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Israel's military intelligence agency has been using Microsoft's Azure cloud platform to store and analyze intercepted Palestinian phone calls at a vast scale, according to an investigation by The Guardian, the Palestinian-Israeli publication +972 Magazine, and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call.
The system, operational since 2022, can process up to "a million calls an hour" and has been used to support military operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, according to the investigation.
The investigation revealed the partnership took shape after a 2021 meeting between Israeli intelligence Unit 8200 commander Yossi Sariel and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
"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," the investigation found.
According to The Guardian, a cache of leaked Microsoft documents and interviews with 11 sources from the company and Israeli military intelligence revealed 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."
Leaked documents and sources familiar with the system showed that it stored around 11,500 terabytes of intercepted communications—the equivalent of roughly 200 million hours of phone calls.
The cloud-based system pioneered by Sariel "has been put to frequent use alongside a series of AI-driven target recommendation tools also developed on his watch and debuted by the military in a campaign that has devastated civilian life and created a profound humanitarian crisis," The Guardian reported.
Israel has been facing mounting outrage over its destructive war on Gaza, where more than 61,100 people have been killed since October 2023.
The military campaign has devastated the enclave and brought it to the verge of famine.
According to The Guardian's reporting, the leaked documents suggest that 11,500 terabytes of Israeli military data—equivalent to roughly 200 million hours of audio—were being stored on Microsoft's servers in the Netherlands by July of this year, while smaller portions were being stored in Ireland and Israel.
The leaked documents further reveal that before the current Gaza war, Microsoft's leadership viewed the cultivation of the company's relationship with Unit 8200 as a lucrative business opportunity and characterized it internally as "an incredibly powerful brand moment" for Azure.
Nadella himself, during his 2021 meeting with Sariel, defined the partnership as "critical" for Microsoft and committed to providing the resources to support it.
In a meeting at Microsoft's headquarters in Seattle in late 2021, Sariel won the support of Nadella to develop a customized and segregated area within Azure that has facilitated the army's mass surveillance project.
According to sources, Sariel approached Microsoft because the scope of Israel's intelligence on millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is so vast that it cannot be stored on military servers alone.
Microsoft's immense storage and computing power capabilities enabled what multiple Israeli sources described as the project's ambitious goal: to store "a million calls an hour."
Following the 2021 meeting, a dedicated team of Microsoft engineers began working directly with Unit 8200 to build a model that would allow the intelligence unit to use the American company's cloud services from within its own bases.
According to one intelligence source, some of these Microsoft employees were themselves alumni of Unit 8200, which made the collaboration "much easier."
Sariel's interest in upgrading Israel's mass surveillance infrastructure dates back to 2015, when he was an intelligence officer in Israel's Central Command.
That year witnessed a wave of "lone-wolf" stabbing attacks in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and inside the Green Line—many of them carried out by Palestinian teenagers previously unknown to the security services, making the attacks particularly difficult to thwart.
"We found ourselves going ... from funeral to funeral," Sariel recalled in a book he published about artificial intelligence in 2021, the year he took over as head of Unit 8200.
Sariel's solution, according to an intelligence officer who served under him at the time, was to start "tracking everyone, all the time."
Microsoft has said publicly that it found "no evidence" that its technology was used to harm Palestinians in Gaza, and a spokesperson told investigators that the company was unaware that its products had been used to aid the surveillance of civilians.
But three Israeli intelligence sources stated that Unit 8200's cloud-based intelligence trove has been used over the past two years to plan lethal airstrikes in Gaza and that it often serves as a basis for arrests and other military operations in the West Bank.
Beforehand, Unit 8200 could store the calls of tens of thousands of Palestinians defined as "suspects" on its internal servers.
The unit also developed a system called "noisy message," which collects Palestinians' text messages and assigns each of them a rating indicating their level of "danger."
But with the help of Azure, Unit 8200 was able to begin storing the calls of millions of Palestinians, vastly expanding its pool of data.
A senior source in Unit 8200 explained that Sariel viewed his relationship with Nadella as a tool to advance "revolutions" in mass surveillance of Palestinians. "Yossi bragged a lot, even to me, about his connection with Satya," the source said.
As part of its effort to migrate vast amounts of its surveillance data to the cloud, the leaked documents reveal, Unit 8200 was prepared to "push the envelope" on the types of data it was willing to store on Azure.
An internal legal opinion from the Justice Ministry in 2022 noted that both France and Germany required corporations to check for human rights violations in their supply chains by law.
If it were to be revealed that these corporations are operating in the occupied Palestinian territories, such laws "may lead to the issuance of orders to prevent or restrict services" to Israel.
Despite these concerns, Unit 8200's partnership with Microsoft continued, spearheaded by Sariel himself.
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