The Israeli "Breaking the Silence" movement revealed a digital tracking campaign that the Israeli occupation army called the "Blue Wolf" aimed at creating a digital database for Palestinians in the West Bank.
The movement confirmed in a report published by The Washington Post on Monday, quoting the testimonies of a number of former soldiers in the Israeli occupation army, that their mission was to carry out an operation called “close tracking” aimed at photographing the faces of Palestinians using a special application on the cell phone during their routine tours in the occupied West Bank. The West Bank and at the military checkpoints deployed there.
According to the same source, the application includes the captured images to a database that provides the occupation soldiers with information about the Palestinian in the photo from a distance, even before he presents his identification card to them.
The Israeli occupation seeks to build a digital database for the Palestinians to facilitate the process of tracking them and arresting wanted persons (Reuters)
The former soldiers indicated that there is a race within the army units to photograph Palestinians in exchange for prizes to encourage them to photograph as many Palestinians as possible during their missions.
Breaking the Silence, established in 2004, is an Israeli NGO concerned with human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, which collects testimonies from soldiers who served in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.
anger and disdain
Palestinian and Western activists on social media expressed their anger and disapproval of the behavior of the occupation authorities, describing it as inhuman and illegal.
Activist Samar Jarrah saw in a post on Twitter that the pictures that the Israeli occupation soldiers race to capture of the faces of the Palestinians facilitate the classification of people and their arrest through cameras planted everywhere.
Units of the colonial racist army compete among themselves for who can take the largest number of pictures of the faces of children, men and elderly people in occupied Palestine.
The images are used in a program called "The Blue Fox" to facilitate the classification of people and their arrest through surveillance cameras planted everywhere https://t.co/rU4cD7wxfs
— Samar D Jarrah (@SamarDJarrah) November 8, 2021
For his part, Khaled Al-Jabari commented in a tweet that the Israeli occupation uses Palestinian society as a field of experiment with the blessing and support of Western countries and the occupation’s aides without restrictions and while condoning all abuses and violations.
In turn, Michael Page, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch, considered that the Washington Post report "describes a terrifying system of Israeli surveillance of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank through the use of facial recognition technologies on a large scale."
.@lizzadwoskin describes a terrifying system of Israeli surveillance over Palestinians in the occupied West Bank that includes widespread deployment of facial recognition technologies.
https://t.co/1P6YgccLWa pic.twitter.com/pT2HgNqqG6
— Michael Page (@MichaelARPage) November 8, 2021
The report indicated that the Israeli occupation army installed face scanning cameras in the city of Hebron, and established a wide network of cameras that broadcast in a closed circuit called “Hebron Smart City”, with the aim of monitoring the city’s residents, and they can be used to find out what is happening even inside private homes. , according to one of the former occupation soldiers.