Welcome to +972’s Sunday Recap! 

Microsoft has terminated the Israeli army’s access to technology it was using to store vast troves of intelligence on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Gaza, Yuval Abraham reported. The decision followed an exposé last month by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and the Guardian revealing how Unit 8200, the Israeli army’s elite cyber warfare agency, was housing recordings of millions of intercepted phone calls by Palestinians on Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure.

In Gaza, under the guise of re-registration, Israel is seeking to force all international NGOs to comply with the GHF model, turning aid into a vehicle for ethnic cleansing. As Lee Mordechai and Liat Kozma argued (originally published on Local Call), this is Israel’s cruel ultimatum to humanitarian groups in the enclave: collaborate or leave.

Basel Adra and Mohammad Hesham Huraini reported on a recent series of bloody settler pogroms across four separate villages in Masafer Yatta, in the southern West Bank, which left residents and solidarity activists hospitalized with head wounds, broken bones, and internal bleeding.

Israeli ministers have decried a recent pledge by thousands of actors, directors, and other film workers from around the world to boycott Israeli film institutions. Yet as Roy Cohen discussed, many Israeli filmmakers challenging dominant Zionist narratives have long faced boycotts, funding cuts, smear campaigns, and other attempts at silencing — from the Israeli government itself.

And on the latest episode of the +972 Podcast, Ghousoon Bisharat spoke with long-time +972 contributor Ruwaida Amer about the dangers and hardships of reporting from Gaza for nearly two years, where the atrocities she has documented — massacres, destruction, displacement, and starvation — were inseparable from her own lived experience.

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