• Israel's military intelligence agency uses Microsoft's Azure to store intercepted Palestinian phone calls.
• The surveillance system can process up to a million calls per hour, operational since 2022.
• More than 61,100 Palestinians have reportedly been killed in Gaza amid ongoing military actions.
• Internal documents indicated supportive collaboration between Microsoft and Israeli military contractors.

Israel’s military intelligence, Unit 8200, has employed Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to store and analyze intercepted communications from Palestinians at an extensive scale, according to a detailed investigation by aa, trtglobal, and Al Jazeera. The system, established following a key meeting in 2021 between Unit 8200 commander Yossi Sariel and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, can process up to “a million calls an hour” and supports military operations in Gaza and the West Bank.

The investigation revealed that the Azure system has been operational since 2022, enabling the collection and retention of millions of phone calls daily. Leaked documents indicated that as of mid-2025, over 11,500 terabytes of this data—roughly equivalent to 200 million hours of audio—are stored on Microsoft’s servers in Europe, as reported by aa, trtglobal, and Al Jazeera. These systems reportedly help facilitate military actions, including airstrikes and detentions, underpinning a significant expansion in Israel's intelligence capabilities.

According to sources within Unit 8200, the data from this cloud platform plays a vital role in justifying military operations and detaining individuals based on intercepted communications. Such mass surveillance is described by critics as indiscriminate, often leading to wrongful detentions due to the lack of substantial evidence, as detailed in reports from trtglobal and Al Jazeera.

Microsoft maintains that it was not aware of the specific types of data being stored and claims that its systems were not intended for surveillance use in military operations. However, numerous sources have raised concerns regarding the ethical implications of such collaborations, particularly in the context of ongoing conflicts where at least 61,100 Palestinians have lost their lives in Gaza, as highlighted by aa, trtglobal, and Al Jazeera.