The unit 8200 of his army Israel – Instead of being involved in Greece due to the involvement of its former executives in the scandal of the predator-in 2021 it agreed with its CEO MicrosoftSatia Nandela to use the company’s cloud to store a huge volume of confidential data.
As the British “Guardian” reveals, at a meeting at Microsoft’s headquarters near Seattle, Israeli Army 8200 leader Yosi Sariel won Nantela’s support for a plan that would provide access to a personalized and separated space.
Equipped with Azure’s almost unlimited storage capacity, Unit 8200 began creating a powerful new mass surveillance tool: an extensive and interventionist system that collects and stores millions of telephone calls made daily by Palestinians in Gaza.
The cloud -based system – which was first launched in 2022 – allows the Israeli unit 8200 to store a huge volume of calls daily for long periods of time.
The cloud -based storage platform has facilitated the preparation of the Israeli Armed Forces deadly air strikes.
Microsoft claims that Nandela did not know what kind of data planned to store the 8200 unit in Azure. However, secret documents by Microsoft and Mosad confirm the storage of this extensive Palestinian daily communications file.
According to three sources in Unit 8200, the cloud -based storage platform has also shaped Israeli military operations in Gaza and the West Bank.
Thanks to its control over Palestinian telecommunications infrastructure, Israel has long been monitoring telephone calls in the occupied territories. However, the new system allows intelligence officers to reproduce the content of calls from mobile phones by Palestinians, recording the conversations of a much larger number of ordinary citizens.
Millions of recorded calls
Sources of secret services with knowledge of the project reported that the leadership of Unit 8200 turned to Microsoft after concluding that it did not have sufficient storage or computing power to military servers to withstand the burden of telephone calls of the entire population.
Several unit intelligence officers, compared to the US National Security Service (NSA) on monitoring capabilities, said that a slogan was created inside the scale and ambition of the project: “One million calls per hour”.
The system was manufactured to operate on Microsoft servers, behind enhanced security levels developed by the company’s engineers in accordance with the instructions of Unit 8200. Microsoft’s leaked files suggest that much of the unit’s sensitive data may now be located at the company’s data centers in the Netherlands and Ireland.
The revelations about the role of Microsoft’s Azure platform in the monitoring program come at a time when the US technological giant is facing pressure from its employees and investors due to its ties with the Israeli army and the role that its technology has played in 22 months.
In May, an employee interrupted Nandela’s speech in protest, shouting: “Why are you not showing how Israel’s war crimes are fueled by Azure?”
After the “Guardian” and other media revealed in January Israel’s dependence on Microsoft’s technology during the Gaza war, the company commissioned external partners the evaluation of this relationship. The examination, according to Microsoft, “has not found evidence to date” that the Azure or artificial intelligence products of the company “were used to target or hurt people” in the area.
A Microsoft official said the company had talks with Israeli defense officials and determined how its technology in Gaza should be used, insisting that Microsoft systems should not be used to detect deadly attacks.
However, sources in Unit 8200 reported that information coming from the huge telephone calls kept at Azure had been used to research and detect bombing targets in Gaza. One of the sources said that, when planning an air raid against a man in a densely populated area with a large number of civilians, the officers used the cloud -based system to examine the calls made by people in the immediate neighborhood.
The use of the system against Gaza
Sources also said that the use of the system had increased during the Gaza campaign, which has caused the deaths of more than 60,000 people in the area, most of whom are civilians, including more than 18,000 children.
However, the system initially focused on the West Bank, where about 3 million Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation. Sources of Unit 8200 reported that the data stored at Azure were a rich source of information for the population of the area, which, according to some unit members, had been used to blackmail people, detain them or even justify their murder after the event.
A Microsoft spokesman said he “has no information” about the type of data stored by the 8200 unit in her cloud.
“When they have to capture someone and there is not a good reason to do so, they find the excuse there,” one of them said, referring to the information stored in the cloud.
