Israel implements extensive facial recognition program in Gaza

TEL AVIV, Israel – On November 19, minutes after crossing an Israeli military checkpoint along the Gaza Strip’s central highway, Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha was asked to leave by the crowd.

He left his three-year-old son on the ground in his arms and sat in front of a military jeep.

Half an hour later, Abu Toha heard his name.

Then they blindfolded him and took him away for questioning.

“I had no idea what was happening or how they could suddenly know my full legal name,” the 31-year-old said, adding that he had no ties to the Hamas militant group and was trying to leave Gaza for Egypt.

Abu Toha was found to have come within range of cameras equipped with facial recognition technology, according to three Israeli intelligence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

After his face was scanned and identified, an artificial intelligence program discovered that the poet was on an Israeli wanted list, they said.

Abu Toha is one of hundreds of Palestinians targeted by a previously undisclosed Israeli facial recognition program that began in Gaza late last year.

The expansive and experimental effort is being used to conduct mass surveillance there, collecting and cataloging Palestinian faces without your knowledge or consentaccording to Israeli intelligence officials, military officers and soldiers.

The technology was initially used in Gaza to search for Israelis taken hostage by Hamas during cross-border raids on October 7, intelligence officials said.

After embarking on a ground offensive in Gaza, Israel has increasingly turned to a program aimed at rooting out anyone with ties to Hamas or other militant groups.

Sometimes technology incorrectly marked to civilians as wanted Hamas militants, an official said.

The facial recognition program, led by the Israeli military intelligence unit, including the cyber intelligence division Unit 8200, is based on the technology of Corseta private Israeli company, four intelligence officials said.

Also uses Google Photosthey said.

Combined, the technologies allow Israel to distinguish faces in crowds and grainy drone images.

Three of the people familiar with the program said they spoke out of fear that it was a… abuse of time and resources on the part of Israel.

An Israeli army spokesman declined to comment on the activity in Gaza, but said the army “conducts the necessary security and intelligence operations, making significant efforts to minimize harm to the unaffected population.”

He added: “Of course we cannot refer to operational and intelligence capabilities in this context.”

Technology

Facial recognition technology has spread around the world in recent years, driven by increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence systems.

While some countries use the technology to facilitate air travel, China and Russia have used the technology against minority groups and to suppress dissent.

Israel’s use of facial recognition in Gaza stands out as an application of the technology in warfare.

Matt Mahmoudi, a researcher at Amnesty International, said Israel’s use of facial recognition was worrying because it could lead to “a complete dehumanization of Palestinians” in which they are not considered individuals.

He added that Israeli soldiers are unlikely to question the technology when it identifies a person as part of a militant group, even if the technology makes mistakes.

According to an Amnesty report last year, Israel had already used facial recognition in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but in Gaza the effort goes further.

In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, according to the Amnesty report, the Israelis have a local facial recognition system called Blue Wolf.

At checkpoints in West Bank cities like Hebron, there are Palestinians scanned by high-resolution cameras before they can get through.

Soldiers also use smartphone apps to scan Palestinians’ faces and add them to a database, the report said.

In Gaza, which Israel withdrew from in 2005, no facial recognition technology existed.

Instead, Hamas surveillance in Gaza was carried out by tapping phone lines, interrogating Palestinian prisoners, collecting drone footage, gaining access to private social media accounts and hacking telecommunications systems, Hamas officials said. Israeli intelligence.

After October 7, Israeli intelligence officers from Unit 8200 turned to such surveillance looking for information about Hamas militants who violated Israel’s borders.

The unit also reviewed footage of the attacks captured by security cameras, as well as videos posted by Hamas on social media, an official said.

He said the unit was ordered to create a “target list” of Hamas members who participated in the attack.

Corsight was then hired to set up a facial recognition program in Gaza, three Israeli intelligence officials said.

The Tel Aviv-based company says on its website that its technology requires less than 50% of a face to be visible for accurate recognition.

Robert Watts, president of Corsight, posted this month on LinkedIn that facial recognition technology could work in “extreme angles (including from drones), darkness and poor quality.”

Corsight declined to comment.

Unit 8200 personnel soon discovered that Corsight’s technology had problems if images were grainy and faces were obscured, one officer said.

When the military tried to identify the bodies of Israelis killed on October 7, the technology didn’t always work for people whose faces had been injured.

There were also false positives, or cases in which a person was wrongly identified as linked to Hamas, the official said.

To integrate Corsight’s technology, Israeli officers used Google Photos, Google’s free photo sharing and storage service, three intelligence officials said.

By uploading a database of known people to Google Photos, Israeli officials could use the file photo search function of the service to identify people.

Google’s ability to match faces and identify people even when only a small part of their face is visible has been superior to other technologies, an official said.

The military continued to use Corsight because it was customizable, officials said.

A Google spokesperson said Google Photos is a free consumer product that “does not provide identities of unknown people in photos.”

The facial recognition program in Gaza has grown as Israel expands its military offensive there.

Israeli soldiers entering Gaza received cameras equipped with this technology.

Soldiers also set up checkpoints along main roads that Palestinians used to flee areas of intense fighting, with cameras scanning faces.

The objectives of the program were to search for Israeli hostages, as well as Hamas fighters who could be detained for interrogation, Israeli intelligence officials said.

The guidelines on who to detain were intentionally broad, one said.

Palestinian prisoners were asked to do so they will name the people from their communities who believed they were part of Hamas.

Israel would then seek out those people, hoping they would provide more information.

Abu Toha, the Palestinian poet, was named a member of Hamas by someone in the northern Gaza city of Beit Lahia, where he lived with his family, Israeli intelligence officials said.

Officials said there was no specific intelligence information attached to his file that explained a link to Hamas.

In an interview, Abu Toha, who wrote “Things You Can Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza,” said that it has no connection with Hamas.

When he and his family were arrested at a military checkpoint on November 19 as they tried to leave for Egypt, he said he did not show any identification when asked to leave by the crowd.

After being handcuffed and taken to sit under a tent with several dozen men, he heard someone say that the Israeli army had used “new technologies” on the group.

After 30 minutes, Israeli soldiers called him by his full legal name.

Abu Toha said he was beaten and interrogated in an Israeli detention center for two days before being returned to Gaza without explanation.

He wrote about his experience in The New Yorkerwhere he is a collaborator.

He attributed his release to a campaign led by journalists at the New Yorker and other publications.

After his release, Israeli soldiers told him that his interrogation had been a “mistake“, he has declared.

In a statement at the time, the Israeli military said Abu Toha was questioned due to “intelligence indicating a series of interactions between various civilians and terrorist organizations within the Gaza Strip.”

Abu Toha, who is now in Cairo with his family, said he was not aware of any facial recognition program in Gaza.

“I didn’t know Israel was capturing or recording my face,” he said.

But Israel “has been watching us from the sky for years with its drones. They watched us garden, go to school, and kiss our wives. “I feel like I’ve been watched for a long time.”

c.2024 The New York Times Company