Candles being lit at a vigil on Monday outside the Fox News and NBC News headquarters in Washington DC for journalists killed in Gaza. Photograph: Mehmet Eser/Zuma Press Wire/Shutterstock
Israeli-Palestinian magazine says IDF ‘legitimisation cell’ set up to blunt global outrage over killing of media staff
A special unit in Israel’s military was tasked with identifying reporters it could smear as undercover Hamas fighters, to target them and to blunt international outrage over the killing of media workers, the Israeli-Palestinian outlet +972 Magazine reports.
The “legitimisation cell” was set up after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack to gather information that could bolster Israel’s image and shore up diplomatic and military support from key allies, the report said, citing three intelligence sources.
According to the report, in at least one case the unit misrepresented information in order to falsely describe a journalist as a militant, a designation that in Gaza is in effect a death sentence. The label was reversed before the man was attacked, one of the sources said.
Earlier this week, Israel killed the Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif and three colleagues in their makeshift newsroom, after claiming Sharif was a Hamas commander. The killings focused global attention on the extreme dangers faced by Palestinian journalists in Gaza and Israel’s efforts to manipulate media coverage of the war.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities,mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.
Activists with the group Geef Tegengas (Push Back) lock themselves to a pole near the entrance to Microsoft’s data center near Middenmeer, Netherlands on August 10, 2025 (Photo: Geef Tegengas/Instagram)
“Microsoft stores thousands of terabytes of surveillance data from the Israeli intelligence service Unit 8200—data that is used to oppress, imprison, and murder innocent Palestinians.”
Protesters staged a demonstration Sunday at a Microsoft data center in the Netherlands following last week’s revelation that the facility is being used by the Israel Defense Forces to plan genocidal airstrikes in Gaza and to store massive amounts of intelligence on Palestinians in the illegally occupied territories.
Members of the direct action group Geef Tegengas (Push Back) led the demonstration at Microsoft’s data center near the northwestern city of Middenmeer. Some activists scaled the roof of a building and lit flares, while others locked themselves to poles and blocked an entrance to the facility.
On its Instagram page, Geef Tegengas said it was targeting “genocide in our backyard.”
“Microsoft stores thousands of terabytes of surveillance data from the Israeli intelligence service Unit 8200—data that is used to oppress, imprison, and murder innocent Palestinians,” the group said. “Thanks to its Azure cloud service, Microsoft plays a direct role in the genocide of the people of Gaza.”
Geef Tegengas demanded that Microsoft “remove all Israeli intelligence data” and urged employees at the facility to “lay down your work.”
The group also called on people to boycott Microsoft and support the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel.
“We will continue to take action until this genocidal collaboration stops,” Geef Tegengas vowed.
These folks of ‘Geef Tegengas’ need a world stage. They are there in Middenmeer for an important reason: highlighting Microsoft’s complicity on Dutch soil in war crimes.
Sunday’s demonstration followed the publication last week of a joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call revealing that Unit 8200, the largest unit in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), is storing 11,500 terabytes of data containing roughly 200 million hours of Palestinians’ phone call recordings on the Azure servers in the Netherlands.
According to the investigation—which involved interviews with 11 Microsoft and Israeli intelligence sources and a cache of leaked company documents—former Unit 8200 head Yossi Sariel traveled to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington in the United States in 2021 to meet CEO Satya Nadella.
Sniffing a lucrative opportunity, Nadella agreed to grant the cyberwarfare unit access to a special area of the Azure cloud platform. The project’s goal was storing “a million calls per hour.”
An intelligence source said that some of the Microsoft employees involved in the undertaking were Unit 8200 veterans, making collaboration “much easier.”
One leaked Microsoft document showed that company leaders embraced the IDF partnership as “an incredibly powerful brand moment.”
Microsoft responded to the investigation by claiming that Nadella was unaware of exactly what kind of data Unit 8200 was storing on the company’s servers.
Three Unit 8200 sources told The Guardian that Azure has facilitated IDF airstrikes on Gaza, where 674 days of U.S.-backed IDF bombing, invasion, and siege have left at least 229,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing amid a worsening famine and the specter of ethnic cleansing and full Israeli occupation.
Israel’s conduct in the war is the subject of an ongoing genocide case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands. The International Criminal Court, also located in the Dutch city, last year issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza.
Microsoft said Monday that it has launched an investigation into how Unit 8200 is using Azure. This, after the company said in May that an internal review “found no evidence to date that Microsoft’s Azure and [artificial intelligence] technologies have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza.”
A Microsoft spokesperson said Monday that the company “takes these allegations seriously, as shown by our previous independent investigation.”
“As we receive new information, we’re committed to making sure we have a chance to validate any new data and take any needed action,” the spokesperson added.
The Guardianreported Monday that the news outlets’ investigation prompted debate last week in the Staten-Generaal, the Dutch Parliament, where Christine Teunissen of the left-wing Party for the Animals pressed the government on what it is doing to prevent data stored in the Netherlands from “being used to commit genocide” in Gaza.
Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp replied that he would “request further investigation.”
“If there are serious indications of criminal offenses in that information, legal proceedings can of course be initiated, and that is then up to the public prosecution service,” he said.
The Guardian/+972 Magazine/Local Call investigation follows last month’s revelation by the latter two outlets that the IDF has undertaken a “dramatic increase in the purchase of services from Google Cloud, Amazon’s AWS, and Microsoft Azure.”
Big Tech’s profiteering from Israel’s annihilation of Gaza and occupation, settler colonization, and apartheid in the West Bank has sparked numerous protests, including by employees of complicit companies. At least dozens of workers at companies including Google, Meta, and Microsoft have been fired for Palestine advocacy. Others have resigned in protest.
