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Title: Israel is reportedly storing millions of Palestinian phone calls on
Microsoft servers

Date: Wed, 06 Aug 2025 16:11:28 +0000
Link: https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/israel-is-r...

Israel has allegedly been recording and storing millions of phone calls made
by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank as part of a large surveillance
effort dating back to 2022, according to reporting by The Guardian, +972
Magazine and Local Call. The report suggests that the country has been
shuttling these recordings to Microsoft Azure cloud servers.

Company CEO Satya Nadella allegedly okayed the effort personally after
meeting with a commander from IsraelΓÇÖs military surveillance agency, Unit
8200. He reportedly gave the country a customized and segregated area within
the Azure platform to store millions of phone calls made each day without
knowledge or consent from Palestinians.

According to sources within Unit 8200, these recordings have assisted in the
preparation of deadly airstrikes and helped shape military operations
throughout the region. Israel has long been intercepting calls in the
occupied territories, as it basically controls the entire Palestinian
telecommunications infrastructure.

This new method, however, reportedly captures the conversations of a large
pool of regular civilians. The mantra when building out the project was to
record "a million calls an hour." Leaked Microsoft files suggest that the
lion's share of this data is being stored in Azure facilities in the
Netherlands and Ireland.

Microsoft has been facing increased scrutiny regarding its role in Israel's
22-month offensive in Gaza. CEO Nadella was interrupted by an employee at a
keynote speech in May, with the worker pleading for the executive to "show
how Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure."

🎮 Microsoft workers are refusing to work on Israeli military tech.
According to No Azure for Apartheid, dozens of employees across various roles
have signed a pledge to stop working on Azure contracts tied to IsraelΓÇÖs
military, and want Microsoft ends those deals.

Internal… pic.twitter.com/sduAAN0mXF

ΓÇö Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) July 23, 2025

Earlier this year, the company commissioned an external review that "found no
evidence to dateΓÇ¥ that Azure or its AI products were "used to target or
harm people" in the territory. Today's reporting suggests otherwise. Unit
8200 sources indicate that intelligence drawn from this data was used to
identify bombing targets. Microsoft says it has "no information" about the
kind of data stored by Israel on its servers.

ΓÇ£At no time during this engagement,ΓÇ¥ a company representative added,
ΓÇ£has Microsoft been aware of the surveillance of civilians or collection of
their cellphone conversations using MicrosoftΓÇÖs services, including through
the external review it commissioned.ΓÇ¥ Sources say that usage of the
surveillance system increased during the campaign in Gaza. So far, 60,000
people in the territory have been killed, including over 18,000 children.

Microsoft isn't the only company that has been accused of assisting Israel in
what many are calling a genocide in Gaza. A report recently found that Google
employees have repeatedly worked with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and
IsraelΓÇÖs Defense Ministry (IDM) to expand the government's access to AI
tools.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-
tech/israel-is-reportedly-storing-millions-of-palestinian-phone-calls-on-
microsoft-servers-161127912.html?src=rss

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