LONDON: Israel’s military surveillance agency, Unit 8200, has used Microsoft Azure cloud services to store recordings of millions of mobile phone calls made daily by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank since 2022.
The cloud-based storage platform has enabled the execution of lethal Israeli airstrikes and has influenced military operations in Gaza and the West Bank, according to a joint investigation by The Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call.
After a meeting in late 2021 between Yossi Sariel, the head of Unit 8200, and Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, work commenced on a customized, segregated area within the Microsoft Azure cloud platform for the Israeli intelligence agency to store a vast archive of daily communications from Palestinians.
Unit 8200, the rough equivalent of the US’ National Security Agency, had determined that the Israeli military’s servers lacked the necessary storage space and computing power to handle the volume of phone calls from an entire population — about 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and another 2.3 million in Gaza.
Sources revealed that the “a million calls an hour” mantra that spread within Unit 8200 captured the project’s scale, using Azure’s near-limitless storage capacity to collect and store recordings of millions of Palestinians.
