Afrasianet - Author: Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham - An ambitious Israeli military project to store a huge amount of Palestinian phone calls on Microsoft's servers in Europe has been unveiled.

The  British newspaper "The Guardian" publishes  a report on an investigative investigation that reveals a secret cooperation between the Israeli military intelligence unit "8200" and "Microsoft", where the unit used cloud computing services "Azure"  to store and analyze a large number of Palestinian phone calls in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as part of a large-scale mass surveillance system.

The following is the text of the report, adapted from Arabic:

On a late Sunday afternoon in 2021, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella met with the commander of Israel's military surveillance unit 8200. Among the spy chief's agenda was to transfer vast amounts of top-secret intelligence material to the U.S. company's cloud.

During a meeting at Microsoft's headquarters near Seattle, a former chicken farm turned high-tech complex, spy chief Yossi Sariel got Nadella's backing for a plan that would give Unit 8200 access to a dedicated and isolated area within Microsoft's cloud platform Azure.

Equipped with near-unlimited Azure storage, Unit 8200 began building a powerful new mass surveillance tool: a comprehensive, intrusive system that collects and stores recordings of millions of phone calls made daily by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

This was first revealed in an investigation conducted by the Guardian newspaper in collaboration with the Israeli-Palestinian magazine +972 and  the Hebrew-language website LocalCall. This cloud system, which became operational in 2022, enables Unit 8200 to store a huge amount of calls per day for long periods of time.

Microsoft claims that Nadella was unaware of the type of data that the 8200 unit intended to store in Azure. But a trove of leaked Microsoft documents and interviews with 11 sources from the company and Israeli military intelligence reveal how the unit used Azure 8200 to store this vast archive of daily Palestinian communications.

According to three sources from Unit 8200, the cloud storage platform has facilitated the preparation of deadly airstrikes, and has outlined military operations in Gaza and the West Bank.

Thanks to its control of Palestinian telecommunications infrastructure, Israel has long intercepted phone calls in the occupied territories. But the new random system allows intelligence officers to play the content of cellular calls made by Palestinians, recording conversations of a much larger segment of ordinary civilians.

Intelligence sources familiar with the project said that the command of Unit 8200 turned to Microsoft after concluding that it did not have enough storage space or computing power on the military's servers to carry the burden of phone calls to an entire population.

Several intelligence officers at the unit, which is comparable to the National Security Agency (NSA) in surveillance capabilities, said an internal slogan that embodied the scope and ambition of the project: "One million calls an hour."

The system is designed to be stored on Microsoft's servers behind reinforced layers of security developed by the company's engineers under Unit 8200 instructions. Microsoft's leaked files suggest that a large proportion of the sensitive unit's data may now be stored in the company's data centers in the Netherlands and Ireland.

The revelation of Microsoft's  Azure  platform in the surveillance project comes as the U.S. tech giant faces pressure from employees and investors over its ties to the Israeli military and the role its technology played in the 22-month offensive on Gaza.

In May, an employee interrupted Nadala's keynote in protest, and at one point shouted: "How about showing how Israeli war crimes are managed by Azure?". 

After the Guardian and others revealed in January that Israel relied on Microsoft's technology during the Gaza war, the company conducted an external review of the relationship. Microsoft said the review "found no evidence to date" that Azure or its AI products were being used to "target or harm people" in the sector.

A senior Microsoft source said the company had held talks with Israeli defense officials and outlined how its technology would be used in Gaza, insisting that Microsoft systems would not be used to identify targets for lethal strikes.

However, sources in Unit 8200 reported that intelligence from large phone call stores stored in Azure was used to search for and identify targets for bombing in Gaza. One source explained that when planning an airstrike on someone located in densely populated areas with a large civilian population, officers used the cloud system to screen the calls of people in the immediate vicinity.

The sources also added that the use of the system increased during the campaign on Gaza, which has killed more than 60,000 people in the Strip, the majority of whom are civilians, including more than 18,000 children.

But the regime's primary focus has been on the West Bank, where an estimated three million Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation. Sources in Unit 8200 said that the information stored in Azure constitutes a rich repository of intelligence about its population, which some members of the unit claimed was used to extort people, detain them, or even justify killing them after the fact.

An officer who worked with Sariel said at the time, "His response was to start with 'tracking everyone, all the time.' Instead of traditional surveillance of specific targets, the Sariel project relied on mass surveillance of Palestinians in the West Bank, and used innovative AI methods to extract information.

When Sariel took command of Unit 8200 in early 2021, he prioritized a partnership with Microsoft that would enable the unit to dig deeper, capture and analyze the content of millions of phone calls per day.

The files indicate that by July of this year, 11,500 terabytes of Israeli military data, equivalent to about 200 million hours of audio recordings, were stored on Microsoft Azure servers in the Netherlands, while a smaller percentage was stored in Ireland. It is not clear whether all of this data belongs to Unit 8200; some may belong to other Israeli military units.

In 2021, Sariel published a book on artificial intelligence under a pseudonym, which the Guardian revealed was the name of the head of the intelligence service, in which he urged militaries and intelligence services to "move to the cloud."

As Unit 8200 began using Azure storage capabilities  in 2022, intelligence officers quickly grasped the new powers available to them. "The cloud is infinite storage," a source familiar with the system said.

Several intelligence sources explained that calls — including calls from Palestinians to international and Israeli numbers — are typically stored in the cloud for about a month, with the possibility of increasing storage space, allowing the unit to hold calls for longer periods when needed.

This allows the unit to go back in time and retrieve phone conversations of people who become an object of interest, they said. Previously, surveillance targets had to be set in advance to intercept and store their conversations.

Several sources insisted that the cloud system had prevented deadly attacks against Israelis. One of the sources said that the "saving of lives" of Israelis was the main motivation behind Sariel's vision of the system. But it has notably failed to prevent Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, in which some 1,200 people were killed in southern Israel and 240 people were kidnapped.

During the ensuing war in Gaza, Sariel's cloud system was used repeatedly, along with a series of AI-powered targeting tools, also developed during his tenure, and first launched by the military in a campaign that destroyed civilian lives and left a deep humanitarian crisis.