What does recognising a Palestinian state mean? Why have Spain, Italy sent ships to assist the Gaza flotilla? Who are the artists speaking out against the war? Why has Microsoft cut Israel off from some of its services? Microsoft has announced that it has withdrawn some of its services from the Israeli army, following an investigation that raised concerns that Israel may be violating the company's terms of service by using its artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud services to spy on millions of Palestinians throughout Gaza and the West Bank.

Why have Spain, Italy sent ships to assist the Gaza flotilla? Israel's mass surveillance: Microsoft blocks the army from using its software United States tech giant Microsoft has cancelled some services it provides to the Israeli military over concerns it is violating its terms of service by using the firm's cloud computing software to spy on millions of Palestinians, the company's vice chair and president Brad Smith confirmed. Smith wrote in a Thursday blog post that the company had "ceased and disabled a set of services" to a unit within the Israeli Ministry of Defence in response to an August 6 joint investigation by The Guardian newspaper, +972 Magazine, and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call. Unit 8200 is the Israeli military's elite cyber warfare unit responsible for clandestine operations, including collecting signal intelligence and surveillance. The investigation by journalists revealed that following a 2021 meeting between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Unit 8200's leader Yossi Sariel, an agreement was reached to collaborate on moving large volumes of sensitive intelligence material into the company's Azure platform.

In the past 18 months, Israel has also combined A.I. with facial recognition software to match partly obscured or injured faces to real identities, turned to A.I. to compile potential airstrike targets, and created an Arabic-language A.I. model to power a chatbot that could scan and analyze text messages, social media posts and other Arabic-language data, two people with knowledge of the programs said. Many of these efforts were a partnership between enlisted soldiers in Unit 8200 and reserve soldiers who work at tech companies such as Google, Microsoft and Meta, three people with knowledge of the technologies said. Unit 8200 set up what became known as "The Studio," an innovation hub and place to match experts with A.I. projects, the people said. Yet even as Israel raced to develop the A.I. arsenal, deployment of the technologies sometimes led to mistaken identifications and arrests, as well as civilian deaths, the Israeli and American officials said. Some officials have struggled with the ethical implications of the A.I. tools, which could result in increased surveillance and other civilian killings.

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. After launching its offensive in Gaza in October 2023, the IDF faced a sudden rush in demand for storage and computing power, leading it to swiftly expand its computing infrastructure and embrace what one commander described as "the wonderful world of cloud providers".

A video has surfaced of a senior official at Israel's cyber intelligence agency, Unit 8200, talking last year about the use of machine learning "magic powder" to help identify Hamas targets in Gaza. The footage raises questions about the accuracy of a recent statement about use of artificial intelligence (AI) by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), which said it "does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist". However, in the video, the head of data science and AI at Unit 8200 – named only as "Colonel Yoav" – said he would reveal an "example of one of the tools we use" before describing how the intelligence division used machine learning techniques in Israel's May 2021 offensive in Gaza for "finding new terrorists". "Let's say we have some terrorists that form a group and we know only some of them," he said. "By practising our data science magic powder we are able to find the rest of them."

The Israeli army has been using an AI system to populate its'kill list' of alleged Hamas terrorists, leading to the deaths of women and children, a new report claims. The report cited six Israeli intelligence officers, who admitted to using an AI called'Lavender' to classify as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants -- marking these people and their homes as acceptable targets for air strikes. Israel has vehemently denied the AI's role with an army spokesperson describing the system as'auxiliary tools that assist officers in the process of incrimination.' Lavender was trained on data from Israeli intelligence's decades-long surveillance of Palestinian populations, using the digital footprints of known militants as a model for what signal to look for in the noise, according to the report. The intel sources noted that human officers scanned each AI-chosen target for about '20 seconds' before giving their'stamp' of approval, despite an internal study that had determined Lavender AI misidentified people 10 percent of the time. Israel quietly delegated the identification of Hamas terrorists, Palestinian civilians and aide workers to an artificial intelligence, 'Lavender,' a new report revealed.

Unit 8200 may or may not ring a bell, but you've likely heard of Viber, the popular instant messaging app or Wix, the cloud computing service. Viber, Wix, and hundreds of other high-tech startups have their origins in Unit 8200, the cyberware division of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The links are Talmon Marco and Avishai Abrahami, Viber's, and Wix' founders, both of whom did their mandatory military service at or worked for Unit 8200. Over the years, Unit 8200 has turned out thousands of tech-savvy entrepreneurs who, like Marco and Abrahami, went on to found their own tech companies or to occupy leading positions in established ones. In what has become the world's premier example of military innovation, Unit 8200 is credited with playing a key role in developing Israel's high-tech know-how, which has resulted in the country having the highest concentration of startups per capita in the world and consistently ranking as a global leader in innovation.