Hossam Nasr, a former Microsoft software engineer, was fired after organizing an October 2024 “No Azure for Apartheid” vigil for Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.
Nasr told The Guardian after his termination that he was fired “simply because we were daring to humanize Palestinians, and simply because we were daring to say that Microsoft should not be complicit with an army that is plausibly accused of genocide.”
The Israeli military’s reliance on Microsoft’s cloud technology and artificial intelligence systems surged during the most intensive phase of its bombardment of Gaza, leaked documents reveal.
The files offer an inside view of how Microsoft deepened its relationship with Israel’s defence establishment after 7 October 2023, supplying the military with greater computing and storage services and striking at least $10m in deals to provide thousands of hours of technical support.
Microsoft’s deep ties with Israel’s military are revealed in an investigation by the Guardian with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and a Hebrew-language outlet, Local Call. It is based in part on documents obtained by Drop Site News, which has published its own story.
The investigation, which also draws on interviews with sources from across Israel’s defence and intelligence establishment, sheds new light on how the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) turned to major US tech companies to meet the technological demands of war.
A reader holds up a copy of a satirical paper, “The New York War Crimes,” mocking The New York Times’ biased coverage of the Gaza genocide, on March 14, 2024 in New York City. (Photo: Nicki Kattoura/X)
Despite exceptional coverage at times, what was most profoundly important about war in Gaza—what it was like to be terrorized, massacred, maimed, and traumatized—remained almost entirely out of view.
A few days before the end of 2024, the independent magazine +972 reported that “Israeli army forces stormed the Kamal Adwan Hospital compound in Beit Lahiya, culminating a nearly week-long siege of the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza.” While fire spread through the hospital, its staff issued a statement saying that “surgical departments, laboratory, maintenance, and emergency units have been completely burned,” and patients were “at risk of dying at any moment.”
The magazine explained that “the assault on medical facilities in Beit Lahiya is the latest escalation in Israel’s brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, which over the last three months forcibly displaced the vast majority of Palestinians living in the area.” The journalism from +972—in sharp contrast to the dominant coverage of the Gaza war from U.S. media—has provided clarity about real-time events, putting them in overall context rather than episodic snippets.
+972 Magazine is the work of Palestinian and Israeli journalists who describe their core values as “a commitment to equity, justice, and freedom of information”—which necessarily means “accurate and fair journalism that spotlights the people and communities working to oppose occupation and apartheid.” But the operative values of mainstream U.S. news outlets have been very different.
What was sinister about proclaiming “Israel’s 9/11” was what happened after America’s 9/11.
Key aspects of how the U.S. establishment has narrated the “war on terror” for more than two decades were standard in American media and politics from the beginning of the Gaza war in October 2023. For instance:
Routine discourse avoided voices condemning the U.S. government for its role in the slaughter of civilians.
The U.S. ally usually eluded accountability for its high-tech atrocities committed from the air.
Civilian deaths in Gaza were habitually portrayed as unintended.
Claims that Israel was aiming to minimize civilian casualties were normally taken at face value.
Media coverage and political rhetoric stayed away from acknowledging that Israel’s actions might fit into such categories as “mass murder” or “terrorism.”
Overall, news media and U.S. government officials emitted a mindset that Israeli lives really mattered a lot more than Palestinian lives.
The Gaza war has received a vast amount of U.S. media attention, but how much it actually communicated about the human realities was a whole other matter. The belief or unconscious notion that news media were conveying war’s realities ended up obscuring those realities all the more. And journalism’s inherent limitations were compounded by media biases.
During the first five months of the war, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post applied the word “brutal” or its variants far more often to Palestinians (77%) than to Israelis (23%). The findings, in a study by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), pointed to an imbalance that occurred “even though Israeli violence was responsible for more than 20 times as much loss of life.” News articles and opinion pieces were remarkably in the same groove; “the lopsided rate at which ‘brutal’ was used in op-eds to characterize Palestinians over Israelis was exactly the same as the supposedly straight news stories.”
Despite exceptional coverage at times, what was most profoundly important about war in Gaza—what it was like to be terrorized, massacred, maimed, and traumatized—remained almost entirely out of view. Gradually, surface accounts reaching the American public came to seem repetitious and normal. As death numbers kept rising and months went by, the Gaza war diminished as a news topic, while most talk shows seldom discussed it.
As with the slaughter via bombardment, the Israeli-U.S. alliance treated the increasing onset of starvation, dehydration, and fatal disease as a public-relations problem. Along the way, official pronouncements—and the policies they tried to justify—were deeply anchored in the unspoken premise that some lives really matter and some really don’t.
The propaganda approach was foreshadowed on October 8, 2023, with Israel in shock from the atrocities that Hamas had committed the previous day. “This is Israel’s 9/11,” the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations told reporters in New York, and he repeated: “This is Israel’s 9/11.” Meanwhile, in a PBS News Weekend interview, Israel’s ambassador to the United States declared: “This is, as someone said, our 9/11.”
What was sinister about proclaiming “Israel’s 9/11” was what happened after America’s 9/11. Wearing the cloak of victim, the United States proceeded to use the horrible tragedy that occurred inside its borders as an open-ended reason to kill in the name of retaliation, self-protection, and, of course, the “war on terror.”
As Israel’s war on Gaza persisted, the explanations often echoed the post-9/11 rationales for the “war on terror” from the U.S. government: authorizing future crimes against humanity as necessary in the light of certain prior events. Reverberation was in the air from late 2001, when the Pentagon’s leader Donald Rumsfeld asserted that “responsibility for every single casualty in this war, whether they’re innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the feet of the al Qaeda and the Taliban.” After five weeks of massacring Palestinian people, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “any civilian loss is a tragedy”—and quickly added that “the blame should be placed squarely on Hamas.”
The licenses to kill were self-justifying. And they had no expiration date.
