On Sunday, October 29, Ahmed Azza was allowed to leave his neighborhood for the first time in three days. He passed the surveillance camera pointed at his front door and the group of Israeli soldiers stationed on the hill above, and walked eight minutes to the checkpoint at the end of his street. He placed his belongings on a table to be searched, made obligatory eye contact with the facial recognition camera and crossed through the rotating metal barriers into Hebron. Ten hours later, he was given an hour to return home before the checkpoint closed and he was locked out (or locked in) for the next two days.
Azza lives in Tel Rumeida, Hebron, the most tightly controlled neighborhood in the West Bank. Since 1997, Tel Rumeida has been part of H2, a part of Hebron controlled by the Israeli government. About 35,000 Palestinians and 850 Israeli settlers live in this area, where Israeli soldiers impose a system of segregation that severely limits Palestinians’ freedom of movement. It is enforced with a network of surveillance that includes at least 21 manned checkpoints, on-site searches and watchtowers, plus a wide range of CCTV cameras called ‘Hebron Smart City’. According to critics, the purpose of this system is to make life as difficult as possible for Palestinians by slowly forcing them to leave their homes and make way for Israeli settlers.
The West Bank has long been seen as a testing ground for Israeli surveillance technology and tactics. Defense exports have doubled in the past decade, thanks in part to the success of companies that produce surveillance systems, such as Elbit, Candiru and Rafael, and of NSO Group, which produces the Pegasus spyware. But on October 7, on the other side of Israel, the country’s famed surveillance network failed. Hamas gunmen have breached the high-tech border separating Gaza from Israel, killing 1,400 people and taking more than 200 hostages. Since then, a growing sense of paranoia has given the Israeli government the impetus to step up restrictions and surveillance in the West Bank, according to analysts and activists working in the region.
“We are rats in a laboratory,” says Azza, drinking a cup of tea at his workplace in Hebron. “I want to go to the beach, I want to see the sea, I want to taste the water. Here we don’t have this freedom.”
The flagship component of the West Bank surveillance infrastructure is known as ‘Wolf Pack’. According to Amnesty International, its purpose is to create a database of profiles of every Palestinian in the region. One component of this software, known as Red Wolf, uses facial recognition cameras placed at checkpoints to inform Israeli soldiers via a color-coded system whether to arrest, detain or let through approaching Palestinians. If the system does not recognize a person, it automatically records his biometric data in Red Wolf, without him knowing.
Another section, known as the Blue Wolf, is described as “Facebook for Palestinians.” It requires Israeli soldiers to photograph Palestinians individually via a smartphone app to include them in the database. According to Breaking the Silence, an NGO made up of former Israeli soldiers that opposes the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territories, prizes were awarded to different units based on the number of Palestinians they could photograph in a week.