Israel is watching Gaza: a massive facial recognition program has been deployed
The images are compared to a database of Palestinians allegedly linked to Hamas.
According to The New York Times, Israeli military intelligence has introduced an experimental facial recognition program in Gaza, created by the Tel Aviv-based Corsight company, to identify people associated with Hamas.
After the October 7 attacks, Israeli army officers identified potential targets by reviewing security footage and videos that Hamas had uploaded to social media. Also, some Palestinian prisoners were involved in recognizing people.
Corsight used the photos to create a facial recognition tool and boasted that its technology could accurately identify a person even if less than 50% of their face was visible. To expand the database, the Israeli military set up checkpoints equipped with facial recognition cameras along the main roads used by Palestinians fleeing to the south.
At the same time, the military says that the tool was not always accurate – in cases where the footage was grainy or people’s faces were covered, it falsely identified them as being affiliated with Hamas. Similarly, the system flagged the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who in mid-November tried to leave Gaza for Egypt through one of Israel’s checkpoints. The man was reportedly held in a detention center, interrogated and beaten for two days before being released without explanation.
The Corsight technology was supplemented with free Google Photos, where the databases were uploaded and the photo search function was used to further identify people. One officer told the Times that Google’s tool worked better and detected the person even if only a small part of the face was visible.
In October, as Forbes reported, some hospitals in Israel began using Corsight technology to identify patients with “injuries” by comparing them to images sent by relatives.
In 2020, Corsight announced that its technology could identify faces in masks, and two years later, it announced that it was developing a tool that could “create a model of a person’s face based on their DNA.” Last year, Corsight partnered with the Metropolitan Police in Bogota, Colombia, to search for suspects in murders and thefts on public transportation.
