The war of images continues in the Middle East with the first speech by the armed wing of Hamas since the October 7 attacks against Israel. In several videos posted on social networks, the Palestinian terrorist movement claims to hold more than 200 hostages and features a young woman presented as one of these prisoners held in the Gaza Strip.
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In military fatigues, his face masked by a keffiyeh, the spokesperson for the al-Qassam brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, challenges the Israeli government. “ The occupier, he said, is threatening to launch a ground assault against our people. This doesn’t scare us. We are ready “.
Hamas claims in this recording that it is holding between 200 and 250 hostages, some of them being held by other Palestinian factions, that 22 of these Israeli prisoners have been killed since the start of the campaign of strikes aimed at Gaza Strip and that the captives will be released if conditions permit, without giving further details.
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Israeli officials on Monday morning estimated the number of hostages held in the Gaza Strip during the October 7 attack at 199.
In a second video, Hamas broadcasts for the first time images of a young woman presented as one of these hostages. In the video, the woman, who is being treated on the arm by an unidentified medical worker, identifies herself as 21-year-old Mia Schem. She speaks in Hebrew in front of the camera. She claims to be in good health and asks to be able to reunite with her loved ones as quickly as possible.
A crisis unit set up by 980 specialists
At the same time, Israel is mobilizing all its resources to try to locate these hostages. Nearly 980 specialists, developers, cyber security experts from civil society are gathered in Tel Aviv, reports our correspondent in Jerusalem, Sami Boukhelifa. They set up a crisis unit, to try to gather as much information as possible from open source (open source in English). That is to say, information freely available on the Internet, and which could help locate the hostages.
Michael is 35 years old. “ What am I doing here ? There are several teams here. There is a team that I am part of that collects the data. A team that will analyze the data, in order to obtain as much information as possible on missing people », he explains.
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Michael and his teams collect tens of thousands of videos, available on social networks. Hundreds of thousands of messages, texts, content related to the situation in Israel and Gaza. A titanic job, made possible thanks to the assistance of Bots. In other words, automated software that performs repetitive tasks on the internet. “We create bots that will collect all this data and send it to the database to be analyzed.”
Help from artificial intelligence
From there, analysts and linguists take over to decipher the videos. They also have a file containing the photos of the hostages. It is artificial intelligence that automatically manages facial recognition. “ Even a quarter of the face of a wanted person, who will be put in a car, who will be hidden – and this quarter of a face which is very difficult to identify with the naked eye – an artificial intelligence which will exploit this data, is able to identify it », assures Michael.
The information collected has a purely humanitarian objective, Michael insists. “ I’m not here to destroy the enemy, but just to try to save lives », concludes the young man.