Dear Khani,
Just this morning, our team at Local Call, in collaboration with +972 Magazine and The Guardian, published a critical follow-up investigation on the role of Big Tech in Israel's 15-month-long assault on Gaza.
The investigation reveals the extent of the Israeli military’s reliance on Microsoft services during its war on Gaza, according to leaked commercial records from Israel’s defence ministry obtained by Dropsite News and files from Microsoft’s Israeli subsidiary. The report builds on earlier findings about the impact of private US technology services, such as those provided by Amazon and Google, which have enabled the Israeli military to manage and analyze vast amounts of data and influence critical operations. The investigation shows how the Israeli army deepened its reliance on Microsoft after October 7, and comes amid growing protests by cloud company employees who fear that the technology they developed has helped Israel commit war crimes.
Read the full investigation here.
The report also found 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 division, Unit 8200. Microsoft has also provided the military with extensive access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model, the engine behind Chat-GPT, thanks to the close partnership between the two companies.
In October 2023, the army’s monthly consumption of AI services provided by Microsoft jumped sevenfold compared to the month preceding the war; by March 2024, it was 64 times higher.
Just as concerning, reviewed documents and testimony from intelligence officers reveal how closely Microsoft personnel are working with units in the Israeli army. An intelligence officer who worked directly with Microsoft Azure employees to develop a surveillance system used to monitor Palestinians told +972 and Local Call that the connection with the company's developers was so direct and deep that he actually referred to them as "people who are already working with the unit," as if they were soldiers. Between October 2023 and June 2024 alone, the Israeli military spent $10 million to purchase 19,000 hours of engineering support from Microsoft.
We hope you'll take time to read the investigation in full as the world reckons with the ways that civilian technology companies may be complicit in the onslaught on Gaza.
With determination,
Guy Yadin Evron Social Media Coordinator, Just Vision | 
