Alon Haimovich, the general manager of Microsoft Israel, will step down following an internal investigation into the company’s ties with the Israeli military. The inquiry was launched after a joint media investigation reported that Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform had been used to intercept and store large volumes of phone calls between Palestinian civilians.

According to the findings, Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200 used Azure to build a system that enabled the analysis of millions of calls from Gaza and the West Bank. Microsoft concluded that the military had violated its terms of service and that employees in Israel had not been fully transparent with the parent company in the United States about how the technology was being deployed.

Haimovich played a central role in developing the relationship between Microsoft and the military unit and attended a 2021 meeting between Microsoft’s chief executive and the head of Unit 8200. Following the investigation, the military unit’s access to Azure and its artificial intelligence tools was revoked. Haimovich did not comment publicly, though he said in a farewell message to staff that he had helped make Israel one of Microsoft’s fastest-growing markets.