Microsoft stores millions of Israeli spy data used to target Palestinians.

BarcelonaThe Israeli army's cyberwarfare unit uses Microsoft servers to store a wealth of surveillance data on Palestinians captured from the mobile phones of Palestinians, data it has used to planning deadly military attacks in Gaza and the West Bank. Microsoft has made available to the Israeli army a customized area with almost unlimited capacity within its Azure cloud, allowing the Israeli army's cyberespionage unit, Unit 8200, to build a powerful new tool for mass surveillance: a vast and intrusive system of mobile phones made daily by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. This is revealed in a joint investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew outlet Local Call.

Leaked Microsoft documents and interviews with 11 sources from the company and Israeli military intelligence for these three outlets reveal that the cloud-based storage platform has facilitated the preparation of deadly airstrikes and shaped military operations in Gaza and the West Bank. Several sources close to the project identified the surveillance project's motto—and its goal—as "one million calls every hour."

The collaboration agreement between the American company and the Israeli government The agreement was finalized in late 2021 in a meeting between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Unit 8200 commander Yossi Sariel. The meeting was held at a former chicken farm converted into a high-tech campus in Seattle, and the cloud-based surveillance system first went live in 2022. According to these outlets' sources, Sariel contacted Microsoft because the amount of material obtained by Israel from the West Bank and Gaza was so immense that it could not be stored solely on local military servers. Thanks to its control over Palestinian telecommunications infrastructure, Israel has intercepted phone calls to the occupied territories for decades. The information now stored on Microsoft's platform is likely one of the largest sets of surveillance and intrusive data in the world on a single population group, he says. +972 Magazine.

According to the report of The Guardian, the leaked documents suggest that 11,500 terabytes of Israeli military data—equivalent to approximately 200 million hours of audio—was stored on Microsoft servers in the Netherlands as of July of this year, with smaller batches being kept in Ireland and Israel. The data is collected on Microsoft servers behind layers of enhanced security developed by the company's engineers on the instructions of Unit 8200.

The press revelation comes as the US tech giant is facing pressure from employees and investors over its role in the Gaza offensive. In May of that same year, after intense criticism, Microsoft said it had conducted an internal review and concluded there was no evidence the Israeli military had used its Azure technology "to attack or harm individuals in the Gaza conflict," but the investigation by these three outlets suggests just the opposite.