A Microsoft spokesman said he “has no information” about the type of data stored by the 8200 unit in her cloud. He said that “the company’s cooperation with Unit 8200 was based on enhancing cyberspace and the protection of Israel from cyberattacks of states and terrorists.”
“Under no circumstances during this collaboration,” he added, “Microsoft was not aware of the monitoring of citizens or collecting their mobile conversations using Microsoft services, including the external assessment it assigned.”
How did the massive interception began
The driving force behind this project – described by a source as a “revolution” within the unit – was Sariel, commander of Unit 8200 from early 2021 to the end of 2024. Sariel, a professional intelligence officer, was a staunch supporter of the project.
Following a series of deadly attacks in 2015 by young Palestinians, many of whom were adolescents unknown to security services, Sariel had overseen a significant increase in the volume of Palestinian communications that the 8200 unit was watching and storing.
His answer was to start “watching everyone, constantly,” said one officer working for Sariel at the time. Instead of the traditional monitoring of specific goals, Sariel’s work was based on the massive monitoring of Palestinians on the West Bank and used innovative methods of artificial intelligence to export information.
“Suddenly, everyone was our enemy,” said another source working in the project, which was intended to predict if someone was a threat to Israeli security.
According to the “Guardian”, a system developed during this period, according to sources, scanned all text messages between Palestinians on the West Bank and was attributed to each message a risk rating based on an automated analysis of whether it contained words that were considered suspicious. The system, which is still in use and is known as ‘Noisy Message’, can recognize text messages in which people talk about weapons or discuss their desire to die.
When Sariel took over the management of Unit 8200 in early 2021, he prioritized the conclusion of a cooperation with Microsoft, which would enable the unit to move further and record and analyze the contents of millions of telephone calls every day.
At his meeting with Nandela later that year, Sariel does not seem to have explicitly stated his plan to store Palestinian phone calls to the cloud, referring to “sensitive loads” of secret data, according to the internal records of the meeting.
However, the documents indicate that Microsoft engineers realized that the data stored at Azure would include raw information, including audio files, while some Microsoft officials based in Israel, including graduates of Unit 8200, seemed to know what the unit was unanimous.
Among Microsoft staff, the project was “surrounded” by great secrecy and engineers had instructions not to mention the name of Unit 8200.
“You don’t have to be a genius to understand it,” said one source. “You say [στη Microsoft] That we have no other space for servers, that they are sound files. It’s quite clear what it is. “
Among Microsoft staff, the project was “surrounded” by great secrecy and engineers had instructions not to mention the name of Unit 8200.
The records indicate that by July this year, 11,500 Trembit Israeli military data – corresponding to about 200 million hours of sound – were kept on Microsoft’s Azure servers in the Netherlands, while a smaller percentage were kept in Ireland. It is not clear whether all this data belongs to Unit 8200; some may belong to other Israeli military units.
An infinite storage space
When Unit 8200 began to use Azure’s storage capabilities in 2022, intelligence officers quickly realized the new possibilities at their disposal. “Cloud is an infinite storage area,” said a source familiar with the system.
Calls – including Palestinian calls to international and Israeli numbers – are usually kept in the cloud for about a month, although storage can be expanded, allowing the unit to maintain calls for longer periods when needed, several sources of secret services have explained.
This allows the unit to return to the past and recover the phone conversations of people who are interesting, they said. Previously, the surveillance goals had to be pre -selected in order to get their conversations and save their conversations.
Many of the sources insisted that the cloud -based system had prevented deadly attacks on Israelis. One of them said that the “rescue of lives” Israelis was the main driving force behind Sariel’s vision for the system. However, the system failed to prevent Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, which killed nearly 1,200 people in southern Israel and 240 people were abducted.
Following the attacks, Sariel has been criticized for the obvious priority he gave to “addictive and exciting” technology over old -fashioned information methods, which, according to some critics, contributed to the disaster, the Guardian argues. Sariel resigned last year, taking responsibility for “the role of 8200 in the failure of information and business”.