Israel’s ‘Gospel’ Targeting System Proves Lethal to Gaza Civilians, Too
Loosened standards for IDF’s AI-assisted platform blamed for mounting casualties
UPDATED
Earlier this month, following years of precise Israeli air-and-drone strikes that had killed dozens of senior Iran-backed militia commanders across Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, Tehran’s most powerful proxy force, sounded a belated public alarm about the artificial intelligence tools that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) uses to target its foes.
“Essentially, Nasrallah’s counter-intelligence deputies told him, ‘Boss, you’ve got to tell everybody that the Israelis are cleaning our clocks,’” said a former CIA counter-terrorism officer who is deeply knowledgeable about Israel’s spyware, all boosted by a muscular application of artificial intelligence, or AI.
This former official, who served in Israel and asked to remain anonymous in exchange for discussing sensitive intelligence matters, was referring to Nasrallah’s lengthy Feb. 13 speech, which was broadcast over Iran’s Press TV network. The Hezbollah chief warned his audience that Israeli intelligence had hacked into the data bases of Arab telecommunications firms across the region and vacuumed up millions of telephone numbers, as well as the names and IP addresses of their subscribers. Armed with that information, Nasrallah said the Israelis could take remote control of their targets’ cell phones and computers, giving them access to their emails, texts, photos and passwords. Without mentioning it by name, the former official said, Nasrallah was clearly referring to Pegasus, the now-commercial spyware developed by veterans of Unit 8200, the IDF’s enterprising signal’s intelligence branch.
Nasrallah also warned that Israel’s cyber spies could covertly activate a cell phone’s microphone and camera, allowing them to record a target’s conversations and movements. And with a sophisticated AI targeting platform that quickly sifts through vast amounts of that information as well as GPS coordinates, Wi-Fi signal strengths, and cell tower data, IDF officers could also quickly pinpoint a human target’s location, right down to a specific room in a building or the seat of a vehicle, enabling, as the late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon once put it, “the separation of a terrorist’s head from his shoulders.”
In addition, Nasrallah warned that Israeli intelligence had also hacked into the myriad unsecured, Internet-linked CCTV and security cameras that operate across the Middle East, allowing both IDFmilitary intelligence and the Mossad to keep their crosshairs fixed on the comings and goings of targeted militants.
“When the Israelis strike a target, many people search for their spies and agents,” Nasrallah said. “But for these operations, they don’t need spies. . .Your mobile phone is the spy. And it’s not just any spy. It’s a lethal spy.”
Nasrallah ended his admonition with an urgent plea to his fellow Shiite militants to turn off their cell phones and lock them away in metal boxes—presumably to prevent Israel from using Pegasus to switch them back on—and also, while they’re at it, to disconnect their CCTV and security cameras from the Internet—all “for the sake of security and the perseverance of this battle” against Israel.
Nasrallah’s speech is significant in that it marks the first public acknowledgement of Israel’s technological prowess by a regional adversary, as well as an apparent effort by Hezbollah and its Iranian backers to learn as much as possible about the limitations of Israel’s spy technology on the battlefield so it can come up with ways to thwart it, the former CIA official explained.
“This is an extraordinary cybersecurity warning, based on deep, inside knowledge,” the former CIA official said of Nasrallah’s speech. “It’s absolutely mind-bending. I’ve never heard anything like that.”
To devastating effect, Hamas already had learned the counter-espionage lessons that Nasrallah is trying to teach. Indeed, despite the Israeli intelligence community’s access to all of Gaza’s cell phones, internet communications and devices connected to those networks, Israel still failed to deter Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, which killed some 1,200 Israelis, took 253 hostages and set the stage for Israel’s ferocious response. Nor had the IDF achieved its strategic goal of destroying Hamas and eliminating its top Gaza leaders, despite four and half months of around-the-clock Israeli airstrikes, artillery barrages and ground operations that have leveled or severely torn up most of the Gaza Strip’s buildings and infrastructure, killed what the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry says are more than 29,000 Palestinians and displaced 85 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents.
“In sum, Israel’s terrorist screening of Gaza has failed, and failed so gravely that the national security of Israel has been fundamentally eroded, leaving its glaring limitations exposed to all adversaries,” said the former CIA official. Iranian military and intelligence organizations and Arab proxies like Hezbollah “are now using Gaza as a lab to assess these Israeli vulnerabilities and gathering intelligence on how to counter Israel’s technological advantages,” he said, “through denial-and-deception, counterintelligence and information-assurance capabilities.”
