Israel surveils millions of Palestinians using Microsoft cloud

In late 2021, Unit 8200 commander Yossi Sariel met with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the company's headquarters near Seattle.

During the meeting, they discussed Israel's plan to migrate its intelligence data to Microsoft's Azure cloud platform.

Although Nadella only briefly joined the meeting, internal documents show that he supported Sariel's vision and expressed Microsoft's readiness to provide resources.

By switching to Azure—secured with custom protection layers by Microsoft engineers—Unit 8200 built a surveillance system capable of storing up to one million calls per hour. This system has been active since 2022.

It allows Israel to retroactively listen to and analyze daily phone calls of millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Previously, surveillance was limited to pre-identified individuals, but the cloud infrastructure now enables indiscriminate recording and later review of any call.