By Sara Miller, NoCamels -
When the terror attacks on October 7 unfolded in southern Israel and it became clear that dozens of Israeli civilians – among them women, children, the elderly and the infirm – had been dragged into Gaza by Hamas, a group of high-tech experts offered their know-how to help identify them.
Working out who is captive and who was murdered in the attacks has been complicated by the desecration of the bodies of some of the victims, making identifying them a difficult and painstaking process.
Hundreds of people have yet to be accounted for, with hundreds of the more than 1,300 people who were murdered in the attacks still not formally identified.
The group of around 300 volunteers from multiple Israeli high-tech companies are working together in a “war room” in Tel Aviv, trawling through vast amounts of footage posted on social media from the terrible events of that day in order to identify the Israelis who were abducted to Gaza.
One of the main contributors to the initiative is Gal Vekselman, CTO of Elad Data, a Tel Aviv-headquartered software company.
“[On] that bloody day there were so many videos and pictures from the site itself, from Gaza and from Israel… pushing into multiple social media [platforms],” Vekselman tells NoCamels.
“The idea was to try and find clues and information about the kidnapped from social media.”
The group is using a combination of human eyes and facial recognition artificial intelligence to spot the Israelis in footage available – including videos made by Hamas terrorists as they were carrying out their abductions.
The volunteers are combing through the footage posted everywhere from Telegram and X (formerly Twitter) to Facebook and Instagram, he says.
As well as the human efforts, the group is using machine learning to train algorithms to try to spot those who were kidnapped.
Without revealing the actual processes involved due to the sensitivity of the operation, Vekselman says that there is a data scientist onsite who is running the machine learning algorithm for facial recognition. That person is working in conjunction with volunteers from around the world, who wrote specific code to help with this endeavor.
According to Vekselman, the idea for the operation came from the Brothers in Arms group – a network of Israel Defense Forces reservists whose protests against planned judicial reforms swiftly transformed into a massive effort to help the victims of the October 7 attacks and subsequent war.
They reached out to Vekselman, asking for his expertise, as well as others in Israel and around the world whom he declines to name without authorization.
“This is more than a technological effort,” he says. “This is really the apogee of Israel at its finest. You can see how Israelis are really working together, putting all egos aside.”
This includes, he says, any divisions over the controversial judicial reforms that triggered months of weekly protests. Everyone pulled together to create one coordinated effort.
“All of these people come here to this facility, working together just to contribute; learning new tools, new technologies, just to try to help these people,” he says.
“It’s just heartwarming to see all these people working together.”
The war room has a whiteboard that features the names of the people who are still unaccounted for, and makes a note on it every time someone is identified through these efforts. When a person is identified, it galvanizes the people in the room, he says.
But hunting for any shred of information about the abducted Israelis means scouring videos that often include graphic violence, and the project has psychologists onsite to help mitigate the emotional trauma of such scenes.
“They’re very sensitive about the mental health of the people participating in this endeavor,” Vekselman says.
There are other, similar efforts to identify the missing Israelis, he says, but this is the largest in scale.
The information that the volunteers find is passed onto the authorities, Vekselman explains, again declining to specify which channels they are working with, out of security considerations. He similarly declines to provide a number of people that they have been able to identify. Nor does the group have direct contact with the families of the missing.
“I think it’s important to the world to see that Israelis are here not to hate anyone,” Vekselman tells NoCamels.
“We are doing what needs to be done in order to make sure that everyone can live in peace and with love, and with a sense of humanity.“
