A million calls an hour' How Microsoft enabled mass surveillance of Palestinians

One afternoon in late 2021, Microsoft's chief executive, Satya Nadella, met with the commander of Israel's military surveillance agency, Unit 8200. On the spy chief's agenda: moving vast amounts of top secret intelligence material into the US company's cloud.

- Harry Davies Yuval Abraham

Meeting at Microsoft's headquarters near Seattle, the spymaster, Yossi Sariel, won Nadella's support for a plan that would grant Unit 8200 access to a customized and segregated area within Microsoft's Azure cloud platform.

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.

Revealed here for the first time in an investigation by the Guardian with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, the cloud-based system—which first became operational in 2022—enables Unit 8200 to store a giant trove of calls daily for extended periods of time.

Microsoft claims Nadella was unaware of what kind of data Unit 8200 planned to store in Azure. But a cache of leaked Microsoft documents and interviews with 11 sources from the company and Israeli military intelligence reveals how Azure has been used by Unit 8200 to store this expansive archive of Palestinians' communications.

According to three Unit 8200 sources, the cloud-based storage has facilitated deadly airstrikes and has shaped military operations in Gaza and the West Bank.

Thanks to its control over Palestinian telecommunications infrastructure, Israel has long intercepted phone calls in the occupied territories. But the new system allows intelligence officers to play back Palestinians' mobile calls, capturing the conversations of a much larger pool of ordinary civilians.

Intelligence sources with knowledge of the project said Unit 8200's leadership turned to Microsoft after concluding it did not have sufficient storage space or computing power on the military's servers to bear the weight of an entire population's phone calls.