Israel stored mass surveillance of Palestinians on Microsoft's European servers: report

Israeli intelligence services have used Microsoft's cloud technology to store and analyse vast amounts of intercepted phone calls made by Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, a joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call has revealed.

The highly secretive programme, developed by the Israeli military's cyber-intelligence unit, Unit 8200, has stored millions of phone conversations on Microsoft's Azure cloud servers in Europe.

The system, first launched in 2022, allows officers to playback and analyse calls made by Palestinians on a massive scale, amounting to what insiders described as "a million calls an hour".

The cloud-based system stores data at Microsoft datacentres in the Netherlands and Ireland.

The project was made possible following a 2021 meeting between Unit 8200 chief Yossi Sariel and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the company’s headquarters near Seattle.

Though Microsoft maintains Nadella only attended the meeting briefly and was unaware of the nature of the data being transferred, leaked documents and interviews with Israeli and Microsoft sources suggest company engineers worked closely with Israeli intelligence to develop the infrastructure needed for the surveillance programme.

Microsoft insists that it had "no information" about the surveillance of civilians or interception of mobile conversations. But internal records cited by the report showed the company was aware that the data included raw intelligence.

Some Microsoft employees in Israel, alumni of Unit 8200, are said to have known the purpose of the project.

By July 2025, at least 11,500 terabytes, roughly 200 million hours of audio, had been uploaded. It's not clear whether all of it belongs to Unit 8200, but Microsoft files show the unit plans to eventually transfer up to 70 percent of its classified and top-secret data to Azure.

Unit 8200 is Israel's equivalent of the US National Security Agency (NSA), responsible for signals intelligence.

Sources told the outlets that cloud-based surveillance had been used to identify airstrike targets in Gaza, justify arrests in the West Bank, and even pressure individuals through personal information.

One officer claimed it was used to "find an excuse" for detention when there was no legitimate reason.

The revelations come as Microsoft faces mounting pressure from employees and shareholders over its involvement in the Gaza war, now in its 22nd month and estimated to have killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians.

In May, a protester interrupted a keynote by Nadella, shouting: "Show how Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure."

Unit 8200's expanded surveillance efforts, particularly in the West Bank, were reportedly part of Sariel's strategy to suppress Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. His response was to "track everyone, all the time", a shift away from traditional targeted surveillance.

One system developed by Unit 8200, called "noisy message", scans all text communications between Palestinians in the West Bank and uses AI to flag messages containing certain keywords. Now, with calls stored en masse in Azure, officers can retrieve past conversations even when an individual only becomes a target later.

Although Microsoft insists that it has not knowingly supported surveillance of civilians, the documents show its engineers worked daily with Unit 8200 to customise Azure security settings.

The secrecy around the partnership was such that employees were instructed not to refer to the Israeli unit by name, according to the report.

Last year, former Microsoft staff involved in the No Azure for Apartheid campaign told The New Arab that company engineers with security clearance actively oversaw services for classified Israeli military units, including one based in the prime minister’s office.

The whistleblowers, who were later fired after staging a vigil for Gaza, said Microsoft had "weaponised internal policies" to suppress employee dissent over its role in the war.

The Israeli army said its cooperation with Microsoft was part of “legally supervised agreements” and insisted that operations were conducted in line with international law.

Microsoft, meanwhile, continues to deny it was aware of the data's nature and reiterates that it does not permit the use of its technology for identifying targets in military operations.

However, the project reflects how private tech infrastructure is being integrated into the machinery of occupation and conflict.

As one intelligence source said of the partnership: "The cloud is infinite storage… It was the solution to our problems in the Palestinian arena."