On November 19, within minutes of walking through an Israeli military checkpoint along Gaza's central highway, Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha was asked by a crowd to step outside. He put down his 3-year-old son and sat down in front of the military jeep.
Thirty minutes later, Abu Toha heard his name called. He was then blindfolded and taken for interrogation.
“I had no idea what was going on and how they could suddenly know my legal name,” said the 31-year-old man, who is not affiliated with the militant group Hamas and moved from Gaza to Egypt. He added that he was about to leave the country.
Three Israeli intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Abu Toha was found to have come within range of cameras equipped with facial recognition technology. After scanning his face and determining his identity, an artificial intelligence program determined that the poet was on Israel's most wanted list, the statement said.
Abu Toha is one of hundreds of Palestinians selected by a previously private Israeli facial recognition program launched in the Gaza Strip late last year. According to Israeli intelligence, military officials and soldiers, this large-scale, experimental effort is being used to carry out mass surveillance without the knowledge or consent of Palestinians, and to expose Palestinians to their faces. It is said that they are collecting information and creating a catalog.
The technology was initially used to search for Israelis taken hostage by Hamas during an Oct. 7 cross-border raid in the Gaza Strip, intelligence officials said. After Israel launched a ground offensive in Gaza, it increasingly turned to programs to root out those with ties to Hamas and other extremist groups. One police officer said the technology could sometimes falsely flag civilians as Hamas militants.
Facial recognition programs run by Israel's military intelligence units, including Cyber Intelligence Unit 8200, rely on technology from the private Israeli company Cosight, four intelligence officials said. He also uses Google Photos. Combining these technologies will allow Israel to extract faces from crowds and grainy drone footage.
Three people familiar with the project said they spoke out because of concerns that it was a misuse of Israel's time and resources.
An Israeli military spokesperson declined to comment on operations in the Gaza Strip, but said the military was “carrying out the necessary security and intelligence operations, while making significant efforts to minimize damage to non-involved populations.” I'm making an effort,” he said. He added: “Obviously, we cannot refer to operational or intelligence capabilities in this context.”
Facial recognition technology has become popular around the world in recent years with increasingly sophisticated AI systems. Some countries use this technology to facilitate air travel, while China and Russia deploy it against minorities and to suppress dissent. Israel's use of facial recognition in Gaza stands out as an application of this technology in war.
Matt Mahmoudi, a researcher at Amnesty International, said he was concerned about Israel's use of facial recognition because it could lead to “the complete dehumanization of Palestinians”, where they would no longer be seen as individuals. Stated. He added that even if the technology were to make mistakes, Israeli soldiers would be unlikely to question the technology if it identified an individual as part of an extremist group.
An Amnesty International report last year said Israel had previously used facial recognition in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but its efforts in Gaza have gone further.
In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israelis have installed an indigenous facial recognition system called Blue Wolf, according to an Amnesty International report. At checkpoints in West Bank cities such as Hebron, Palestinians are scanned by high-definition cameras before being allowed to pass. The report said soldiers are using smartphone apps to scan Palestinian faces and add them to a database.
Facial recognition technology did not exist in the Gaza Strip, which Israel withdrew from in 2005. Israeli intelligence officials say surveillance of Hamas in the Gaza Strip is instead carried out by tapping phone lines, interrogating Palestinian prisoners, collecting drone footage, gaining access to personal social media accounts and hacking into communication systems. It is said that he was killed.
Since October 7, Israeli intelligence officers from Unit 8,200 have relied on their surveillance for information on Hamas militants who have breached Israel's borders. A police officer said the force also thoroughly investigated CCTV footage of the attack and videos uploaded by Hamas on social media. The force said it had been instructed to draw up a “hit list” of Hamas members who took part in the attack.
Three Israeli intelligence officers said Cosite was later deployed to create facial recognition programs in the Gaza Strip.
The Tel Aviv-based company says on its website that its technology can see less than 50 percent of the face for accurate recognition. Corsight President Robert Watts posted on LinkedIn this month that facial recognition technology could work at “extreme angles, darkness (even from a drone), and poor quality.”
Mr. Corsite declined to comment.
According to one member, members of Unit 8200 quickly realized that Coesite's technology did not work well when the footage was grainy and faces were obscured. When the military tried to identify the bodies of Israelis killed on October 7, the technique did not always work on people with facial injuries. The officer said there were also cases of false positives, where a person was incorrectly identified as affiliated with Hamas.
To supplement Cosite's technology, Israeli officials used Google's free photo sharing and storage service, Google Photos, three intelligence officials said. By uploading a database of known people to Google Photos, Israeli police officers could potentially identify the person using the service's photo search feature.
One executive said Google's ability to match faces and identify people even when only a small portion of their face was visible was superior to other technologies. The military continued to use Cosite because it was customizable, officers said.
A Google spokesperson said Google Photos is a free consumer product and “does not identify the unknown person in your photos.”
Facial recognition programs in the Gaza Strip have grown as Israel expands its military offensive there. Israeli soldiers entering Gaza were given cameras equipped with this technology. Soldiers also set up checkpoints and facial-scanning cameras along major roads used by Palestinians to flee the hotly fought area.
Israeli intelligence officials said the purpose of the plan was to search for Israeli hostages and Hamas fighters who could be held for interrogation.
The guidelines for who to stop were intentionally broad, one person said. Palestinian prisoners were asked to name people in their community they believed to be part of Hamas. Israel will then search for those people in hopes of getting more information.
Palestinian poet Abu Toha was named as a Hamas operative by someone in Beit Lahia, a town in northern Gaza where he lived with his family, Israeli intelligence officials said. Officers said his file had no specific information attached explaining his ties to Hamas.
Abu Toha, author of “What's Hidden in My Ears: Poems of Gaza,'' said in an interview: sHe has nothing to do with Hamas.
He said he was stopped at a military checkpoint while attempting to leave the country with his family for Egypt on November 19, and did not produce identification when asked to leave the crowd.
After being handcuffed and made to sit under a tent with dozens of other men, I heard someone say that the Israeli military had used “new technology” against the group. Within 30 minutes, Israeli soldiers called him by his full name.
Abu Toha said he was beaten and interrogated for two days in an Israeli detention center before being returned to Gaza without any explanation. He wrote about his own experiences in the New Yorker magazine, where he was a contributor. He credited his release to a campaign led by journalists from The New Yorker and other publications.
After his release, Israeli soldiers reportedly told him that the interrogation had been a “mistake.”
The Israeli military said in a statement at the time that Abu Toha was questioned due to “information indicating numerous interactions between civilians and terrorist organizations within the Gaza Strip.”
Abu Toha, who is currently in Cairo with his family, said he was unaware of the facial recognition program in Gaza.
“I didn't know that Israel was photographing and recording my face,” he said. But Israel “has been watching us from the air for years using drones. They've seen us gardening, going to school, kissing our wives. I feel like I’ve been watched the whole time.”
kashmir hills Contributed to the report.