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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/27/technology/israel-facial-recognition-gaza.html?unlocked_article_code=1.f00.mzxu.bq3hVn9-NDYA&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&ugrp=c">nytimes.com</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Israel Deploys Expansive Facial Recognition Program in Gaza</h1>
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<div class="gmail-css-103l8m3"><div class="gmail-css-1u5onbp epjyd6m1"><div class="gmail-css-233int epjyd6m0"><p class="gmail-css-4anu6l e1jsehar1"><span class="gmail-byline-prefix">By </span><span class="gmail-css-1baulvz gmail-last-byline"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/sheera-frenkel" class="gmail-css-n8ff4n e1jsehar0">Sheera Frenkel</a> </span>Reporting from Tel Aviv</p></div></div></div><div><div class="gmail-css-3xqm5e">March 27, 2024</div></div>
</div></div><div class="gmail-content"><div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div id="gmail-site-content"><br><p id="gmail-article-summary">The
experimental effort, which has not been disclosed, is being used to
conduct mass surveillance of Palestinians in Gaza, according to military
officials and others.</p><div><div><span><img alt="" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/03/25/multimedia/00ISRAEL-FACE-1-01-wlcp/00ISRAEL-FACE-1-01-wlcp-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale" width="395" height="263" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;"></span></div><span>Displaced
Palestinians arriving at a refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip this
month. Israel has deployed facial recognition technology at checkpoints
along roads in Gaza, according to military officials.</span><span><span>Credit...</span><span><span aria-hidden="false">Agence France-Presse — Getty Images</span></span></span></div><div><p>Within minutes of walking through an Israeli military checkpoint along Gaza’s central highway on Nov. 19, the Palestinian poet <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/world/middleeast/abu-toha-palestinian-poet-gaza.html" title="">Mosab Abu Toha</a> was asked to step out of the crowd. He put down his 3-year-old son, whom he was carrying, and sat in front of a military jeep.</p><p>Half an hour later, Mr. Abu Toha heard his name called. Then he was blindfolded and led away for interrogation.</p><p>“I
had no idea what was happening or how they could suddenly know my full
legal name,” said the 31-year-old, who added that he had no ties to the
militant group Hamas and had been trying to leave Gaza for Egypt.</p><p>It
turned out Mr. Abu Toha had walked into the range of cameras embedded
with facial recognition technology, according to three Israeli
intelligence officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. After
his face was scanned and he was identified, an artificial intelligence
program found that the poet was on an Israeli list of wanted persons,
they said.</p></div><div><p>Mr. Abu Toha is one of hundreds of
Palestinians who have been picked out by a previously undisclosed
Israeli facial recognition program that was started in Gaza late last
year. The expansive and experimental effort is being used to conduct
mass surveillance there, collecting and cataloging the faces of
Palestinians without their knowledge or consent, according to Israeli
intelligence officers, military officials and soldiers.</p><p>The technology was initially used in Gaza to search for Israelis who were taken hostage by Hamas during the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/23/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-attack-video.html" title="">Oct. 7 cross-border raids</a>, the intelligence officials said. After Israel embarked on a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/28/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-ground-invasion.html" title="">ground offensive</a>
in Gaza, it increasingly turned to the program to root out anyone with
ties to Hamas or other militant groups. At times, the technology wrongly
flagged civilians as wanted Hamas militants, one officer said.</p><p>The facial recognition program, which is run by Israel’s military intelligence unit, including the cyber-intelligence division <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/12/world/middleeast/13Israeldoc.html" title="">Unit 8200</a>,
relies on technology from Corsight, a private Israeli company, four
intelligence officers said. It also uses Google Photos, they said.
