Microsoft has terminated 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, the Guardian revealed on Thursday.
Microsoft told Israeli officials late last week that Unit 8200, the occupation 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, the Guardian reported, citing sources familiar with the situation.
Microsoft has terminated unit 8200’s access to select cloud storage and AI services, making it the first giant tech company to terminate any services to apartheid Israel at least since the beginning of its Gaza genocide.
Palestinians call for escalated BDS pressure on Microsoft… pic.twitter.com/BzlLrwxLZc
— BDS movement (@BDSmovement) September 26, 2025
The decision to cut off Unit 8200’s ability to use some of its technology results directly from an investigation published by the Guardian last month. It revealed how Azure was being used to store and process the trove of Palestinian communications in a mass surveillance program.
In a joint investigation with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, the Guardian revealed how Microsoft and Unit 8200 had worked together on a plan to move large volumes of sensitive intelligence material into Azure.
The project began after a meeting in 2021 between Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, and the unit’s then commander, Yossi Sariel.
In response to the investigation, Microsoft ordered an urgent external inquiry to review its relationship with Unit 8200. Its initial findings have now led the company to cancel the unit’s access to some of its cloud storage and AI services.
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.”
According to several sources, the Guardian reported that the enormous repository of intercepted calls – which amounted to as much as 8,000 terabytes of data – was held in a Microsoft datacenter in the Netherlands. Within days of the Guardian publishing the investigation, Unit 8200 appears to have swiftly moved the surveillance data out of the country.
According to sources familiar with the huge data transfer outside of the EU country, it occurred in early August. Intelligence sources said Unit 8200 planned to transfer the data to the Amazon Web Services cloud platform.
The Guardian noted that the extraordinary decision by Microsoft to end the spy agency’s access to key technology was made amid pressure from employees and investors over its work for the Israeli military and the role its technology has played in the almost two-year offensive in Gaza.
Source: The Guardian (edited by Al-Manar)
