Microsoft Parked Israeli Spy Data in a Dutch Polder

Activists occupied Microsoft’s Middenmeer data center on 10 August 2025 after 11,500 terabytes of Israeli military data were logged on Dutch Azure servers. The group Geef Tegengas chained the gate, climbed the roof, and lit flares. They wanted every Israeli intelligence file gone from those halls.

The files were in the Netherlands because a European cloud region sells trust. That same Dutch address is what put the archive under a local protest, a genocide question in parliament, and a company ban on some Israeli defence-ministry services, after which the store left the European Union while the polder campus kept growing.

Fifteen Activists Chained the Gate at Agriport

On Sunday 10 August 2025, about 15 people from Geef Tegengas, a Rotterdam direct-action group, arrived at Microsoft’s campus in Middenmeer, in the municipality of Hollands Kroon. They locked themselves to the gate with steel tubes so staff could not drive in, hung banners on the fence, and sent a few people onto a roof with flares.

The demand was blunt. Leaked company files and interviews with 11 people inside Microsoft and Israeli military intelligence had just described a custom Azure environment used by Unit 8200, Israel’s signals-intelligence arm, to keep recordings of Palestinian mobile calls from Gaza and the West Bank. Geef Tegengas said those recordings were being used to oppress, jail, and kill civilians, and that Azure made Microsoft a party to the assault on Gaza.

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. Thanks to its Azure cloud service, Microsoft plays a direct role in the genocide of the people of Gaza.

Geef Tegengas, protest statement, Middenmeer, 10 August 2025

The group told workers on site to stop work until the intelligence store was wiped, and it called for a boycott. Microsoft described “an incident whereby our site was entered without permission,” told the police, and said service was not affected. A spokeswoman said the demonstrators left on their own around 17:00.

The occupation lasted an afternoon. The political problem it pointed at did not.

A 2021 Seattle Meeting Put the Archive on Dutch Soil

Late in 2021, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella met Yossi Sariel, then commander of Unit 8200, at the company’s campus near Seattle. Sariel wanted a custom, walled-off slice of Azure so the unit could move secret workloads off military servers that, officers later said, could not hold an entire population’s phone calls.

Microsoft says Nadella sat in that meeting for about 10 minutes and was not told the payload would be civilian call recordings. A spokesperson said the company’s work with the unit was sold as cyber defence against state and militant attacks, and that Microsoft “did not build or consult with Unit 8200” on a cloud surveillance system. Leaked internal records describe Nadella calling the partnership “critical” and backing a segregated Azure area for sensitive data.

By early 2022 the system was live. Company engineers and unit staff designed extra security to the unit’s standard. One internal note said the rhythm of contact was “daily, top down and bottom up.” Staff were told not to use the unit’s name. Unit 8200, roughly the Israeli counterpart to the U.S. National Security Agency, already intercepted Palestinian traffic because it controls the networks. Azure changed the scale. Officers inside the unit summed it up as “a million calls an hour.”

Before the cloud move, the unit could keep calls from tens of thousands of people tagged as suspects on its own machines. With Azure it could keep the calls of millions, including ordinary civilians, and play them back later. Three unit sources said the store was used to prepare airstrikes in Gaza and to shape operations in the West Bank, where about 3 million Palestinians live under military occupation. Other officers said the same files were used to detain people, to lean on them, or to justify a killing after the fact.

Sariel wanted as much as 70 percent of the unit’s data, including secret and top secret material, in Azure, and was willing to “push the envelope” on what an intelligence service normally keeps on its own metal. Israel’s Justice Ministry had already flagged the legal catch in 2022. A ministry opinion warned that France and Germany required firms to check human-rights abuse in their supply chains, and that the Netherlands was drafting similar rules, which “may lead to the issuance of orders to prevent or restrict services.” The partnership went ahead anyway. A large share of the sensitive store was expected to sit, at first, in Microsoft halls outside Israel. The halls that mattered were in the Netherlands, with a smaller share in Ireland.

How Much Israeli Military Data Sat in Middenmeer?

Leaked Microsoft files described the Dutch footprint as of July 2025. The figures in that reporting are easy to mash together, and they do not all measure the same pile of bytes.

THE DUTCH AZURE STORE, AS DESCRIBED IN 2025

Microsoft’s first public line was that it had “no information” about Unit 8200 data on Azure and no knowledge of civilian call collection on its services. Senior people inside the company, according to people familiar with the scramble after the leak, worried that Israel-based staff might have held back what the military unit was actually doing. Some of those staff had served in the unit or still sat in its reserve.

That is the practical knot behind a later public fight over encryption. Microsoft does not read a customer’s content as a matter of policy. It can still see that a defence-ministry account is eating Azure storage in the Netherlands, and that AI tools are in the mix. The company later investigated those business records, not the tapes themselves.

