foreign cloud platforms.
