Israel Uses Azure for Palestinian Call Surveillance

A joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call has revealed that Israel's Unit 8200 uses Microsoft's Azure cloud platform to store vast amounts of intercepted Palestinian phone calls from Gaza and the West Bank, enabling large-scale mass surveillance since 2022. The project reportedly began after a 2021 meeting between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Unit 8200's commander, leading to the establishment of a segregated Azure environment capable of storing millions of calls daily. Sources indicate this system has supported Israeli military operations and airstrikes, representing an unprecedented scale of surveillance targeting ordinary civilians. Internal documents and whistleblowers suggest Microsoft engineers, including some with Unit 8200 backgrounds, helped develop the infrastructure despite public denials of knowledge about the civilian focus. The intercepted data is believed to be stored in Azure facilities in the Netherlands and Ireland. Microsoft maintains that its partnership was intended to bolster Israeli cybersecurity and that it was unaware of the specific nature of the stored data.