DUBAI: Microsoft has terminated the Israeli military’s access to technology it used for the mass surveillance of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
The tech firm informed Israeli authorities it would “cease and disable specified IMOD (Israel Ministry of Defense) subscriptions and their services, including their use of specific cloud storage and AI services and technologies,” Brad Smith, the vice-chair and president of Microsoft said in a company memo and blog post on Thursday.
Cybersecurity services provided by the company to Israel and other countries in the Middle East are not affected, he added.
The decision follows the preliminary findings of a formal review launched by Microsoft last month in response to a report by The Guardian newspaper on an investigation it carried out in partnership with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, and the Hebrew-language news site Local Call.
The joint investigation found Israel’s military surveillance agency, Unit 8200, used Microsoft Azure cloud services to store recordings of millions of cellphone calls made by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank since 2022.
The intelligence obtained from the call data stored in Azure was reportedly used by Unit 8200 to identify targets for military bombing campaigns. When planning airstrikes in densely populated areas containing many civilians, intelligence officers would analyze calls from Palestinians located nearby, sources said. They described the system as indiscriminate and intrusive, labeling it a tool that had turned an entire population into the “enemy.”
During development of the system, Microsoft and Unit 8200 engineers collaborated to implement advanced security measures in Azure that met the standards required by the Israeli agency. The project was highly secretive, and Microsoft staff were instructed not to make any mention of Unit 8200.
To protect the privacy rights of cellphone users, the Microsoft review did not access the IMOD data but instead focused on the company’s own business records, including internal documents and email communications, Smith said.
“We do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians,” he added. “We have applied this principle in every country around the world, and we have insisted on it repeatedly for more than two decades.”
