One Million Calls Per Hour: Revealing Microsoft’s Cooperation with Israeli Intelligence to Monitor the Residents of the West Bank and Gaza

SadaNews - The Guardian published a report prepared by Harry Davies and Yuval, confirming that the Israeli army has undertaken a project to store the calls of Palestinians on Microsoft programs in Europe.

In the afternoon of a day at the end of 2021, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella met with the commander of the Israeli military surveillance unit 8200, and among the items on the agenda was a major intelligence transfer of highly classified materials to the American company's cloud. During a meeting at Microsoft’s headquarters near Seattle, the head of intelligence, Yossi Saryil, secured Nadella's support for a plan that would grant unit 8200 access to a designated and isolated area within Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure.

With the unlimited Azure capabilities, unit 8200 began building a powerful mass surveillance tool: a comprehensive and intrusive system that collects and stores recordings of millions of phone calls made by Palestinians daily in Gaza and the West Bank.

This system, which began operating in 2022 and was revealed by an investigation by The Guardian in conjunction with +972 Magazine and the Hebrew publication Local Call, allowed unit 8200 to store massive amounts of calls daily for long periods.

Microsoft claims that Nadella was not aware of the type of data that unit 8200 intended to store on Azure, but a collection of leaked Microsoft documents and interviews with 11 sources from the company and Israeli military intelligence reveal how unit 8200 used Azure to store this vast archive of daily Palestinian communications.

According to three sources from unit 8200, the cloud storage platform contributed to preparing for deadly airstrikes and outlining military operations in Gaza and the West Bank.

Thanks to its control over Palestinian communication infrastructure, Israel has long been intercepting phone calls in the occupied territories. However, the new random system allows intelligence officers to run content from mobile phone calls made by Palestinians, thereby recording conversations of a much larger slice of ordinary civilians.

Intelligence sources familiar with the project stated that the leadership of unit 8200 turned to Microsoft after concluding that they lacked sufficient storage space or computing power on the military’s servers to handle the burden of phone calls for entire populations. Several intelligence officers in the unit noted that an internal slogan emerged reflecting the scope of the project: "One million calls per hour." The system was designed to store on Microsoft servers behind enhanced security layers developed by the company’s engineers under the instructions of unit 8200.

Leaked Microsoft files indicate that a significant portion of the sensitive data of the unit may now reside in the company's data centers in the Netherlands and Ireland.

The revelation of Microsoft Azure's role in the surveillance project comes at a time when the American tech giant is facing pressure from employees and investors regarding its ties to the Israeli army and the role its technology has played in the 22-month-long assault on Gaza.

Following revelations by The Guardian and other media in January about Israel's reliance on Microsoft technologies during the Gaza war, the company conducted an external review of the relationship. Microsoft stated that the review "found no evidence to date" that Azure or its AI products were used "to target or harm individuals" in the Gaza Strip. A senior source at Microsoft said the company had discussions with Israeli defense officials, outlining how its technologies were being used in Gaza and insisted that Microsoft systems were not used to identify targets for lethal strikes.

However, sources within unit 8200 reported that intelligence drawn from the vast stores of phone calls kept in Azure was used to seek and identify bombing targets in Gaza.

One source explained that when planning an airstrike on a person residing in densely populated civilian areas, officers used the cloud system to check calls from people in the immediate surrounding area. The sources added that the use of the system increased during the assault on Gaza, which took the lives of over 60,000 people in the enclave, the majority of whom were civilians, including more than 18,000 children.

However, the primary focus of the system was on the West Bank, where more than three million Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation. Sources in unit 8200 indicated that the data stored in Azure constitutes a rich repository of intelligence about the inhabitants, which some unit members claimed was used to blackmail people, detain them, or even justify their killings after the fact. One person remarked, referring to the information stored in the cloud: "When they need to arrest someone and there isn't a sufficient reason to do so, they find an excuse there," referring to the stored information.

