Microsoft Deepens Role in Israeli Surveillance, Military Operations against Palestinians

An exposé by The Guardian on Wednesday revealed that Microsoft has been hosting massive volumes of intercepted Palestinian communications on its Azure cloud servers since at least 2022.

The data—collected by Unit 8200, Israel’s notorious cyber-intelligence arm—is stored in Europe, mainly in the Netherlands and Ireland.

The surveillance dragnet, according to sources cited in the report, captures millions of Palestinian phone calls every hour and allows Israeli authorities to scrutinize daily life in Gaza and the occupied West Bank with extreme granularity.

This system, an insider revealed, is seen by Israeli officials as essential to maintaining “long-term control” over Gaza, even in the aftermath of devastating attacks on its civilian infrastructure.

Unit 8200 officers reportedly comb through intercepted conversations to retroactively justify airstrikes in crowded residential areas, using the data as a pretext for arrest and assassination.

As one source bluntly stated: “When they need to arrest someone and there isn’t a good enough reason to do so, that’s where they find the excuse.”

Despite claiming ignorance, Microsoft has been directly complicit in the system’s architecture.

In late 2021, former Unit 8200 commander Yossi Sariel held a closed-door meeting with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in Redmond, where plans were discussed to migrate Israel’s surveillance infrastructure onto Microsoft’s cloud.

Sariel assured Nadella the deal would “solve our problems in the Palestinian arena.”

Internal emails show Nadella referred to the partnership as “critical” and committed technical resources to fortify the regime’s data operations.

Microsoft engineers helped build encrypted “security layers” around the intercepted data, ensuring its protection and enabling further Israeli military action based on that intelligence.

By mid-2025, over 11,500 terabytes—equivalent to 200 million hours of audio surveillance—had been uploaded to Azure under the agreement.

Reports say Unit 8200 aimed to transfer 70% of its military and intelligence data to Microsoft’s servers, including classified material.

Microsoft also provided artificial intelligence tools to enhance the regime’s targeting capabilities.

Among them was an AI system called “noisy message,” which flagged written content deemed suspicious, feeding into Israel’s predictive arrest and targeting programs.

Israeli sources again stressed that this surveillance backbone is viewed as a key pillar of their future domination of Gaza.

Microsoft’s technology has been instrumental in the regime’s ongoing war on Gaza since October 2023—a campaign widely condemned as genocidal, resulting in the deaths of more than 61,000 Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians, women, and children.

For Microsoft, the collaboration promises massive financial returns.

The report said the cloud surveillance deal could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars and represents a “brand moment” for Azure in the cutthroat global cloud services industry.

Still, despite the high-tech infrastructure, Israeli intelligence failed to predict or prevent the historic resistance operation by Gaza-based forces in October 2023.

The successful infiltration into occupied territories caught the regime off guard, leading to a political and intelligence crisis within Tel Aviv.

The aftermath saw Yossi Sariel quietly resign, admitting to “intelligence and operational failure.”

This is not the first time American tech companies have been shown to play a decisive role in Israeli military and intelligence operations in the region.

It adds to a growing body of evidence implicating US corporations in enabling war crimes and apartheid under the guise of cloud computing and AI innovation.