Microsoft terminated in September 2025 the Israeli military’s access to technology it used to operate a powerful surveillance system that collected millions of Palestinian civilian phone calls made each day in Gaza and the West Bank, according to Guardian. Microsoft told Israeli officials that Unit 8200, the military’s elite spy agency, had violated the company’s terms of service by storing the vast trove of surveillance data in its Azure cloud platform.
Equipped with Azure’s near-limitless storage capacity and computing power, Unit 8200 had built an indiscriminate new system allowing its intelligence officers to collect, play back and analyze the content of cellular calls of an entire population.
The project was so expansive that, according to sources from Unit 8200 – which is equivalent in its remit to the US National Security Agency – a mantra emerged internally that captured its scale and ambition: “A million calls an hour.”
The enormous repository of intercepted calls – which amounted to as much as 8,000 terabytes of data – was held in a Microsoft data center in the Netherlands. Within days of the Guardian publishing, Unit 8200 appears to have swiftly moved the surveillance data out of the country.
Excerpt from Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham, Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its technology in mass surveillance of Palestinians, Guardian, Sept. 25, 2025
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