Microsoft says it has stopped providing some of its cloud and AI services to Israel’s Ministry of Defense following a report in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, which alleged Israel used the services to conduct mass surveillance of Palestinians in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The Guardian report, published in August in conjunction with Israeli outlets +972 Magazine and Local Call, claimed Israel’s military surveillance agency — called Unit 8200 — used Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to store recordings of millions of cellphone calls made by Palestinians.
These calls could be played back by intelligence officers, and The Guardian cited three sources within Unit 8200 who said the database was used to help shape military operations in Gaza and the West Bank, and to prepare deadly airstrikes by helping with research and to identify bombing targets in Gaza.
One source told The Guardian that during the planning of an airstrike on an individual in a densely populated area of Gaza, officers would use the system to examine calls made by other people in the immediate vicinity.
Other sources told The Guardian that use of the data was initially focused on the West Bank, which Israel’s military controls.
“When they need to arrest someone and there isn’t a good enough reason to do so, that’s where they find the excuse,” one source told the British newspaper.
The Guardian reported that leaked Microsoft files suggested a large proportion of the sensitive data was potentially being stored in Microsoft data centers in Ireland and the Netherlands.
After the publication of its report, several sources told the newspaper that the repository of intercepted calls — as much as 8,000 terabytes of data — had been held in a Microsoft data center in the Netherlands, but within days of its report being published in early August, the data appeared to have been moved out of the country.
“We have found evidence that supports elements of The Guardian’s reporting. This evidence includes information relating to IMOD consumption of Azure storage capacity in the Netherlands and the use of AI services,” Microsoft said in a statement Thursday, without elaborating on what the evidence showed.
Microsoft said it had informed the Israeli Ministry of Defense that it would be halting and disabling its use of some specific subscriptions and services.
“We have reviewed this decision with IMOD and the steps we are taking to ensure compliance with our terms of service, focused on ensuring our services are not used for mass surveillance of civilians,” Microsoft said.
Intelligence sources told The Guardian that Unit 8200 planned to transfer the data from Microsoft’s servers to the Amazon Web Services cloud platform. Neither the Israel Defense Forces nor Amazon replied to The Guardian’s request for comment.
CBS News asked both the IDF and Amazon for comment on the report of a possible transfer of the data to Amazon’s servers but did not receive a reply by time of publication.
Microsoft said its current review is still ongoing.
It follows an initial review by the American tech giant, triggered by an earlier Guardian report about how the IDF’s use of Microsoft’s Azure and AI services surged during its Gaza offensive, in which the company said it had found “no evidence that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies, or any of our other software, have been used to harm people or that IMOD has failed to comply with our terms of service or our AI Code of Conduct.”
