Microsoft Israel GM Steps Down After Defense Probe

Alon Haimovich, the Country General Manager of Microsoft Israel, has stepped down following an internal investigation by the company's global leadership into the subsidiary's contracts with Israel's Defense Ministry. Several managers from the governance and government relations divisions have also departed, and Microsoft Israel is now being managed temporarily by Microsoft France.

The probe, conducted in recent weeks, focused on whether the Israeli unit had been transparent about the Defense Ministry's use of Microsoft systems, including Azure cloud storage. Officials expressed concerns that some military units may have violated company terms of service, particularly regarding mass surveillance data stored on European servers, which could expose Microsoft to regulatory scrutiny under European data protection laws.

Evidence from the investigation supported prior findings that Israel's Unit 8200, a signals intelligence unit, had used a segregated Azure area since 2022 to store large volumes of intercepted Palestinian phone calls from Gaza and the West Bank. Leaked documents indicated around 11,500 terabytes of military data on servers in the Netherlands, with a smaller amount in...