Microsoft restricts Israeli armed forces’re access to specific cloud computation and AI services amid the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

The tech giant Microsoft has declared that it will discontinue certain services provided to the Israeli military due to concerns of violation of its terms of service, confirmed by the company’s vice chair and president Brad Smith. This decision follows an August 6 joint investigation by The Guardian newspaper, +972 Magazine, and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, which uncovered that Unit 8200 of the Israeli Ministry of Defence employed Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform for mass surveillance of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank. Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s elite cyber warfare unit, reportedly reached an agreement with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in 2021 to collaboratively relocate large volumes of sensitive intelligence to Azure’s platform. Utilizing Azure’s substantial storage capacity and computing power allowed Unit 8200 to collect, examine, and analyze phone calls of millions of Palestinians and potentially guide lethal air strikes across the Palestinian territories. The stored data on Palestinians were reportedly verified to be on Microsoft’s Azure servers located in the Netherlands and Ireland. Microsoft’s Smith underscored the company’s adherence to longstanding principles of not providing technology for mass civilian surveillance and protecting customer privacy rights, although the specific Israeli unit was not identified. Some Israeli Defence Ministry subscriptions, including certain cloud storage and AI services, were confirmed to be cancelled. Despite this, there are claims that Microsoft has only discontinued a small subset of services for one unit within the Israeli military, leaving the majority of its contracts still in place.

Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/26/microsoft-cuts-israeli-militarys-access-to-some-cloud-computing-ai?traffic_source=rss