Combined, the technologies enable Israel to pick faces out of crowds and
grainy drone footage.</p><p>Three of the people with knowledge of the
program said they were speaking out because of concerns that it was a
misuse of time and resources by Israel.</p></div><div><div><p><span>Image</span></p><div><span><img alt="" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/03/25/multimedia/00ISRAEL-FACES-hebron-gfjh/00ISRAEL-FACES-hebron-gfjh-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" width="395" height="253" style="margin-right: 25px;"></span></div></div><span>An Israeli soldier stands under a surveillance camera at a checkpoint in Hebron, the West Bank, in 2021.</span><span><span>Credit...</span><span><span aria-hidden="false">Hazem Bader/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images</span></span></span></div><div><p>An
Israeli army spokesman declined to comment on activity in Gaza, but
said the military “carries out necessary security and intelligence
operations, while making significant efforts to minimize harm to the
uninvolved population.” He added, “Naturally, we cannot refer to
operational and intelligence capabilities in this context.”</p></div><div><p>Facial recognition technology has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/30/technology/police-surveillance-tech-dubai.html" title="">spread across the globe</a> in recent years, fueled by increasingly sophisticated A.I. systems. While some countries use the technology to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/18/travel/facial-recognition-airports-biometrics.html" title="">make air travel easier</a>, China and Russia have deployed the technology against <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/technology/china-surveillance-artificial-intelligence-racial-profiling.html" title="">minority groups</a> and to <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/russia-protests-tech/fears-raised-over-facial-recognition-use-at-moscow-protests-idUSL8N2KA54T" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">suppress dissent</a>. Israel’s use of facial recognition in Gaza stands out as an application of the technology in a war.</p><div id="gmail-NYT_MAIN_CONTENT_1_REGION"><p><span>Sign up for the Israel-Hamas War Briefing. </span><span>The latest news about the conflict. </span></p></div><p>Matt
Mahmoudi, a researcher with Amnesty International, said Israel’s use of
facial recognition was a concern because it could lead to “a complete
dehumanization of Palestinians” where they were not seen as individuals.
He added that Israeli soldiers were unlikely to question the technology
when it identified a person as being part of a militant group, even
though the technology makes mistakes.</p><p>Israel previously used facial recognition in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, according to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/technology/israel-palestine-facial-recognition.html" title="">an Amnesty report last year</a>, but the effort in Gaza goes further.</p><p>In
the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israelis have a homegrown facial
recognition system called Blue Wolf, according to the Amnesty report. At
checkpoints in West Bank cities such as Hebron, Palestinians are
scanned by high-resolution cameras before being permitted to pass.
Soldiers also use smartphone apps to scan the faces of Palestinians and
add them to a database, the report said.</p></div><div><p>In Gaza, which
Israel withdrew from in 2005, no facial recognition technology was
present. Surveillance of Hamas in Gaza was instead conducted by tapping
phone lines, interrogating Palestinian prisoners, harvesting drone
footage, getting access to private social media accounts and hacking
into telecommunications systems, Israeli intelligence officers said.</p><p>After
Oct. 7, Israeli intelligence officers in Unit 8200 turned to that
surveillance for information on the Hamas gunmen who breached Israel’s
borders. The unit also combed through footage of the attacks from
security cameras, as well as videos uploaded by Hamas on social media,
one officer said. He said the unit had been told to create a “hit list”
of Hamas members who participated in the attack.</p><p>Corsight was then brought in to create a facial recognition program in Gaza, three Israeli intelligence officers said.</p><p>The
company, with headquarters in Tel Aviv, says on its website that its
technology requires less than 50 percent of a face to be visible for
accurate recognition. Robert Watts, Corsight’s president, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/posts/robert-watts-b661514b_please-join-us-next-week-in-farnborough-on-activity-7171096975189200896-GDHw?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">posted</a>
this month on LinkedIn that the facial recognition technology could
work with “extreme angles, (even from drones,) darkness, poor quality.”</p><p>Corsight declined to comment.</p><p>Unit
8200 personnel soon found that Corsight’s technology struggled if
footage was grainy and faces were obscured, one officer said. When the
military tried identifying the bodies of Israelis killed on Oct. 7, the
technology could not always work for people whose faces had been
injured. There were also false positives, or cases when a person was
mistakenly identified as being connected to Hamas, the officer said.</p></div><div><p>To
supplement Corsight’s technology, Israeli officers used Google Photos,
the free photo sharing and storage service from Google, three
intelligence officers said. By uploading a database of known persons to
Google Photos, Israeli officers could use the service’s photo search
function to identify people.</p><p>Google’s ability to match faces and
identify people even with only a small portion of their face visible was
superior to other technology, one officer said. The military continued
to use Corsight because it was customizable, the officers said.</p><p>A
Google spokesman said Google Photos was a free consumer product that
“does not provide identities for unknown people in photographs.”</p><p>The
facial recognition program in Gaza grew as Israel expanded its military
offensive there. Israeli soldiers entering Gaza were given cameras
equipped with the technology. Soldiers also set up checkpoints along
major roads that Palestinians were using to flee areas of heavy
fighting, with cameras that scanned faces.</p><p>The program’s goals
were to search for Israeli hostages, as well as Hamas fighters who could
be detained for questioning, the Israeli intelligence officers said.</p></div><div><p>The
guidelines of whom to stop were intentionally broad, one said.
