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Microsoft has cut off the Israeli military's access to technology it used to operate a powerful surveillance system that collected millions of Palestinian civilian phone calls made every day in Gaza and the West Bank, the Guardian newspaper has revealed.
Microsoft told Israeli officials late last week that Unit 8200, the military's elite spy agency, had violated the company's terms of service by storing vast amounts of surveillance data on its Azure cloud platform, sources familiar with the situation said.
The decision to cut off Unit 8200's ability to use some of its technology stems directly from an investigation published by the Guardian last month that revealed how Azure was being used to store and process Palestinian communications data in a mass surveillance program.
In a joint investigation with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, the Guardian newspaper revealed how Microsoft and Unit 8200 had worked together on a plan to transfer large volumes of sensitive intelligence material to Azure.
The project began after a meeting in 2021 between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and the unit's then-commander, Yossi Sariel.
In response to the investigation, Microsoft ordered an urgent external investigation to examine its relationship with Unit 8200. Its initial findings have now led the company to revoke the unit's access to some of its cloud storage and artificial intelligence services.
Equipped with the nearly unlimited storage capacity and computing power of Azure, Unit 8200 had built a new, indiscriminate system that allowed its intelligence officers to collect, play back, and analyze the content of an entire population's cell phone calls.
The project was so vast that, according to sources from Unit 8200, which is equivalent in its responsibility to the US National Security Agency, a mantra emerged from within that encapsulated its scale and ambition: “A million calls per hour.”
According to some sources, the gigantic cache of intercepted calls - which amounted to up to 8,000 terabytes of data - was held in a Microsoft data center in the Netherlands. Within days of the Guardian's investigation being published, Unit 8200 appears to have rapidly moved the surveillance data out of the country.
According to sources familiar with the large data transfer outside the EU, it took place in early August. Intelligence sources said Unit 8200 planned to transfer the data to the Amazon Web Services cloud platform. Neither the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) nor Amazon responded to a request for comment.
Microsoft's extraordinary decision to end the spy agency's access to key technology came amid pressure from employees and investors over its work for the Israeli military and the role its technology has played in the nearly two-year offensive in Gaza.
A United Nations investigative commission concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, a charge denied by Israel but supported by many international law experts.
The Guardian's joint investigation sparked protests at Microsoft's US headquarters and one of its European data centers, as well as demands from a worker-led activist group, No Azure for Apartheid, to end all ties with the Israeli military.
On Thursday, Microsoft vice president and president Brad Smith informed staff of the decision. In an email first seen by the Guardian, he said the company had “discontinued and disabled a number of services for a unit within the Israeli Ministry of Defense,” including cloud storage and AI services.
The decision abruptly ends a three-year period during which the spy agency operated its surveillance program using Microsoft technology.
Unit 8200 used its extensive surveillance capabilities to intercept and collect calls. The spy agency then used a custom, segregated area within the Azure platform, allowing the data to be stored for long periods of time and analyzed using artificial intelligence-driven techniques.
Although the initial focus of the surveillance system was the West Bank, where some 3 million Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation, intelligence sources said the cloud data storage platform was used in the Gaza offensive to facilitate the preparation of deadly airstrikes.
The revelations highlighted how Israel has relied on the services and infrastructure of major US technology companies to support its bombing of Gaza, which has killed more than 65,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and created a deep humanitarian crisis and famine./ TheGuardian
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