Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its tech in mass surveillance of Palestinians

> The decision has not affected Microsoft’s wider commercial relationship with the IDF, which is a longstanding client and will retain access to other services. The termination will raise questions within Israel about the policy of holding sensitive military data in a third-party cloud hosted overseas.

It's worth noting that even after finding out the "most moral" army is conducting mass surveillance, they're still happy to provide them services.

Doesn't every army conduct "mass surveillance"? What do you think all those satellites with cameras are doing orbiting the planet?

Wouldn't the opposite be incredibly immoral? Attacking/bombing/etc without large scale surveillance would largely mean increased collateral damage.

Perhaps the actual moral choice isn’t attacking blindly or mass surveillance of an occupied nation - it’s peace?

Regardless, the death toll in gaza (somewhere between 45,000 and 600,000) suggests that this mass surveillance isn’t being used effectively to reduce the death toll. It also doesn’t take mass surveillance to know that bombing hospitals and schools is going to kill innocent people.

Even the Gaza Health Ministry claims only 68,000, so I presume that your 600,000 is a typo.

Unfortunately not a typo:

https://www.un.org/unispal/document/press-briefing-francesca...

“65,000 is the number of Palestinians are certain killed, including over, of which 75% are women and children.

In fact, we shall start the thinking of 680,000, because this is the number that some scholars and scientists claim being the real death toll in Gaza.

And it would be hard to be able to prove or disprove this number, especially if investigators and others remained banned from entering the occupied Palestinian territory, and particularly the Gaza Strip.”

The death toll could be that high. I hope to hell it isn’t. But we don’t know and won’t know until the killing stops. We do know that tens of thousands of innocent people have been killed, and at least 150,000 people injured.

I don’t think her statements aren’t even factual: the current estimates aren’t the confirmed identities, they include estimates for missing and presumed dead. You don’t think the GHM would publish larger estimates if 1/3 of every living person in Gaza was missing or dead? It’s hard to have an objective conversation when numbers are just made up.

I am not asserting a specific number. There have been between 65,000 and 680,000 gazans murdered by the idf directly and indirectly. I think it’s unlikely the number is as high as 680k, but there is absolute chaos on the ground, doctors and hospitals and records destroyed. We won’t know until the slaughter stops what number is real.

If you want to let the lack of a specific number hold you up while the killing continues, that’s up to you.

If you're basing this on the Lancet letter about indirect deaths, that's an estimate that includes future deaths that could be linked to past events of the war. So "have been" isn't the right tense.

It's also non-peer-reviewed, and based on rather arbitrarily picking a multiplier of 15x from a range of past conflicts' multipliers. One author described the figure as "purely illustrative" in a now-deleted tweet.