“A million calls per hour” How does Israel monitor any whisper of Palestinians

According to the report, at the end of 2021, Microsoft CEO Satea Nadella met with the commander of the “Unit 8,200” a cyber intelligence elite unit within the Israeli Army at the company headquarters near Seattle. At this meeting, Commander Yossi Sariel called for support to transfer a large amount of classified intelligence data to Microsoft's cloud platform Azure.

After that agreement, Unit 8,200 began building a multi-intervention system for massive surveillance, which began operating in 2022. This new system records and preserves millions of phone conversations daily from Gaza and the West Coast. With Azura's virtually unlimited capacity, the system allows registration of a large amount of communication for long periods of time.

Three sources within the 8,200 unit confirmed that data stored in this system has been used to plan air strikes and other military operations in Palestinian territories.

Due to the lack of military servers' capacity, the 8,200 unit addressed Microsoft to create a personal and isolated space within Azure, where Microsoft engineers worked together with the Israeli unit for infrastructure construction.

The documents show that most data now lies in Microsoft data centres in the Netherlands and Ireland.

“A million calls per hour”

According to sources, an internal slogan within the 8,200 unit was: “a million calls per hour”. The system was first used in the West Coast and then extended to Gaza. It has been used not only to pursue suspected targets but also to monitor the Palestinian civilian population en masse, for purposes involving blackmail, arrests and justification.

A former unit officer stated: “when someone must be arrested and there is not enough evidence, they find an excuse in the glade. ”

Microsoft has declared that CEO Nadella was unaware of the contents of the data that the 8,200 unit was planning to guard in Azure. The company claims that co-operation was limited to strengthening cyber security.

Reactions and Internal Tensions in Microsoft

Microsoft's involvement in the programme has caused concern among employees and company investors. In May, an employee interrupted a Nadella speech and shouted:

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After these findings, Microsoft launched an external audit, which according to the company " “found no evidence that Azzure or artificial intelligence products were used to target or harm individuals. ”

However, sources from the 8,200 unit reject that claim, saying that data from the clown system has been used to identify targets and plan attacks, especially during the military campaign in Gaza following the October 7th 2023 attacks, where, according to sources, over 60,000 people have lost their lives, including 18,000 children.

The documents provided by the investigation show that by July 2025, some 11,500 terabytes of military data have been transferred to Microsoft servers, equivalent to about 200 million hours of stored audio. Most of this data is thought to be registered Palestinian conversations.

Sariel, who resigned in 2024 after failing to prevent the October 7th attack, had promoted the use of artificial intelligence and safekeeping to the glade as a solution to advanced oversight. He had long tried to boost partnership with Microsoft, viewing it as strategic for the entity's goals.

Despite the failure to prevent Hamas' attack on October 7th 2023, the clone surveillance system continues to be used intensively by the Israeli Army and the 8,200 unit. Sources suggest that interest in increasing its use is on the rise, especially in the context of Israel's long - term control of Gaza.