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LONDON: Activists in the Netherlands have taken over the roof of a Microsoft data center after it was revealed that the tech giant stores data for the Israeli military in the country.

The Geef Tegengas (Push Back) group said the Microsoft Azure platform, which uses servers in the Netherlands, was being used to store intercepted phone data from Palestinians by Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200.

It came after a joint investigation by The Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language media platform Local Call.

The investigation found 11,500 terabytes of Israeli military data, or around 200 million hours of audio, on the Netherlands’ Azure servers.

Geef Tegengas members lit flairs on the roof of the data center, with others blocking access to the site near Middenmeer in the northwest of the country. 

They said they are “calling on all employees of the data center to lay down their work until all Israeli intelligence has been removed from the servers,” The Guardian reported.

Last week, Dutch politicians raised the issue of the use of servers by the Israeli military in the country’s parliament in The Hague.

MP Christine Teunissen asked the government for information on how it could prevent data stored in the Netherlands from “being used to commit genocide” in Gaza. 

Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp responded that he was unaware of the nature of the data kept on the Azure servers, but that he would request more information.

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

Microsoft last week said it had “no information” about Unit 8200 data stored on Azure. The Guardian reported on Saturday that senior figures at the tech giant were concerned that staff based in Israel may have hidden aspects of the unit’s work.

A spokesperson for the US company said: “At no time during this engagement (with Unit 8200) has Microsoft been aware of the surveillance of civilians or collection of their cellphone conversations using Microsoft’s services.” 

LONDON: Half of the protesters arrested in London on Saturday in relation to the banned group Palestine Action are older than 60, police data shows.

Officers arrested 532 people at the mass demonstration against the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization last month, The Guardian reported.

All except 10 were arrested under Section 13 of the UK’s Terrorism Act for displaying placards or signs in support of a banned group.

London’s Metropolitan Police on Sunday released an age breakdown of the people arrested at the demonstration. Almost 100 were in their 70s and 15 were aged 80 or older.

The event was organized in Parliament Square by Defend Our Juries, which requested that protesters hold signs saying: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”

Police arrested high-profile former government and military figures. Jonathon Porritt, 75, a former adviser to the government of Tony Blair, said he is deeply concerned by the erosion of civil liberties in Britain under successive governments.

Police arrested him under Section 13 and he was bailed until Oct. 23. He described the ban on Palestine Action as “a measure of the government’s desperation” that is “entirely inappropriate.”

Porritt said: “I thought this was overreach by the home secretary, trying to eliminate the voices of those who are deeply concerned about what is happening in Gaza.

“This was an absolutely clear case of a government using its powers to crush dissenting voices when it is the government itself that is most reprehensible for what continues to be an absolute horror story in the world.

“What we are seeing now in Gaza has just utterly shocked people and it’s completely abhorrent that we are living through a genocide on our TV screens.”

Some people who attended the protest complained that police detained older demonstrators for hours in the hot summer weather and denied them access to water.

Defend Our Juries on Sunday said everyone arrested had been released from police custody and no charges had been issued.

The Met Police said: “There was water available at the prisoner processing points and access to toilets. We had police medics on hand as part of the policing operation and we processed people as quickly as possible to ensure nobody was waiting an unreasonably long time.

“Notwithstanding that, a degree of personal responsibility is required on the part of those who chose to come and break the law.

“They knew they were very likely to be arrested which is a decision that will inevitably have consequences.”

Chris Romberg, a 75-year-old former British Army officer colonel and a military attache at the British embassies in Jordan and Egypt, was also arrested under Section 13 and bailed.

“This is a serious assault on our freedoms,” Romberg, the son of a Holocaust survivor told, The Guardian. “When I protested against the US war in Vietnam, we were able to chant ‘victory to the NLF’ without being criminalized.

“Now a statement of support for a nonviolent direct-action group is prosecuted under anti-terrorism legislation.”

Award-winning poet Alice Oswald, 58, told officers who had detained her to write to the home secretary about the position they were forced into as a result of the Palestine Action ban.

She said: “Clearly there were some police officers who were really struggling with what they had to do. You could see the slightly shifty look in their faces, too.

“When I was speaking to them in the police van I did say: ‘Write to Yvette Cooper and tell her that this is making your life impossible’.”

She told The Guardian that she was partly motivated to attend the demonstration after delivering online poetry classes to young people in Gaza.

Since the proscription of Palestine Action in July, 10 people have been charged for suspected offenses under the Terrorism Act.