Inside Israel, polls show the failure of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to prevent the Oct. 7 terror attack also has deeply eroded the public’s confidence in his government’s ability to protect them. With his popularity plummeting, Netanyahu has promised “total victory” in his current war against Hamas to mitigate the inevitable official judgment of his performance that looms over his political future once the war is over.
The ferocity of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza also underscores the determination of the IDF, whose slow response to the Oct. 7 attack tarnished its reputation, to reestablish its deterrent power in the eyes of Israel’s enemies.
In this climate, both Netanyahu’s far-right government and the IDF are no longer willing to be deterred by Hamas’ strategy of hiding among Gaza’s civilian population. Indeed, as early as November, Netanyahu made clear Israel would target Hamas leaders “wherever they are.”
Now, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepares to invade Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city and Hamas’ last major stronghold, new details have emerged that help explain the glaring discrepancy between the IDF’s insistence that it takes steps to minimize collateral damage, on one hand, and the the high Palestinian civilian death toll and the widespread destruction in Gaza, on the other.
More Targets, Fewer Rules
What has made the war in Gaza so much deadlier and destructive than Israel’s previous operations against Hamas is the combination of its use of artificial intelligence, which generates more targets than ever before, and the IDF’s relaxation of rules limiting strikes against non-military targets and civilians, according to little noticed statements by current and former IDF officials, as well as an investigation by the Israeli-Palestinian +972 online magazine and the Hebrew-language news site, Sikha Mekomit, or Local Call.
According to the IDF’s official website (which was down on Saturday), the military’s intelligence branch created its AI-assisted targeting directorate in 2019. The website disclosed it employs an AI-assisted target creation platform called Habsora in Hebrew (the Gospel, in English) in the IDF’s war against Hamas “to produce targets at a fast pace.”
In an interview published a few months before the Gaza war, retired Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, who stepped down as the IDF’s chief of staff last year, described the AI-assisted targeting platform as “a machine that processes vast amounts of data faster and more effectively than any human, translating them into actionable targets.”
To illustrate the impact that the system has had on targeting, Kochavi said that before the platform was created, the IDF’s intelligence branch would produce 50 targets in Gaza in a year. “Once this machine was activated, it generated 100 new targets every day,” Kochavi said.
The types of data that are fed into Israel’s targeting platform are classified, but the former CIA counterterrorism official and other experts on AI-assisted targeting systems told SpyTalk that such platforms typically analyze large sets of information from multiple sources. Those sources include communications intercepts; surveillance imagery from drones, satellites and aircraft ; cell phone call detail records; data from clandestine picocells (a small cellular base station typically covering a small area like a shopping mall); Pegasus data from targeted cell phones tablets and laptops; data from the hacked CCTV and security cameras; and human intelligence reports from Palestinian informers in Gaza.
The IDF website says that “through the rapid and automatic extraction of intelligence,” the Habsora/Gospel platform produces targeting recommendations “with the goal of a complete match between the recommendation of the machine and the identification carried out by a person.” The website also quotes a senior Israeli official as saying the targeting directorate “produces precise attacks on infrastructure associated with Hamas while inflicting great damage to the enemy and minimal harm to those not involved.”
But the former CIA official questions such claims.
“In war, AI systems require the ingestion of quality inputs of intelligence at a massive level,” he said. “This is particularly true for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems input. But that’s not effective when you have little current intel on the enemy, who is hiding underground and who doesn’t maneuver as armies do, but rather as insurgents amidst a civilian population.”
He added: “The U.S. learned that in Afghanistan despite our massive tech advantage across billions of dollars worth of intel platforms.”
The same could be said of the advanced technology the U.S. employed in Vietnam during the war there. The 20,000 electronic sensors the Air Force dropped on the Ho Chi Minh trail beginning in 1967 failed to thwart the movement of North Vietnamese troops and supplies into the south. The CIA’s Phoenix counterinsurgency program, which used computerized files to eliminate Viet Cong operatives, was considered a success—it "neutralized" 81,740 people suspected of VC membership, of whom 26,369 were killed—but was shut down following persistent reports of corruption, communist infiltration and the torture and murder of suspects and innocent civilians alike.
As for the current situation in Gaza, another former CIA operative who served in the region told SpyTalk that in the heat of battle, the speed at which the Gospel system generates targets is “beyond the capacity of humans to react to changes of erroneous data.”
Velocity Problems
“The system may operate at such a high speed that it would be difficult to validate new targets or revalidate old targets with regard to recent changes in the surrounding area and civilian population,” said this former intelligence operative, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. “In other words, tempo may overtake any safeguards to prevent collateral damage.
