Inside Israel’s AI targeting system: How data from a phone becomes a death sentence
Ahmad Turmus got in his car, started it up, and drove off. Less than 30 seconds later came the shriek of the two missiles that lanced through his car.
The buzz of the Israeli drone was constant that day, and every time Ahmad Turmus looked up, it seemed to be circling over him, like an all-too-patient bird of prey.
So when the phone rang as he was visiting family one Monday afternoon in February, Turmus wasn’t too surprised that the person speaking accented Arabic was an Israeli military officer.
What surprised him was the question.
“Ahmad, do you want to die with those around you or alone?”
According to family members interviewed, Turmus answered with one word before hanging up: “Alone.”
An Israeli air force drone patrols the skies over the southern Gaza Strip on October 30, 2011.
The targeting of Turmus, which Israel acknowledged, demonstrates how, time and again, its military has mastered an intelligence war for which Hezbollah appears to have no answer.
Ever since the spectacular pager attacks of September 2024, when Israel remotely detonated explosives hidden in pagers carried by Hezbollah members, foot soldiers, support personnel, field commanders, chiefs of staff, and even a revered secretary general have been felled by a targeting system powered by artificial intelligence.
IDF AI system permits near-omniscient Hezbollah tracking
The system, which fuses data from smartphones, security and traffic cameras, Wi-Fi signals, drones, government databases, and social media, has granted Israel what seems an almost omniscient ability to track Hezbollah cadres’ every movement.
Turmus, 62, was serving as a liaison between Hezbollah and residents of Talloussah, a small village less than three miles from the Israeli border, which had turned into a battlefield during Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah in 2024.
Throughout the 15-month ceasefire that followed, he spent his time coordinating with repair personnel and civil defense crews to get the village running, even as Israeli strikes persisted across south Lebanon.
His family described him as a former fighter for the militant Islamist group, but who, in his older age, had taken an administrative role. Israel said it was working on “military and financial matters… to rehabilitate Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure.”
Whatever his role, he too was now ensnared in Israel’s kill chain – the culmination of an intelligence-gathering process that began years ago.
There are multiple ways Turmus could have landed in the military’s cross-hairs – none of them a smoking gun on its own, but all potential grist for the algorithm that eventually picked him to be killed that February day.
For one, he lived in Talloussah, a Shiite-dominated village supportive of Hezbollah. This meant that the movements of Turmus and other residents were constantly under the surveillance of Israeli drones.
According to an AI specialist who worked with defense firms until he raised concerns about the use of such systems in Gaza, the drones’ cameras probably filmed and recorded his face, along with the make and license plate of his car and his home.
The drones could have used cell-site simulators, known as “stingrays,” to masquerade as cellphone towers and trick his smartphone into connecting, granting them access not only to Turmus’s data but his movements in real time.
Even if Turmus had switched SIM cards, he would still have been tracked, said the AI specialist, who was granted anonymity to discuss his work.
“It’s a massive data pipeline: phone metadata, location pings, SIM card swaps, app usage, social media behavior, sometimes even banking or facial recognition inputs. A lot is ‘scraped’ from commercial platforms, mobile networks, partner intelligence agencies, or spies on the ground,” the AI specialist said.
https://www.jpost.com/defense-and-tech/article-895697