Palestinian prisoners were asked to name people from their communities
who they believed were part of Hamas. Israel would then search for those
people, hoping they would yield more intelligence.</p><p>Mr. Abu Toha,
the Palestinian poet, was named as a Hamas operative by someone in the
northern Gaza town of Beit Lahia, where he lived with his family, the
Israeli intelligence officers said. The officers said there was no
specific intelligence attached to his file explaining a connection to
Hamas. </p></div><div><div><p><span>Image</span></p><div><span><img alt="" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/03/25/multimedia/00ISRAEL-FACE-1-03-wlcp/00ISRAEL-FACE-1-03-wlcp-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" width="395" height="296" style="margin-right: 25px;"></span></div></div><span>Mosab Abu Toha, the Palestinian poet, and his family. He said he was not aware of any facial recognition program in Gaza.</span><span><span>Credit...</span><span><span aria-hidden="false">via Mosab Abu Toha</span></span></span></div><div><p>In an interview, Mr. Abu Toha, who wrote “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems From Gaza,”<em> s</em>aid he has no connection to Hamas.</p><p>When
he and his family were stopped at the military checkpoint on Nov. 19 as
they tried leaving for Egypt, he said he had not shown any
identification when he was asked to step out of the crowd.</p></div><div><p>After
he was handcuffed and taken to sit under a tent with several dozen men,
he heard someone say the Israeli army had used a “new technology” on
the group. Within 30 minutes, Israeli soldiers called him by his full
legal name.</p><p>Mr. Abu Toha said he was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-palestinian-detainees.html?smid=tw-share" title="">beaten and interrogated</a> in an Israeli detention center for two days before being returned to Gaza with no explanation. He wrote <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/01/a-palestinian-poets-perilous-journey-out-of-gaza" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">about his experience</a>
in The New Yorker, where he is a contributor. He credited his release
to a campaign led by journalists at The New Yorker and other
publications.</p><p>Upon his release, Israeli soldiers told him his interrogation had been a “mistake,” he said.</p><p>In
a statement at the time, the Israeli military said Mr. Abu Toha was
taken for questioning because of “intelligence indicating a number of
interactions between several civilians and terror organizations inside
the Gaza Strip.”</p><p>Mr. Abu Toha, who is now in Cairo with his family, said he was not aware of any facial recognition program in Gaza.</p><p>“I
did not know Israel was capturing or recording my face,” he said. But
Israel has “been watching us for years from the sky with their drones.
They have been watching us gardening and going to schools and kissing
our wives. I feel like I have been watched for so long.”</p><p>Kashmir Hill contributed reporting.</p></div><div><div><p><span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/sheera-frenkel">Sheera Frenkel</a></span>
is a reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering the ways
technology impacts everyday lives with a focus on social media
companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube,
Telegram and WhatsApp.<span> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/sheera-frenkel">More about Sheera Frenkel</a></span></p></div><p>A version of this article appears in print on <span datetime="2024-03-28T04:00:00.000Z">March 28, 2024</span>, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Israelis Deploy High-Tech Tool To Surveil Gaza<span>. <a href="https://www.parsintl.com/publication/the-new-york-times/">Order Reprints</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper">Today’s Paper</a> | <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY">Subscribe</a></span></p></div><br></div></div></div>
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