The Israeli army has launched a large-scale program to store recordings of Palestinian telephone conversations on Microsoft servers in Europe, the British newspaper The Guardian reported.
Yosi Sariel, former head of Unit 8200 of the Israeli military intelligence service, responsible for cyber warfare, agreed in 2021 with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella that Israel would be granted access to the Azure cloud, where an almost unlimited amount of information can be stored, the newspaper reported.
Millions of Palestinian phone calls a day are now stored in the cloud, the Guardian noted.
Microsoft argues that Nadella did not know what type of data Unit 8200 intended to store in Azure.
According to three sources in the unit who spoke to the Guardian, the ability to use Azure facilitated the preparation of Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Thanks to its control over the Palestinian telecommunications infrastructure, Israel had long intercepted the conversations of Palestinians in the occupied territories, but thanks to Azure, it gained the ability to play any conversations of ordinary civilians.
Thanks to leaked Microsoft files, it is now known that a large portion of confidential Unit 8200 data may be stored in Microsoft data centers in the Netherlands and Ireland. (PAP)
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