Exposed – Giant US Tech Companies’ Complicity in Israel’s Gaza Genocide & Mass Starvation of Children & Civilians. | “A million calls an hour’: Israel relying on Microsoft cloud for expansive surveillance of Palestinians”, The Guardian.
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“US & Western companies continue aiding and supporting Israel’s War Crimes, Genocide & Mass Starvation of Gaza children and civilians unhindered by the global public outcry.
This must change yesterday before tomorrow.”
Khaled Fattal, MLi Group chairman and Survivability News Publisher.
After you read the Guardian Report below, ask yourself:
What can I do about this?
- Learn how your elected officials, tech giants and others are complicit in these unprecedented Gaza atrocities and horrors on children and civilians.
- Remember your politicians’ names when they are up for re-election.
- Start Boycotting companies that are complicit in these Gaza atrocities.
Also, start calling for:
- Accountability
- Justice.
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By Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham,
Wed 6 Aug 2025 07.00 EDT
One afternoon in late 2021, Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, met with the commander of Israel’s military surveillance agency, Unit 8200. On the spy chief’s agenda: moving vast amounts of top secret intelligence material into the US company’s cloud.
Meeting at Microsoft’s headquarters near Seattle, a former chicken farm turned hi-tech campus, the spymaster, Yossi Sariel, won Nadella’s support for a plan that would grant Unit 8200 access to a customised and segregated area within Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.
Armed with Azure’s near-limitless storage capacity, Unit 8200 began building a powerful new mass surveillance tool: a sweeping and intrusive system that collects and stores recordings of millions of mobile phone calls made each day by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
Revealed here for the first time in an investigation by the Guardian with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, the cloud-based system – which first became operational in 2022 – enables Unit 8200 to store a giant trove of calls daily for extended periods of time.
Microsoft claims Nadella was unaware of what kind of data Unit 8200 planned to store in Azure. But a cache of leaked Microsoft documents and interviews with 11 sources from the company and Israeli military intelligence reveals how Azure has been used by Unit 8200 to store this expansive archive of everyday Palestinian communications.
According to three Unit 8200 sources, the cloud-based storage platform has facilitated the preparation of deadly airstrikes and has shaped military operations in Gaza and the West Bank.
Thanks to the control it exerts over Palestinian telecommunications infrastructure, Israel has long intercepted phone calls in the occupied territories. But the indiscriminate new system allows intelligence officers to play back the content of cellular calls made by Palestinians, capturing the conversations of a much larger pool of ordinary civilians.
Intelligence sources with knowledge of the project said Unit 8200’s leadership turned to Microsoft after concluding it did not have sufficient storage space or computing power on the military’s servers to bear the weight of an entire population’s phone calls.
Several intelligence officers from the unit, which is comparable to the US National Security Agency (NSA) in its surveillance capabilities, said that a mantra emerged internally that captured the project’s scale and ambition: “A million calls an hour”.
Click to continue reading on the Guardian website
