Israel goes hi-tech for Gaza disengagement

By Rafael D. Frankel

Inside, under artificial light and in climate controlled rooms, away from the fields of Gaza and the dusty plains of the Negev desert where police and army units have been training for their doleful task of removing Israeli Jews from their homes, teams of police now sit making the last preparations for some of the most important work of the Gaza Disengagement.

When August 15 arrives, and the police officers begin the physical evacuation of Gaza, their superiors will be sitting at two command centers, one in Aein HaShlosha, the other in the National Police Headquarters in Jerusalem. From there they will watch, listen to, and coordinate the entire disengagement from afar with the help of some of the most advanced technology ever employed by security forces around the world.

And when the disengagement is complete, when the Jewish residents are gone and their homes bull-dozed from the beach-side towns they built, it will then be technology which the Israeli Defense Forces depend upon to keep Gaza secure.

“The disengagement required intense preparation, and presented us with a big technological challenge,” said Commander Ariel Friedman, the head of technology for the Israeli Police.

In developing the relatively cheap $1.25 million system that will coordinate the disengagement, Friedman said the police had to work under four basic premises: that there was no agreement with the Palestinians on how to proceed, that attacks on Israelis would continue during the pull-out, that there would be large anti-disengagement demonstrations by Israeli opposed to the plan, and that many of the Jews in Gaza would refuse to leave their homes.

Under these assumptions, the police developed a system which allows commanders to trace more than 13 million “reactions” every day. Tasks as mundane as a printer cartridge being changed at one of their command centers, to vastly more important information like which people have been evacuated from their homes will all be tracked, and that information available to the commanders with the click of a mouse.

“Everything is computerized,” said ?rank? Ofer Shenhov, the head of the police computerized operations section.

Most important to the disengagement, the computer system will allow commanders to supervise exactly how the disengagement is proceeding in “real time.” Using information radioed in by police and soldiers on the ground, GIS tracking from their vehicles, and aerial and ground based cameras, the system will provide a complete picture to police at the command centers of nearly every aspect of the Gaza withdrawal.

The systems will be aided in large part by an investment in new hardware by the police that was accelerated in the run-up to the evacuation. In the last 4 months, Freidman said, the police have increased the amount of their patrol cars equipped with advanced computer and GIS technology by 35 percent—most of those being vehicles assigned to the Gaza area.

Not only will they be able to track the location of people, vehicles, and goods, but thanks to a database that was painstakingly constructed over the last few months in tandem with the computer systems, the police will be able to access comprehensive information about the people and homes they are evacuating.

On a display screen in the police headquarters in Jerusalem, Shenhov scrolls through details such as how many family members live in one house in the town Gadid, if they have any pets, if they have registered weapons, and if they have any special needs.

“It’s very important to know about our citizens,” Friedman said, “we want to give them special treatment.”

Developers of the system also included a range of visual aids that feed off the real time data, and are accessible as such. Charts and graphs will display the status of the withdrawal in each town in terms of how many people have been evacuated, what goods have been moved, which structures have been demolished in up to the minute, daily, and aggregate displays. One chart will also track how many people were arrested resisting evacuation.

Once the evacuation is complete, the army will assume total control of the Gaza border, and will rely both on advanced technology and physical deterrence for keeping Gazans out of Israel. The IDF is currently constructing a barrier network between Gaza and Israel—built entirely in Israeli territory, according to a military source with advanced knowledge of the network—which consists of a barbed wire fence, an sensor-laden fence, a tracking road, a 75 to 150-meter-wide agriculture zone, another barbed wire fence, and a buffer zone 1-2 kilometers wide.

The $225 million network will employ a range of cameras, manned and possibly unmanned patrol vehicles, and sensory technology all tied into “a few” command and control centers around Gaza, the military source said. “We are trying to establish a system… that will buy us time in case of a terrorist infiltration and that would allow us to act better with our forces,” he said.

While he would not get into the specific technology the IDF will use, the source said it would be very similar to other borders they have constructed.

