Hebron – Between the "flock of wolves", the "blue wolf" and then the "red wolf", the privacy of Palestinians falls prey to the Israeli occupation regimes and modern technologies, through hundreds of smart cameras installed to track them.
Palestinians in occupied Jerusalem and Hebron have become part of the geography targeted by the occupation's latest self-feeding tracking and identification technologies, which Amnesty International has criticised as "digital discrimination".
Israeli checkpoints photograph Palestinians and control their movement through facial recognition systems (Al Jazeera Net)
Practical application
To learn more about the practical application of Israeli techniques and the "Red Wolf", Al Jazeera Net takes you to the experience of the Palestinian sixty Mufid Al-Sharabati from the Old City of Hebron, which is one of the most restricted and controlled areas of the West Bank.
Al-Sharabati lives at the beginning of Shuhada Street, in a fully Israeli-controlled part of Hebron, dozens of meters away, separated by an Israeli military checkpoint from the PA-controlled part of the city.
The Sharabati family and some 170 other Palestinian families living around the road are forced to use the heavily fortified Israeli military checkpoint several times a day.
The checkpoint is crowded with dozens of cameras, while dozens more surround Sharabati's home and the homes of its Palestinian neighbors, all of which transmit information about them to the Israeli military.
What is the "red wolf" doing in Israel#هاشتاج pic.twitter.com/RCYDCscviA
— Hashtag (@ajmhashtag) May 4, 2023
Sharabati used to rely on soldiers knowing him or his ID card, but today he is being tracked by cameras as he approaches the checkpoint.
"As soon as the person crossing arrives, the last camera takes a picture of his face, and his entire database appears in front of the soldier," he explains. If the regime reports that he is not a resident of the area, he is forced to return. If he is one of them, he must undergo a second scanning "so that the whole body appears as a skeleton."
Sharabati points to a large number of cameras installed at the checkpoint from various sides and from the outside towards the neighborhoods under the control of the Palestinian Authority, and says that "all these cameras are filming us now."
Not only that, but Sharabati points to a remote-operated automatic rifle mounted between the cameras, used to fire bullets. "We are in a prison, many of our relatives cannot visit us because army statements say just by photographing their faces that they are not from the area, while settlers from everywhere come in their vehicles and enter freely," he said.
He points to the almost constant filming of houses and their surroundings with a small plane, as well as breaking into them, photographing their residents and collecting their data. "We are in a jungle of human, technical and racist wolves," he concludes.
Advanced Israeli surveillance cameras in the Old City of Hebron film the person and violate his privacy (Al Jazeera Net)
Invasion of privacy
Hisham Abdel Hafez, a field researcher at the Palestinian Al-Haq Foundation, pointed to the margin of error and risk of surveillance systems "which are self-fed by photographing faces."
He added that "there is a clear violation of privacy, the Palestinian is pursued; wherever he moves, he is filmed through modern cameras with high efficiency and great accuracy installed in high places in Hebron."
He said that these cameras are concentrated in the vicinity and inside Palestinian homes, although they are able to film people in all their details as if they were stripped of clothes, as previously stated by an army soldier who worked in monitoring these cameras.
The human rights researcher adds that this soldier – whose name was not mentioned – explicitly said that she refuses to be photographed with these cameras in public places, wondering: How if this is at home?
Abdel Hafez said that the Israeli "wolf cameras" are added to dozens of regular cameras, physical obstacles, manned checkpoints and military observation points that restrict, hinder and violate the privacy of the Palestinian citizen in an area not exceeding one square kilometer in the center of Hebron.
Dozens of Palestinian families in the Old City of Hebron face an Israeli technical system that violates their privacy (Al Jazeera Net)
Technology and apartheid
Amnesty International said in a report published on Tuesday that "the Israeli authorities are using facial recognition technology to entrench apartheid (...) It uses an experimental facial recognition system known as the Red Wolf to track Palestinians and automate harsh restrictions on their freedom of movement."
The report, Digital Apartheid, documents how the Red Wolf is part of an ever-growing surveillance network that entrenches the Israeli government's control over Palestinians and contributes to maintaining Israel's apartheid regime.
The Red Wolf system is deployed at military checkpoints in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, scanning Palestinians' faces and adding them to huge surveillance databases without their consent.
#إسرائيل/#الأراضي_الفلسطينية_المحتلة: In a new report, Digital Apartheid, we document how the Red Wolf facial recognition system is part of an ever-growing surveillance network that entrenches the Israeli government's control over Palestinians and contributes to the maintenance of #الأبارتهايد https://t.co/7iJvIJ3jMW
— Amnesty International (@AmnestyAR) May 2, 2023
The International Organization links the "Red Wolf" with two other surveillance systems run by the Israeli occupation army that were announced in previous years, namely the "Wolves Herd", which is a very extensive database containing all available information about Palestinians, and "Blue Wolf", an application that Israeli forces can access via smartphones and tablets, and immediately displays the information stored in the "Wolves Herd" database.
The international organization points to a dense network of CCTV cameras that support facial recognition technology "to keep Palestinians under semi-constant surveillance."
She expressed concern about the risk of Palestinians being tracked "by an algorithm or prevented from entering their neighborhoods, based on information stored in discriminatory surveillance databases."
The organization says the regime is focusing on Hebron and East Jerusalem "because they are the only cities in the occupied Palestinian territory within whose borders Israeli settlements are located."