The Hague Said It Had No Legal Window

Two days after the roof action, Christine Teunissen, a Member of Parliament for the Party for the Animals, asked the cabinet whether the Middenmeer campus was holding the intercepted calls, and how the state could stop that store being used in Gaza. Vincent Karremans, the minister of economic affairs, answered on 23 September 2025, also for the foreign ministry. Foreign minister Caspar Veldkamp had already said that if the material pointed to crimes, the public prosecution service could act.

If there are serious indications of criminal offences in that information, legal proceedings can of course be initiated, and that is then up to the public prosecution service.

Caspar Veldkamp, Minister of Foreign Affairs, August 2025

Karremans’s written answers are the more revealing document, because they describe a state that hosts the halls and cannot look inside them.

WHAT THE DUTCH CABINET SAID IT COULD NOT DO

• Confirm the store: The minister said he could not judge whether the Middenmeer campus held the intercepted calls, and that Microsoft, asked directly, also would not confirm it.
• Require a notice: Operators have no duty to report stored data types to Dutch authorities, and Microsoft had made no such report about Unit 8200.
• Open the racks: He said he had no legal basis to order a government search of data stored by a third party in a Dutch data center, and that Microsoft was running its own review instead.
• Force advance scanning: The Digital Services Act, he wrote, bars a general duty on hosts to monitor stored information or to hunt for illegal use; they must act once they know.
• Call it state complicity: The cabinet’s view was that complicity under international law would require the Dutch state to give aid to an unlawful act, and that this case did not meet that test.

Teunissen and allied MPs had argued the opposite, that facilitating the store risked making the Netherlands a party to serious breaches of humanitarian law, and they asked the government to freeze an expansion of the Hollands Kroon campus until an independent inquiry reported. The cabinet did not take that path. Criminal law, Karremans wrote, can apply if servers on Dutch soil are used to commit offences, and that choice sits with the public prosecutor, not with a minister who cannot see the disks.

So the protest met a legal wall that is not a glitch. A hyperscale hall in a polder is treated as a hotel for other people’s bits. The landlord does not have to say who is staying. The state does not get a spare key.

Microsoft Cut Cloud Storage After Its Own Review

Microsoft announced a review on 15 August 2025 and hired Covington & Burling LLP, with an outside technical firm under the lawyers’ direction. Two rules governed the work, the company later wrote: it does not supply technology for mass surveillance of civilians, and it does not read customer content. The reviewers looked at Microsoft’s own books, mail, and internal files.

On 25 September 2025, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s vice chair and president, told staff the company had ceased and disabled specified IMOD services, including some cloud storage and AI, for a unit inside the Israel Ministry of Defense. An Israeli security official said the operational capacity of the Israel Defense Forces was not damaged.

We do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians. We have applied this principle in every country around the world, and we have insisted on it repeatedly for more than two decades.

Brad Smith, Vice Chair and President, Microsoft staff note, 25 September 2025

Smith said the still-open review had found evidence supporting elements of the August reporting, including IMOD consumption of Azure storage in the Netherlands and the use of AI services. IMOD was given a chance to show the disabled services complied with the terms. Public reporting at the time, Microsoft later noted, was that the ministry planned to move the disputed data onto a competing cloud.

People familiar with a large transfer said the intercepted-call repository, as much as 8,000 terabytes, had been held in a Dutch Microsoft data center and was taken out of the country in early August, in the days around the leak and the roof action. The 11,500-terabyte military-data figure and that call archive are not the same pile. What the public record does show is that the European copy was treated as a liability the moment it became a newspaper story, which is the outcome Israeli lawyers had sketched, in reverse, three years earlier.

FROM THE LEAK TO THE FINAL COMPANY NOTE

1. 6 August 2025: Leaked Microsoft files and 11 sources describe Unit 8200’s Azure call archive, with 11,500 terabytes of Israeli military data in the Netherlands as of July.
2. 10 August 2025: Geef Tegengas occupies the Middenmeer campus for an afternoon.
3. 12 August 2025: Teunissen files parliamentary questions on the store and on possible crimes.
4. 15 August 2025: Microsoft announces an external review.
5. 23 September 2025: Karremans tells parliament the state cannot see what the halls hold.
6. 25 September 2025: Microsoft disables specified Israeli defence-ministry cloud storage and AI services.
7. June 2026: Microsoft publishes a final update. Covington’s factual findings, it says, are unchanged, and IMOD still was not allowed to keep those services.

The June 2026 note lists process changes, not a public inventory of what, if anything, still sits on Dutch disks. Microsoft still sells IMOD software, professional services, Azure, and Azure AI, including translation, and still helps Israel defend its networks, it said. Limited extra help after 7 October 2023, it added, was confined to hostage-rescue support, with some requests approved and others refused. Worker campaigns under the banner No Azure for Apartheid kept disrupting events and sending mass staff mail into 2026, arguing the cut was narrow and late.

