Gaza Genocide13 May, 20262 min read
Microsoft Israel General Manager Alon Haimovich Leaves After Probe Into Azure Spy Use
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Alon Haimovich leaves Microsoft Israel after global probe into Defense Ministry ties. Azure platform used to intercept and store Palestinian phone calls.
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Haimovich Ousted
Microsoft Israel’s general manager Alon Haimovich is to leave the company after an investigation into its relationship with the country’s military, The Guardian reported. The inquiry was ordered by Microsoft in the US after a joint investigative piece by The Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call found that the company’s technology was used to spy on phone conversations between Palestinian civilians. Microsoft’s investigation found that the Israeli military violated its terms of service when it used Azure to spy on and store calls, and that Israel-based employees had not been transparent with the parent company about how the technology was used.
Haimovich, The Guardian reported, was vital to developing the relationship between the Israeli military and Microsoft, having attended a meeting in 2021 between CEO Satya Nadella and the then-commander of Unit 8200. Microsoft subsequently terminated the unit’s access to the platform and its artificial intelligence technology revoked.
Surveillance Dispute
The Guardian said the joint investigation found Unit 8200 had used Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to store a vast trove of intercepted calls from Gaza and the West Bank. Microsoft’s findings are described as unclear by The Guardian, but sources familiar with the situation said they prompted an announcement last week that Microsoft Israel’s general manager, Alon Haimovich, would leave the company. Middle East Eye reported that Microsoft ordered an inquiry last year into the Israeli military’s use of the company’s technology to operate a surveillance system that could replay and analyse the contents of millions of Palestinian phone calls every day.
Middle East Eye also said Microsoft terminated the unit’s access to its cloud services and the products that had supported the mass surveillance project, which aimed to collect "a million calls per hour". In an email to staff announcing his departure last week, Haimovich said he had positioned Israel as “one of Microsoft’s fastest-growing markets worldwide”.
Next Steps and Fallout
Brad Smith said last year: “We do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians,” as Microsoft’s inquiry focused on whether Unit 8200 violated terms of service that prohibit the use of its technology to facilitate mass surveillance. According to Globes, Haimovich was summoned by the inquiry team after a visit to Microsoft Israel’s offices near Tel Aviv, and several other managers in Microsoft Israel’s governance department also left their positions. The Decoder reported that Microsoft took action in September 2025 by disabling certain cloud storage and AI services for a unit within the Israeli defense ministry.
“We do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians.”
The Decoder also said that after the investigation was published, the data appeared to have been moved out of the country, and that Unit 8200 had planned a transfer to Amazon Web Services. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement described Microsoft as “perhaps the most complicit tech company in Israel’s illegal apartheid regime and ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza”.