‘A million calls an hour’: Israel relying on Microsoft cloud for expansive surveillance of Palestinians, 6 August 2025

[I]n late 2021, Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, met with the commander of Israel’s military surveillance agency, Unit 8200...Yossi Sariel [of Unit 8200], won Nadella’s support for a plan that would grant Unit 8200 access to a customised and segregated area within Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. Armed with Azure’s near-limitless storage capacity, Unit 8200 began building a powerful new mass surveillance tool: a sweeping and intrusive system that collects and stores recordings of millions of mobile phone calls made each day by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank...

...[T]he cloud-based system – which first became operational in 2022 – enables Unit 8200 to store a giant trove of calls daily for extended periods of time.

Microsoft claims Nadella was unaware of what kind of data Unit 8200 planned to store in Azure. But a cache of leaked Microsoft documents and interviews with 11 sources from the company and Israeli military intelligence reveals how Azure has been used by Unit 8200 to store this expansive archive of everyday Palestinian communications.

According to three Unit 8200 sources, the cloud-based storage platform has facilitated the preparation of deadly airstrikes and has shaped military operations in Gaza and the West Bank.

Thanks to the control it exerts over Palestinian telecommunications infrastructure, Israel has long intercepted phone calls in the occupied territories. But the indiscriminate new system allows intelligence officers to play back the content of cellular calls made by Palestinians, capturing the conversations of a much larger pool of ordinary civilians...The leaked Microsoft files suggest that a large proportion of the unit’s sensitive data may now be sitting in the company’s data centres in the Netherlands and Ireland...

...After the Guardian and others revealed in January Israel’s reliance on Microsoft technology during the war in Gaza, the company commissioned an external review of the relationship. The review, Microsoft said, had “found no evidence to date” that Azure or its AI products were “used to target or harm people” in the territory.

A senior Microsoft source said the company had held conversations with Israeli defence officials and stipulated how its technology should be used in Gaza, insisting Microsoft systems must not be employed for the identification of targets for lethal strikes...

...[T]he initial focus of the system was the West Bank, where an estimated 3 million Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation. Unit 8200 sources said the information stored in Azure amounted to a rich repository of intelligence about its population that some in the unit claimed had been used to blackmail people, place them in detention, or even justify their killing after the fact. “When they need to arrest someone and there isn’t a good enough reason to do so, that’s where they find the excuse,” one said, referring to the information stored in the cloud.

A Microsoft spokesperson said it had “no information” about the kind of data stored by Unit 8200 in its cloud. They said the company’s “engagement with Unit 8200 has been based on strengthening cybersecurity and protecting Israel from nation state and terrorist cyber-attacks”. “At no time during this engagement,” they added, “has Microsoft been aware of the surveillance of civilians or collection of their cellphone conversations using Microsoft’s services, including through the external review it commissioned.”...

...Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s telecoms infrastructure has reduced the volume of phone calls in the territory but sources said the information held in the cloud remained useful. According to one, enthusiasm for the system had grown among intelligence officers working on Gaza as the war progressed and they saw the military is “heading towards long-term control there”.