Within minutes of passing through an Israeli military checkpoint along Gaza’s central highway on November 19, Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha was asked to step out of the gang. He put down the 3-year-old son he was carrying and sat down in front of the military jeep.
Half an hour later, Mr. Abu Toha heard his name being called. He was then blindfolded and brought for interrogation.
“I had no idea what was happening and how they could suddenly know my full name,” the 31-year-old said, adding that he had no links with the Hamas militant group and was trying to depart Gaza for Egypt.
According to 3 Israeli intelligence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, it turned out that Abu Toha had entered the realm of cameras equipped with facial recognition technology. After scanning his face and identifying him, the factitious intelligence program determined that the poet was on Israel’s wanted list, he added.
Abu Toha is one in all a whole bunch of Palestinians chosen as a part of a previously undisclosed Israeli facial recognition program that began in Gaza late last 12 months. According to Israeli intelligence officers, military officials and soldiers, an expansive and experimental effort is getting used to conduct mass surveillance there, collecting and cataloging the faces of Palestinians without their knowledge or consent.
The technology was initially used in Gaza to look for Israelis who were taken hostage by Hamas during cross-border raids on Oct. 7, intelligence officials said. After Israel launched its ground offensive in Gaza, it increasingly turned to a program of rooting out anyone with ties to Hamas or other militant groups. At times, the technology incorrectly marked civilians as wanted Hamas fighters, one official said.
The facial recognition program run by Israel’s military intelligence unit, including Cyber Intelligence Unit 8200, relies on technology from private Israeli company Corsight, 4 intelligence officials said. They claim it also uses Google Photos. Together, these technologies allow Israel to pick faces from crowds and grainy drone footage.
Three people conversant in the program said they were speaking out due to concerns that it was a misuse of Israel’s time and resources.
An Israeli military spokesman declined to comment on the actions in Gaza, but said the military was “conducting necessary security and intelligence operations while making significant efforts to minimize harm to the uninvolved population.” He added: “Of course we cannot refer to operational and intelligence capabilities in this context.”
In recent years, facial recognition technology has spread internationally, driven by increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence systems. While some countries are using this technology to make air travel easier, China and Russia have deployed this technology against minority groups suppress dissent. Israel’s use of facial recognition in Gaza stands out as a wartime use of the technology.
Matt Mahmoudi, a researcher at Amnesty International, said Israel’s use of facial recognition raises concerns since it may lead to a “total dehumanization of Palestinians” where they are going to now not be seen as individuals. He added that Israeli soldiers were unlikely to query the technology when it identified a person as a part of a militant group, regardless that the technology makes mistakes.
Israel has already used facial recognition in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but efforts in Gaza are going further, in response to last 12 months’s Amnesty International report.
According to a report by Amnesty International, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israelis have their very own facial recognition system called Blue Wolf. At checkpoints in West Bank cities equivalent to Hebron, Palestinians are scanned with high-resolution cameras before being allowed to pass. The report shows that soldiers also use smartphone applications to scan the faces of Palestinians and add them to a database.
No facial recognition technology existed in Gaza, from which Israel withdrew in 2005. Instead, Hamas surveillance in Gaza involved tapping phone lines, interrogating Palestinian prisoners, collecting drone footage, accessing private social media accounts and hacking into telecommunications systems, Israeli intelligence officials said.
After October 7, Israeli intelligence officers in Unit 8200 turned to this surveillance to acquire details about Hamas bandits who had violated Israel’s borders. The unit also searched security camera footage of the attacks, in addition to videos posted by Hamas on social media, one in all the officers said. He said the unit was ordered to create a “hit list” of Hamas members who participated in the attack.
Corsight was then brought in to create a facial recognition program in Gaza, three Israeli intelligence officers said.
The Tel Aviv-based company says on its website that its technology requires lower than 50 percent of the face to be visible for accurate recognition. Robert Watts, president of Corsight, sent this month on LinkedIn that facial recognition technology can work with “extreme angles (even from drones) in the dark and low quality.”
Corsight declined to comment.
One officer said Unit 8200 personnel soon discovered that Corsight’s technology had problems if the footage was grainy and faces were obscured. As the military tried to discover the bodies of Israelis killed on October 7, the technology couldn’t all the time work for those whose faces were injured. The officer said there have also been false positives or cases where a person was wrongly identified as related to Hamas.
Three intelligence officers say Israeli officials used Google Photos, Google’s free photo-sharing and storage service, to enhance Corsight’s technology. By uploading a database of famous people to Google Photos, Israeli officials could use the location’s photo search function to discover people.
One officer said Google’s ability to match faces and discover people even when only a small a part of their face is visible is superior to other technologies. Officers said the military continued to make use of the Corsight since it might be customized.
A Google spokesperson said Google Photos is a free consumer product that “does not share the identity of unknown people in photos.”
Gaza’s facial recognition program expanded as Israel expanded its military offensive there. Israeli soldiers entering Gaza received cameras equipped with this technology. Soldiers also arrange checkpoints along fundamental roads where Palestinians fled areas of heavy fighting, with cameras scanning faces.
The aim of the program was to look for Israeli hostages in addition to Hamas fighters who might be detained for interrogation, Israeli intelligence officials said.
One person said the rules on who ought to be detained were intentionally broad. Palestinian prisoners were asked to supply the names of individuals in their communities who they believed were members of Hamas. Israel will then seek for these people, hoping to acquire more intelligence.
Israeli intelligence officials said Palestinian poet Abu Toha was named as a Hamas agent by someone in the northern Gaza city of Beit Lahia, where he lived together with his family. Officials said his file didn’t include any specific information explaining his ties to Hamas.
In an interview, Mr. Abu Toha, who wrote “Things You Can Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza,” Said, has no links with Hamas.
When he and his family were stopped at a military checkpoint on November 19 as they tried to depart for Egypt, he said he didn’t show any identification when asked to depart the gang.
After he was handcuffed and brought to a tent with several dozen men, he heard someone say that the Israeli army had used “new technology” on the group. Within half-hour, Israeli soldiers began calling him by his full name.
Mr. Abu Toha said he was beaten and interrogated in an Israeli prison for 2 days before being returned to Gaza without explanation. He wrote about his experience in “The New Yorker”, where he is a contributor. He attributed his release to a campaign by journalists from The New Yorker and other publications.
After his release, Israeli soldiers told him that the interrogation had been a “mistake”.
In a statement on the time, the Israeli military said Abu Toha was taken for questioning on account of “intelligence indicating a number of interactions between several civilians and terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip.”
Mr. Abu Toha, who is currently in Cairo together with his family, said he was not aware of any facial recognition program in Gaza.
“I didn’t know Israel was recording or recording my face,” he said. But Israel “has been watching us for years from the sky with its drones. They watched us work in the garden, go to school, and kiss our wives. I feel like I’ve been watched for so long.”
Cashmere Hill reporting contributed.
