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LEAKED DOCUMENTS EXPOSE DEEP TIES BETWEEN ISRAELI ARMY AND MICROSOFT
 
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Yuval Abraham
January 23, 2025
972 Magazine
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_ Since Oct. 7, the Israeli military has relied heavily on cloud and
AI services from Microsoft and its partner OpenAI, while the tech
giant’s staff embed with different units to support rollout, a joint
investigation reveals. _

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Microsoft has a “footprint in all major military infrastructures”
in Israel, and sales of the company’s cloud and artificial
intelligence services to the Israeli army have skyrocketed since the
beginning of its onslaught on Gaza, according to leaked commercial
records from Israel’s Defense Ministry and files from Microsoft’s
Israeli subsidiary.

The documents reveal that dozens of units in the Israeli army have
purchased services from Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure,
in recent months — including units in the air, ground, and naval
forces, as well as the elite intelligence squad, Unit 8200. Microsoft
has also provided the military with extensive access to OpenAI’s
GPT-4 language model, the engine behind ChatGPT, thanks to the close
partnership
[[link removed]] between
the two companies. 

These revelations are the product of an investigation by +972 Magazine
and Local Call in collaboration with The Guardian. It is based in part
on documents obtained by Drop Site News, which has published
[[link removed]] its
own story. The investigation shows how the Israeli army deepened its
reliance on civilian tech giants after October 7, and comes
amid growing protests
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cloud company employees who fear that the technology they developed
has helped Israel commit war crimes.

Army units revealed to be using services provided by Azure include the
Air Force’s Ofek Unit, which is responsible for managing large
databases of potential targets for lethal airstrikes (known as the
“target bank”); the Matspen Unit, which is responsible for the
development of operational and combat support systems; the Sapir Unit,
which maintains the ICT infrastructure in the Military Intelligence
Directorate; and even the Military Advocate General’s Corps
[[link removed]], which
is tasked with prosecuting Palestinians and lawbreaking soldiers in
the occupied territories. 

According to one document, as revealed
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by The Guardian, Unit 81, the technological arm of the Military
Intelligence Directorate’s Special Operations Division that
manufactures surveillance equipment for the Israeli intelligence
community, also receives cloud services and support from Azure. 

The documents additionally indicate that the “Rolling Stone”
system, which the army uses to manage the population registry and
movement of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, is maintained by
Microsoft Azure. Azure is also used in a highly classified unit inside
the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, where Microsoft employees with
security clearance are required to sign off and oversee the provision
of cloud services.

According to the documents, the AI services that the Defense Ministry
purchased from Microsoft include translation (about half of the
average monthly consumption during the first year of the war),
OpenAI’s GPT-4 model (about a quarter of the consumption), a
speech-to-text conversion tool, and an automatic document analysis
tool. In October 2023, the army’s monthly consumption of AI services
provided by Azure jumped sevenfold compared to the month preceding the
war; by March 2024, it was 64 times higher.

Although the documents do not specify how the different army units use
these cloud storage and AI tools, they do indicate that about a third
of the purchases were intended for “air-gapped” systems that are
isolated from the internet and public networks, strengthening the
possibility that the tools have been used for operational purposes —
such as combat and intelligence — as opposed to simply logistical or
bureaucratic functions. Indeed, two sources in Unit 8200 confirmed
that the Military Intelligence Directorate purchased storage and AI
services from Microsoft Azure for intelligence-gathering activities,
and three other sources in the unit confirmed that similar services
were purchased
[[link removed]] from
Amazon’s cloud computing platform, AWS.

The documents further show that Microsoft personnel work closely with
units in the Israeli army to develop products and systems. Dozens of
units have purchased “extended engineering services” from
Microsoft, in which, according to the company’s website,
“Microsoft experts become an integral part of the [customer’s]
team.” 

The documents describe, for example, that in recent years the Military
Intelligence Directorate has purchased private development meetings
and professional workshops, which Microsoft’s experts have given to
soldiers at a cost of millions of dollars. Between October 2023 and
June 2024 alone, the Israeli Defense Ministry spent $10 million to
purchase 19,000 hours of engineering support from Microsoft.

An intelligence officer who served in a technological role in Unit
8200 in recent years, and worked directly with Microsoft Azure
employees before October 7 to develop a surveillance system used to
monitor Palestinians, told +972 and Local Call that the company’s
developers became so embedded that he referred to them as “people
who are already working with the unit,” as if they were soldiers. 

The source added that during the development phase, Microsoft Azure
staff came for meetings at an army base to examine the possibility of
building the surveillance system on top of the company’s cloud
infrastructure. “The idea was that this thing should be managed in
Azure, because it [uses] so much data,” he said.

Seven sources in the Israeli Defense Ministry, the army, and the arms
industry confirmed that since October 7, the army has become
increasingly dependent on the services it purchases from civilian
cloud providers for operational activity in Gaza. According to army
sources, the storage space and processing power provided by the cloud
companies enables soldiers to make use of vastly greater quantities of
intelligence information — and for longer periods of time — than
they could otherwise maintain on their own internal servers.

Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.

The ‘wonderful world of cloud providers’

In 2021, the Israeli government published a $1.2 billion tender
for Project Nimbus
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to transfer the information systems of government ministries and
security bodies to the public cloud servers of the winning companies
and get access to their advanced services. Microsoft was one of
several companies that submitted a bid for the tender, but in the end
lost out to Amazon and Google
[[link removed]].

Despite Microsoft’s defeat in the Nimbus tender, the Defense
Ministry continued to purchase services from the cloud giant. In
particular, the documents state that Microsoft retains deep ties to
Israel’s Defense Ministry through managing projects relating to its
“special and complex systems,” including “sensitive workloads”
that no other cloud company deals with.

In August 2023, we can reveal, the Israeli army began purchasing
OpenAI’s latest language model, GPT-4. This tool, to which the
military acquires access through the Azure platform rather than
directly from OpenAI, is capable of analyzing billions of pieces of
information, learning from past cases, and responding to spoken and
written instructions. 

Once the war began, the army sharply increased its acquisitions of the
GPT-4 engine: since October 2023, its consumption has been 20 times
greater than during the pre-war period. From the documents, it is
impossible to know whether the military used GPT-4 in classified
air-gapped systems or those that can connect to the internet. 

OpenAI did not respond to questions about its knowledge of how the
Israeli army uses its products. A spokesperson for the company simply
said: “OpenAI does not have a partnership with the IDF.”

In recent years, Microsoft has reportedly invested
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$13 billion in OpenAI. In May, an article on Microsoft’s
website stated
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OpenAI’s tools have the potential to be “paradigm-changing” for
security and intelligence agencies and improve their accuracy and
efficiency. “It’s a powerful tool for analyzing satellite
photographs and field maps, translating speech and text, offering
interpretation, and creating virtual spaces for training,” the
article noted.

Prior to 2024, OpenAI’s terms included a clause
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the use of its services for “military and warfare” activities. But
in January 2024, as the Israeli army was ramping up its reliance on
GPT-4 while pummeling the Gaza Strip
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the company quietly removed this clause
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its website and expanded its partnerships with militaries and national
intelligence agencies.

In October, OpenAI publicly stated
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it would examine cooperation with security agencies in the United
States and “allied countries,” believing that “democracies
should continue to take the lead in AI development, guided by values
such as freedom, fairness, and respect for human rights.” OpenAI
also announced that it will cooperate with Anduril
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a company that manufactures AI-based drones, while it was reported
last year that Microsoft provided its model to the CIA
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the analysis of top-secret documents in a closed internal system.

The revelations in these documents correspond with the statements of
Col. Racheli Dembinsky, commander of the Israeli army’s Center of
Computing and Information Systems Unit (“Mamram”), which provides
data processing for the whole military. At a conference near Tel Aviv
last July, as +972 and Local Call
[[link removed]] previously
revealed, Dembinsky said that the army’s operational capabilities
were “upgraded” during the current war in Gaza thanks to the
“wonderful world of cloud providers” that enabled “very
significant operational effectiveness.”

This, Dembinsky said, was thanks to the “crazy wealth of services,
big data, and AI” that cloud providers offer — as the logos of
Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Amazon Web Services
(AWS) appeared on the screen behind her.

In her July lecture, Dembinsky explained that the army began working
more intensively with the cloud companies due to the demands of the
war. With the beginning of the ground invasion of Gaza in late October
2023, the army’s systems were overwhelmed and “resources were
exhausted.” This shortage of storage space and processing power,
Dembinsky said, led to a decision in the military to “go outside, to
the civilian world,” where it was possible to purchase AI tools and
computing power “without a glass ceiling.”

The leaked documents show that the Israeli military’s average
monthly use of Azure’s cloud storage facilities in the first six
months of the war was 60 percent higher than in the four months
leading up to it.

In August, the IDF Spokesperson emphasized to +972 and Local Call that
“the IDF’s classified information is not transferred to civilian
providers, and remains in the IDF’s segregated networks” —
although our investigation at the time showed that the Israeli army
had in fact stored some intelligence information collected via the
mass surveillance of Gaza’s population on servers managed by
Amazon’s AWS. 

This time, Israel’s army and Defense Ministry declined to comment.

_Harry Davies of The Guardian contributed to this report_

_Yuval Abraham [[link removed]] is a
+972 & Local Call reporter_

_+972 Magazine [[link removed]] is an independent,
online, nonprofit magazine run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli
journalists. Founded in 2010, our mission is to provide in-depth
reporting, analysis, and opinions from the ground in Israel-Palestine.
The name of the site is derived from the telephone country code that
can be used to dial throughout Israel-Palestine._

_Our core values are a commitment to equity, justice, and freedom of
information. We believe in accurate and fair journalism that
spotlights the people and communities working to oppose occupation and
apartheid, and that showcases perspectives often overlooked or
marginalized in mainstream narratives._

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* Israel
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* IDF
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* Microsoft
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* information technology
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