May 2. (EUROPE PRESS) –
Amnesty International (AI) has denounced this Tuesday that the Israeli authorities are using an experimental facial recognition system called “Red Wolf” (Red Wolf) to “entrench an apartheid policy” in the occupied Palestinian territories through the tracking of its citizens and the automation of Israeli restrictions on the freedom of movement of Palestinians.
According to Amnesty, Red Wolf is only one part of a “growing” surveillance network to strengthen Israel’s control over the Palestinian population. This system, according to the organization, works at the military checkpoints in the city of Hebron, in the occupied West Bank, as well as in East Jerusalem, where it scans the faces of Palestinians and adds them, without their consent, to huge databases of surveillance data.
“The Israeli authorities are using sophisticated surveillance tools to promote segregation and automated apartheid against the Palestinian population,” denounces Amnesty Secretary General Agnès Callamard.
This system, which begins with a network of closed-circuit security cameras, is according to Amnesty “part of a deliberate attempt by the Israeli authorities to create a hostile and coercive environment for Palestinians, in order to minimize their presence in strategic areas.
SURVEILLED
In the West Bank, according to Amnesty, the Red Wolf system predominates in the H2 sector of the city of Hebron, over which Israel has full control. Some 33,000 Palestinians live there, along with approximately 800 Israeli settlers residing in at least seven settlement enclaves.
Amnesty recalls that the Palestinians in the H2 sector are subject to “draconian” movement restrictions, they cannot access certain roads and spend the days from checkpoint to checkpoint, with the consequent difficulty for their daily lives.
For its part, in East Jerusalem and particularly in the Old City, the NGO recalls that Israel maintains a network of thousands of video surveillance cameras known as Mabat 2000, in constant modernization since 2017 “to improve its facial recognition capacity and achieve a unprecedented surveillance power.
In both places the procedure is the same: when a Palestinian goes through a checkpoint where Red Wolf is operating, their face is scanned, without their knowledge or consent, and compared with biometric entries in databases that contain only information about Palestinians and Palestinians.
Lobo Rojo uses this data to determine if a person can pass a check, and automatically records the biometric data of any new faces it scans. If there is no record of a person, it denies passage.
Amnesty believes that this system could also deny entry based on other information stored in Palestinian profiles, for example if a person is wanted for questioning or detention.
As time goes by, Lobo Rojo expands its database of Palestinian faces. In a testimony given to the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence, an Israeli commander stationed in Hebron said that the soldiers are tasked with training and optimizing the facial recognition algorithm so that it begins to recognize faces without the need for human intervention.
Amnesty International cannot say with certainty which companies are supplying the Israeli authorities with facial recognition software, but its research teams have identified suppliers of several cameras they have found in occupied East Jerusalem.
In this regard, researchers have found high-resolution video surveillance cameras manufactured by the Chinese company Hikvision installed in residential areas and mounted on military infrastructure; some of these models, according to Hikvision’s own commercial advertising, can connect with external facial recognition software.
Amnesty International has also identified cameras made by a Dutch company called TKH Security, located in public spaces and mounted on police infrastructure.
In any case, Amnesty calls on the Israeli authorities to end “both mass and targeted” surveillance of Palestinians and lift the arbitrary restrictions they have imposed on the freedom of movement of the Palestinian population in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, “as measures necessary to dismantle apartheid”.