The Polder Campus Is Still Growing

Middenmeer was never a pop-up. Microsoft announced the first hall in December 2013, at a cost put then at about 2 billion euros, and opened it in November 2015 on the datacenter area at Agriport A7, among high-tech greenhouses 50 kilometres north of Amsterdam. The West Europe Azure region still runs from those buildings. Joris Schoonis, chief executive of Microsoft Netherlands, has said the company has 300,000 customers who want data stored nearby in a sovereign country.

THE MIDDENMEER FOOTPRINT

• Halls now: Nine data centers on two campuses, AMS-D with seven buildings at Agriport 570 and AMS-E with two at Westlanderweg 50.
• Power: One of those halls used 1.17 TWh in 2025, about 1 percent of Dutch electricity use of 116 TWh that year, on a 78 MW connection.
• Capital: Microsoft Datacenter Netherlands BV had put about 12.5 billion euros into the Dutch halls by mid-2025, roughly 5 billion in land and buildings and 7.5 billion in servers and kit.
• Next plots: Six further halls are proposed on about 53 hectares beside AMS-E; Microsoft bought 50 hectares in 2025 and another 37.5 hectares of farmland in June 2026 for 44 million euros, and queued a grid hook-up.

Local fights over water, permits, and secrecy long predates the Unit 8200 story. The state has already limited new hyperscale sites to Agriport and Eemshaven. None of that debate, and none of the August occupation, has stopped Microsoft staking more polder for more halls. Geef Tegengas later took the same argument to a future Microsoft site in Amsterdam’s Sloterdijk district.

The files that put activists on a Middenmeer roof are, on the public record, no longer described as sitting in those racks. The campus that held them is still adding land, power, and concrete, in the same sovereign country whose ministers said they had no legal window into the store.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is Israel’s Unit 8200?

Unit 8200 is the signals-intelligence branch of the Israeli military, comparable in role to the U.S. National Security Agency, and it intercepts communications in the occupied territories in part because Israel controls Palestinian telecom networks. Yossi Sariel commanded the unit from early 2021 until late 2024 and had argued, including in a 2021 book on artificial intelligence, that agencies had to “migrate to the cloud” and “track everyone, all the time” after a wave of attacks by people unknown to traditional targeting. A unit system known as “noisy message” already scored Palestinian text messages for suspicious words; Azure was the leap that let the unit keep millions of call recordings, not only a suspect list of tens of thousands.

Did Satya Nadella Approve Storing Palestinian Phone Calls?

Microsoft says no. A spokesperson said Nadella was in the 2021 Seattle meeting for about 10 minutes, that Azure was not even discussed in the way later described, and that his only later contact with Sariel was a condolence card after the death of Nadella’s son. Leaked records still show Nadella backing a custom, segregated Azure area for Unit 8200’s “sensitive workloads,” and they show Microsoft engineers spending 2022 wiring extra security to the unit’s instructions. The gap between a short executive meeting and a daily engineering cadence is the part of the file the company has not publicly closed.

Which Country Enforces Cloud Rules for a Dutch Microsoft Hall?

Karremans told parliament that Digital Services Act oversight sits with the authorities of the EU member state where the provider’s main establishment in the Union is based, which can be a different country from the one where a given hall stands. Hosts also cannot be forced, under that law, to scan stored files in advance for illegal use. That is why a minister in The Hague can say Dutch criminal law might apply to servers on Dutch soil and, in the same answers, say he has no tool to inspect a Microsoft account held for the Israeli defence ministry.

Where Did the Call Archive Go After August 2025?

People familiar with the transfer said the intercepted-call repository, as much as 8,000 terabytes, was moved out of the Netherlands in early August 2025, within days of the leak. Microsoft’s own later note said public reporting at the time was that IMOD planned to shift the disputed data to a competing cloud platform, and that Microsoft never opened IMOD’s content during the review. The company has not published a disk-level map of what, if anything, of the wider 11,500-terabyte Israeli military total remains on Dutch or Irish Azure.

What Did Microsoft Change After It Cut Those Services?

The June 2026 follow-up listed five internal moves: tighter pre-contract review for national-security customers, a fresh look at how staff hold security clearances in some non-U.S. markets, periodic refresh of acceptable-use rules when a project’s scope shifts, more staff training on when to escalate, and a new “Trusted Technology Review” channel in the Microsoft Integrity Portal, including anonymous reports, to be covered in company-wide training in FY27. Those are process changes inside Microsoft. They are not a Dutch inspection power, and they are not a public log of military data still hosted in North Holland.