Ishaaq al-Daour, 32, was sheltering with his family at the UN-run Abu Hussein School in Jabalia refugee camp when the Israeli army stormed the shelter on October 20, forcing over 700 hundred people out of the school and leading them into a large ditch that had been dug in advance by the military.
“They made all of the men go down into the ditch first,” al-Daour told Mondoweiss from the Remal neighborhood in Gaza City. “Then they ordered us to climb out of the ditch one by one and stood each of us in front of a camera that had been installed nearby.”
The army made the men stand in front of the “camera” for at least three minutes per person, al-Daour said, long enough for the cameras to scan their faces and reveal personal data seemingly already stored in the Israeli military’s system. After the scans, al-Daour said the soldiers would reveal information about each individual, including their “name, age, work, family members and names, place of residence, and even their personal activities.”
“When they suspected someone, they took him away [to an unknown location” al-Daour said. As for those who had relatives who belonged to Palestinian resistance movements or who personally belonged to resistance factions, al-Daour speculated that “their fate was immediate death,” citing stories he had heard from others in Gaza, whose friends and relatives were taken at checkpoints and had not been seen again, or who returned to Gaza in body bags.
Al-Daour is one of the thousands of people who were expelled from the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza and ordered to move south at gunpoint by the Israeli army. The forced exodus of thousands out of Jabalia is part of an Israeli offensive on northern Gaza that started on October 5. Its objective is to implement a proposal put forward by a group of senior Israeli generals that aims to empty northern Gaza of its inhabitants through starvation and bombardment, the so-called “Generals’ Plan.”
Survivors from Jabalia like al-Daour report that the Israeli army is using facial recognition technology to screen residents in the ongoing assault, often identifying people from long distances and picking them out from a crowd.
Witnesses say that the Israeli army has set up security checkpoints throughout northern Gaza where the facial recognition technology is being deployed. The military is also reportedly using this technology when it storms shelters for the displaced. Witnesses report that in these cases Israeli forces will corral people in enclosed places, usually ditches dug by military bulldozers, and process them individually.
Hellbound and Down 