Israel gathered Palestinians’ Arabic language data to build AI-powered tool to identify dissent, probe finds

Israeli military intelligence has built an artificial intelligence tool made up of a vast collection of data gathered from intercepted Palestinian communications, which it is using to more easily identify dissent against Israel’s occupation and carry out raids in the occupied West Bank.

According to a joint investigation by the Guardian, +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, the Israeli military’s notorious Unit 8200 has been building and training an AI model to understand spoken Arabic through the use of intercepted telephone conversations and text messages between Palestinians from the occupied territories.

Reportedly resembling a chatbot system such as ChatGPT, the tool serves as a deep learning system that generates human-like text and is able to answer questions about people it monitors, with one unnamed Israeli intelligence source saying that the aim was to “collect all the [spoken Arabic] text the unit has ever had and put it into a centralised place.”

That arose out of the fact that “there are no transcripts of calls or WhatsApp conversations on the internet. It doesn’t exist in the quantity needed to train such a model.” It was the new AI model and its training process that succeeded in gathering sufficient amounts of such data, with the sources revealing that overall, the training data eventually consisted of approximately 100 billion words in dialects including the Palestinian and Lebanese.

READ: Israel unleashed AI-powered war of annihilation in Gaza, investigation reveals

The intelligence sources also made it clear that the role of AI in surveillance of Palestinians and their language is primarily intended to serve as a greater form of control, especially in conducting arrests throughout the occupied West Bank.

When Israeli occupation forces enter Palestinian villages, for example, AI is used to identify those who use words that could potentially indicate “troublemaking”, leading to an increased number of arrests. “It allows us to act on the information of many more people, and this allows control over the population,” one source said. “When you hold so much information you can use it for whatever purpose you want.”

Although a spokesperson for the Israeli military refused to answer questions posed to it by the Guardian, they said that the military “deploys various intelligence methods to identify and thwart terrorist activity by hostile organisations in the Middle East.”