“Of course,” he added, “this presupposes the Israeli government wants to prevent collateral damage. The reaction to the events of October 7 have brought into question what the Netanyahu government wishes to accomplish and what safeguards may still exist.”
The +972/Local Call investigation appears to address that question. The results of its probe appeared in November, but the thousands of Israeli air, naval and artillery strikes since then—and the mushrooming civilian death toll—point to the IDF’s continued unrestrained use of the targeting system, both former CIA officials said. Moreover, with Hamas’ retreat into its extensive tunnel complex beneath Gaza following the Oct. 7 attack complicating Netanyahu’s pledge to destroy the group once and for all, the investigation found that the IDF also loosened its rules of engagement in this war.
The probe, based on interviews with seven members of Israel’s intelligence community, including several assigned to the AI-assisted targeting directorate as well as air force personnel, learned that that IDF, in its determination to kill as many Hamas operatives as possible, expanded its target list to include low-level Hamas operatives as well as senior commanders. The IDF also broadened authorizations to hit non-military targets and relaxed its rules on limiting civilian casualties, the investigation found.
These changes, the investigation learned, led to the IDF’s approval of Israeli air strikes targeting single Hamas members living in high-rise apartment buildings, even though it was known that such attacks would bring down entire structures, killing or wounding hundreds of Palestinian civilians.
In addition, some non-military targets, such as private residences, public buildings, roads, bridges and high-rise apartment blocks, were deemed “power targets” and bombed despite no evidence of any Hamas affiliation, the investigation found. Israeli intelligence officers defined power targets as structures whose destruction would shock Palestinian civilians and turn them against Hamas.
“All of this is happening contrary to the protocol [on collateral damage] used by the IDF in the past,” one of the sources told the +972/Local Call journalists conducting the investigation. “There is a feeling that senior officials in the army are aware of their failure on October 7 and are busy with the question of how to provide the Israeli public with an image [of victory] that will salvage their reputation.”
The Israeli embassy in Washington did not respond to SpyTalk’s requests for comment.
The IDF claims its forces have killed an estimated 12,000 Hamas fighters so far, a number that includes only a handful of known senior Hamas commanders and none of its top leaders, such as Yahyah Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, who remain at large. Its spokespeople still claim Israeli forces scrupulously follow international rules of war regarding collateral damage.
“There is less and less connection between what the Israeli government says regarding the war and what its army is doing,” Israeli journalist Noga Tarnopolsky told a recent symposium on the Gaza war.
While IDF commanders await an order from Netanyahu to attack Rafah with ground forces, Israeli warplanes have been busy striking Habsora/Gospel-identified targets in the city, where an estimated 1.3 million displaced Palestinian civilians have been sheltering. More than 100 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have died in those airstrikes, the Gaza Health Ministry said Friday.
“It’s funny that they use that word, Gospel,” a top executive for a Virginia-based AI firm that designs targeting platforms for the Pentagon told SpyTalk on condition of anonymity.
“It’s a very dangerous term because it signifies in its subtext that these systems are flawless, and that subtext has influence. It’s a way to shape the mind.”
“You still need humans to provide something that isn’t built into AI systems,” he added, “which is ethics.”
This story has been updated with additional political context on Israeli strategy.
Why is there absolutely zero mention here of the fact that Hamas intentionally use Palestinian civilians to shield themselves. Apparently this is consider totally acceptable, even though this hugely increases the likelihood of civilian casualties. Is Israel supposed to simply give up and allow Hamas to operate because it cannot defeat them by harming civilians. That seems to me to be the exact opposite of 'intelligence', which is supposedly what this blog is meant to cover.
Israel’s AI need not be exact, just be effective in locating and destroying targets at lowest Israeli personnel, asset, and fiscal costs possible. Civilian casualties are a result of all wars, particularly asymmetrical as fought by Hamas and its Iranian proxy allies. Upwards of 200,000 civilians died in Berlin and the World cheered victory, and still do! Palestinians will historically be irrelevant.
The consequences can be the Palestinian extinction unless Hamas unconditionally surrenders to Israel.
If the 2.32 million Gazans and 3.25 million other "Palestinians" (most all Egyptians and Jordanians, born since 1948 as self-imposed "refugee status") perished tomorrow, none of the Islamic nations worldwide would give a damn.
Historically, thousands of perished tribes and civilizations have come and gone, as the "Palestinians" will simply be tossed upon the ash heap of history, totally forgotten.😴