{"id":529080,"date":"2026-07-07T06:15:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T06:15:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/529080\/"},"modified":"2026-07-07T06:15:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T06:15:15","slug":"israeli-command-system-identified-850000-targets-in-gaza-and-lebanon-wars-says-supplier-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/529080\/","title":{"rendered":"Israeli command system identified 850,000 targets in Gaza and Lebanon wars, says supplier | Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Israel identified about 1,000 potential targets a day during the first two years of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon<\/a> with its command and control system, according to a presentation by the country\u2019s largest arms supplier, Elbit Systems.<\/p>\n

A total of 850,000 targets were detected in real time by the Israeli Tzayad digital army programme across all the military\u2019s theatres of war between 7 October and the end of 2025, the company said at a military conference in London.<\/p>\n

It describes the number of people, vehicles and other objects detected in real time for possible follow-up attack from land, sea or air, and illustrates the high intensity of the deadly wars<\/a> fought by Israel over the last three years.<\/p>\n

Buildings damaged by Israeli strikes are seen through shattered glass from the Jabal Amel Hospital in Tyre, Lebanon on 18 June 2026. Photograph: Hassan Ammar\/AP<\/p>\n

The 850,000 total was presented at a land warfare conference organised last week by the Royal United Services Institute by Miki Edelstein, an IDF reservist major general, who is an executive vice-president of Elbit.<\/p>\n

Nato\u2019s second most senior military commander, Britain\u2019s Air Chief Marshal Sir Johnny Stringer, was sitting next to him on a panel at the event. A third speaker at the session was a brigadier from the British army.<\/p>\n

Though the presence of the two senior British officers had been advertised on the agenda in advance, Edelstein was simply billed as a \u201cspeaker to be announced\u201d until the session on \u201cintegrating novel with core capabilities\u201d began.<\/p>\n

A slide presented by Edelstein to the largely military audience included a line describing the \u201chigh-tempo operations\u201d run by the Israel Defense Forces, and cited more than 20,000 IDF battle plans and 850,000 \u201cR.T. [real-time] intel targets\u201d.<\/p>\n

Smoke rises from southern Lebanon, as seen from the Israeli side of the Israel-Lebanon border in May. Photograph: Ammar Awad\/Reuters<\/p>\n

The targets were described by Edelstein as \u201can enemy that we are not aware of before\u201d, that \u201cpops up\u201d from under the ground or by manoeuvre, \u201cand we want to hit it accurately\u201d but \u201cdon\u2019t have enough ammunition\u201d to do so immediately.<\/p>\n

Wes Bryant, a former senior targeting adviser and policy analyst at the US Pentagon who specialised in civilian harm assessments, said he believed the 850,000 figure was highly concerning.<\/p>\n

There were 2.2 million people and 300,000 buildings in Gaza<\/a> before October 2023, the main theatre of war in the two years following, Bryant said, suggesting that the IDF had at one point or another targeted \u201cup to or over half the entire population and infrastructure\u201d of the territory.<\/p>\n

Elbit supplies the IDF\u2019s Tzayad, or Hunter, digital army programme, a command system that maps the positions of friendly units and of those deemed to be enemies. Earlier this year, the company won a contract to further develop Tzayad, using artificial intelligence to support tactical decision-making.<\/p>\n

Tents and makeshift shelters housing displaced Palestinians stretch amid the ruins of buildings near the al-Shati refugee camp, Gaza City, on 1 July. Photograph: Omar Al-Qattaa\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

When contacted by the Guardian, an Elbit spokesperson denied that the 850,000 figure cited by Edelstein referred to targets, despite the slide specifying this, saying it reflected \u201caggregated system activity and operational data generated through the IDF\u2019s digital army program across all operational theaters since October 7, 2023\u201d.<\/p>\n

The spokesperson added that it demonstrated the volume of information being processed by the Israeli military: \u201cThe figures represent system activity and operational data, rather than the number of enemy targets or actual strikes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bryant said it was impossible for soldiers in any military to adequately assess each piece of information to conclude if the threat was real and the target legal at the volumes indicated.<\/p>\n

\u201cI will say, definitively, that there is no way each and every one of the 1,000 targets a day \u2013 let alone 850,000 targets in aggregate \u2013 are thoroughly and effectively characterised in terms of collateral damage analysis and assessed risk to civilian populations. Even characterising 50 a day is hard enough (but possible),\u201d the former US military officer said.<\/p>\n

Military leaders across Nato countries believe that wars between states or against near-state opponents are being conducted at a faster rate than previous counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, where there was far greater time to consider the legality of targeting decisions.<\/p>\n

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Israel has been engaged in a series of wars after Hamas launched its surprise attack on 7 October 2023, which killed 1,200 people, and has repeatedly been criticised for killing tens of thousands of civilians in high-intensity attacks on Gaza and Lebanon.<\/p>\n

A UN inquiry has found Israel is committing genocide<\/a> in Gaza, a claim the country is fighting in international courts.<\/p>\n

According to<\/a> the World Health Organization, 71,269 Palestinians were killed in Gaza to the end of last year, the IDF\u2019s principal theatre of operation during the time referenced by Edelstein. A little over half were children, women and elderly people.<\/p>\n

Palestinian children stand among destroyed homes in Gaza City in June. Photograph: Majdi Fathi\/NurPhoto\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

A total of 3,961 were killed in Lebanon during the war in the autumn of 2024, according to the country\u2019s ministry of public health<\/a>, about a quarter of whom were women and children. The recent war of 2026 is outside the period cited.<\/p>\n

Edelstein said the Elbit-run digital army programme helped increase the speed of external fire support \u2013 extra attacks on targets confirmed by the IDF from artillery, warships or fighter jets \u2013 from \u201c40 to 50 minutes to one to seven minutes\u201d.<\/p>\n

A line afterwards on the Elbit slide, not directly referred to by the speaker, adds there were more than 46,000 \u201cjoint strikes and closing fire on real-time intel\u201d, or a little over 50 a day. A \u201cman in the loop\u201d would decide on whether fire support missions went ahead, Edelstein said, because it was \u201cthe right thing to do\u201d.<\/p>\n

Sophia Goodfriend, a research fellow at Cambridge University specialising in the impact of artificial intelligence on warfare, said she believed it would be very difficult for intelligence and air force units to thoroughly vet 1,000 targets a day without relying on support from artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

\u201cAny military would struggle to do so without outsourcing verification to other automated systems, which raises questions of accountability and concern about shrinking amounts of human oversight,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Smoke rises following an Israeli strike on Mazraat Aali et Taher in Lebanon in May. Photograph: Afp Stringer\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

While Tzayad detects possible enemy activity on the battlefield, Israel\u2019s military also uses two other AI-powered databases, Lavender and Hasbora (or the Gospel), to increase the pace at which it can attack people and buildings, having previously run out of targets in wars in 2014 and 2021<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Lavender at one stage identified 37,000 people as potential targets<\/a> based on its assessment of their apparent links to Hamas. Hasbora recommended buildings to target and was able to generate 100 targets a day, according to reports in 2023<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One Israeli intelligence officer said targets flagged up by Lavender were assessed by a human for \u201c20 seconds a time\u201d because so many had been generated by the system. Two intelligence officers said it was permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants during the early stages of the Gaza war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Israel identified about 1,000 potential targets a day during the first two years of the wars in Gaza…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":529081,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43],"class_list":["post-529080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=529080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529080\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/529081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=529080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=529080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}