Robin Hughes, the Middle East Editor for Jane's Defense Weekly, and an expert in electronic warfare, said that implies similar surveillance technology to that being used on the Lebanese border, which the IDF refers to as a “Total Area Control System.”

That system, Hughes said, includes long-range mounted and mobile infrared cameras, aerial photography from drone aircraft and balloons, thermal imaging, motion detectors, and acoustic sensors—all of which feed into command and control (C2) centers. Any anomaly scanned at the C2s can then be radioed to the closest patrol team on the ground for investigation.

Military contractors have also developed computer systems for the IDF which compare and contrast digital photos taken by the assortment of cameras in order to analyze if a picture has changed over the course of anywhere from a minute to a few days, Hughes said.

The IDF is also testing both unmanned patrol vehicles and autonomous guns posted on towers that can both be controlled from C2 centers.

Meanwhile, any and all information fed into the C2 centers—which are each responsible for a strip of the border—can be fed into larger C4 centers, which are higher up the command chain in the total surveillance and border control system developed by the IDF called Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence (C4I). “That is the essence of controlling borders,” Hughes said.

While the purpose of C4I is largely to prevent any infiltration, it can also be employed for offensive operations, such as the “targeted killings” the IDF has often used on senior figures in Palestinian militant organizations. In those circumstances, Hughes said, the IDF can also use aircraft such as the Gulfstream 5 or Hercules EC-130 (both electronic warfare planes) to listen in on cellular communications. In tandem with the visual imagery, the listening devices allow the IDF to pinpoint the exact location and status of their target and use the information for pinpoint killings.

Another advantage of the system, the military source said, was personnel resources it saves the IDF. “Thankfully, technology allows us to reduce the number of people that are needed to [secure the border]. You’re looking at a few dozen [soldiers] at each center,” he said.

With just a few C2 centers around Gaza, that means less than 50 soldiers at any given time will be responsible for utilizing technology capable of watching and containing nearly 1.4 million Palestinians.

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Side Bar

During recent protests by Israelis opposed to the withdrawal from Gaza, many of the rally organizers claim that the surveillance technology nominally used to monitor Arab militants was turned on them.

Protestors say unmanned cameras mounted on towers, blimps, and drone aircraft were used to photograph them, that their mobile phones were bugged and/or rendered inoperative, and that their leaders were followed by the Shin Bet secret service.

“The surveillance they’ve been using is shocking,” said Aliza Herbst, who assisted in coordinating the march on Kfar Maimon. “They have a lot of info that would be difficult to understand how they have it without eves dropping.”

A police spokesman denied the wide-spread use of phone tapping and the claim that they interfered with the cellular network. “There was a crash of the [cellular] network because there was such a huge use of the network,” Lt. Col. Avi Zelba said. (That claim was confirmed by a spokesman for Cellcom.) Additionally, there was “absolutely no” phone tapping “unless there was an order from the court.”

However Zelba did not dispute the photography. “I don’t want to get especially into this question. But the police sometimes have to collect evidence all around and there is a lot of things you have to know,” he said.

While the tactics used by the police to prevent the marchers from gaining entrance into the Gaza Strip were strong, the surveillance did not constitute a breach of Israeli Civil Rights law, said the Israel Association for Civil Rights Spokesman Yoav Loeff.

“There is no [legal] limit on aerial photography by the government,” Loeff said, adding that as long as permission was obtained from the courts, wire taps were also legal. The only “red line” that was crossed by the government, he said, was stopping busses on the way to the protest. That was “over acting ahead in order to prevent some basic crimes… much later on, and we see that as problematic.”

Whether legal or not, the use of surveillance technology on the protestors brought out heated condemnation from those who saw an equivalency being made by the government between the anti-disengagement protestors and Arab militants.

“The fact that they use police and military forces with technological solutions like listening to the phones, taking pictures, photos—it’s like they are dealing with the biggest criminals in Israel, and like they are dealing with terrorists in the same way,” said MK Uri Ariel, a member of the Foreign Affairs and Security committee.

“They are not enemies, they are not terrorists, they are just people who want to demonstrate in a peaceful way, and this is not democratic,” he said.

--R.F.

©2005 The Media Line