The newspaper quoted a Microsoft spokesperson as saying they "have no information" regarding the type of data stored by unit 8200 in their cloud. They added that "the company's collaboration with unit 8200 was based on enhancing cybersecurity and protecting Israel from attacks by nation-states and cyber-terrorist attacks." They added: "Microsoft was not aware, at any time, of civilian surveillance or the collection of their phone conversations using Microsoft services, including through the external review that was commissioned."

The newspaper states that Saryil, the commander of unit 8200 from early 2021 until late 2024, was the driving force behind the cloud project – described by one source as a "revolution" within the unit.

Saryil was a staunch advocate of projects of this magnitude. Following the wave of 2015 lone wolf attacks carried out by young Palestinians, many of whom were teenagers unknown to security forces, Saryil oversaw a significant expansion in the volume of Palestinian communications intercepted and stored by unit 8200. An officer who worked with Saryil at the time said: "His response was to start tracking everyone all the time."

Rather than traditional surveillance of specific targets, Saryil’s project relied on the mass surveillance of Palestinians in the West Bank and used modern artificial intelligence methods to derive insights. Another source involved in the project, which aimed to predict whether someone posed a threat to Israeli security, noted: "Suddenly the entire public became an enemy to us." Sources reported that a system developed during that period was examining all text messages exchanged among Palestinians in the West Bank and classifying each message based on automated analysis, whether it included words deemed suspicious. The system is still in use, known as the "The Jumbled Message," capable of identifying text messages in which individuals discuss weapons or express a desire to die.

When Saryil assumed leadership of unit 8200 in early 2021, he prioritized establishing a partnership with Microsoft that would enable the unit to move forward in capturing and analyzing content from millions of phone calls daily. In his meeting with Nadella later that year, it seems Saryil did not speak candidly about his plan to store Palestinian phone calls in the cloud, instead referring to "sensitive workloads" of classified data, according to internal records of the meeting. However, documents suggest that Microsoft engineers understood that the data stored in Azure would include raw intelligence information, including audio files, while it appears that some Microsoft employees in Israel, including graduates of unit 8200, were aware of what the unit hoped the joint venture would achieve. One source stated: "You don’t need to be a genius to figure that out. [Microsoft] was told that we no longer had any space on the servers, and that they were audio files. It’s perfectly clear." A Microsoft spokesperson stated: "We are unaware of Azure being used to store such data." However, in early 2022, Microsoft engineers and unit 8200 worked together swiftly and closely to design and implement advanced security measures within Azure to meet the unit’s standards. One document noted that "the rhythm of interaction with [the unit] was daily, top-down and bottom-up." The project was shrouded in great secrecy among Microsoft employees, with engineers instructed not to mention the name of unit 8200. Under the plan, massive amounts of raw intelligence materials would be stored in Microsoft’s overseas data centers.

Files indicate that by July of this year, 11,500 terabytes of Israeli military data, equivalent to about 200 million hours of audio recordings, were stored on Microsoft Azure servers in the Netherlands, while a smaller proportion was stored in Ireland.

It is unclear if all this data belongs to unit 8200; some of it may belong to other Israeli military units.

According to the files, unit 8200 informed Microsoft that it planned to transfer up to 70% of its data, including highly classified information, to Azure over time and that it was willing to "go beyond the boundaries" with this type of sensitive information that intelligence agencies usually keep on their own servers.

One executive indicated that they are "always trying to challenge the status quo." When asked about Saryil’s meeting with Nadella, the Microsoft spokesperson said it is "not accurate" to state that the CEO gave his personal endorsement to the project with unit 8200. They added that Nadella "attended for 10 minutes at the end of the meeting" and that there was "no discussion" regarding the content of the data the unit planned to transfer to Azure. However, according to internal Microsoft records of the meeting reviewed by The Guardian, Nadella supported Saryil’s ambitions to transfer much of the elite surveillance unit’s data to the cloud, previously described in the meeting as including sensitive intelligence materials. One of the records noted: "Satya suggested we define specific workloads to start with and then gradually move towards the 70% threshold." It adds that Nadella said "building the partnership is critical" and that "Microsoft is committed to providing the necessary resources to support."