Technology at the service of the search for hostages in Gaza: this is how the computer equipment works

Specialists from different IT sectors Israelis They are dedicated to searching for traces of the hostages held in the Gaza Strip after the attack by Hamaswith the help of artificial intelligence and innovative programs.

Teams of young people specialized in technology are directed from a “command room” located in Tel Aviv. The objective is to answer a series of questions: who are the hostages? Where was the last place they were seen? Were they injured? Is it possible to have information about its location?

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Israeli authorities have identified some 220 hostages, Israelis, binationals and foreigners. They are being held in Gaza, where they were forcibly taken by commandos of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas on October 7.

The technology sector is a pillar of the Israeli economy, benefiting from the expertise of companies specializing in cybersecurity, an activity that the world witnessed when the NSO company’s Pegasus spyware scandal broke.

Experts gathered at the offices of the Gitma BDO communication company pledged to use their knowledge in the identification and search for hostages, a few days after the Hamas attack, which killed more than 1,400 people, mostly civilians.

At first glance, the sight of modern-looking young technicians sipping coffee while typing on their laptops is not much different from startup facilities like those found in Silicon Valley or London. But the work here is unique.

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They browse social networks, they see images of the attack, of the kidnappings. They then analyze them with artificial intelligence and facial recognition programs, and compare them with photographs provided by the families of the hostages and the missing.

With the help of geolocation experts, programmers and Arabic speakers, this work made it possible to quickly provide the authorities with a precise cartography of who was kidnapped and the last time they were seen. The information is then transmitted to the cell created by the army for this hostage crisis.

Family pain

According to Refael Franco, Gitma BDO volunteers identified about sixty hostages. “We are in a civilian command room. Our main objective is to save lives,” explains the CEO of Code Azul, a crisis management company that helped create the Gitam BDO team.

On the screens, digital maps of the Gaza Strip are filled with colored markers that reference specific data about the hostages.

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“People here have left their jobs. CEOs, heads of IT departments, company founders, they have all put everything aside to come and help,” says Ido Brosh, 24, a programmer at Gitam BBDO and who claims to have experience in military intelligence.

“It is horrible that it is this event that has brought us together so much. But it is also the beauty of this country. We find ourselves in difficult times,” she says.

“We have to bring her back.”

Tsili Wenkert “lives a nightmare.” “It’s very hard for a grandmother my age to know that her grandson is captive,” says the 82-year-old woman, referring to 22-year-old Omer Weknert, one of the hundreds of young people who went to the Nova rave party in the desert. near the Gaza Strip.

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Wenkert knows that he is not among the 270 who were killed, according to Israeli authorities: he appears in the images published by Hamas on its Telegram channel. He was identified in his underwear and tied to the back of a truck full of armed men on the way back to Gaza.

At the moment, only four hostages, an American woman and her daughter and two octogenarian women, have been released after Egyptian-Qatari mediation. One of them, Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, explained that she had been held in a “tentacular network” of tunnels under Gaza.

In Gitma BDO, homework sometimes takes a personal turn. Content creator Omri Marcus shows a photo of his best friend’s cousin, which he set as his wallpaper: “She’s in Gaza now. “We have to bring her back.”

Source: Elcomercio

Callum

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