When the latest confrontation between Israel and Iran erupted, known as the Twelve-Day War, Israel surprised Tehran with a precise air strike in the early hours, targeting first-tier leadership figures within the Revolutionary Guard and the army. Among those killed were the commander of the Revolutionary Guard, Hossein Salami, the chief of staff Mohammad Bagheri, along with several senior officers and nuclear scientists.
This systematic targeting created a leadership vacuum within the Iranian military establishment and disrupted decision-making during the first two days of the war. Several analyses pointed to these field developments as having slowed Tehran’s response and stripped it of the initiative at a critical moment.
What stood out in this strike was not only the scale of material losses but the tools that enabled Israel to identify its targets with such precision. Instead of relying exclusively on conventional military systems, Tel Aviv resorted to weaponising technologies assumed to be civilian and peaceful, such as messaging applications and navigation systems.
According to Iranian reports, mobile phone tracking was used in the assassination of figures inside Iran, through certain well-known platforms that market themselves as secure due to so-called end-to-end encryption. These platforms assert that no one, including the company itself, can access or track messages.
Reality, however, is far more complex than corporate narratives suggest. Metadata, which includes the identities of senders and recipients, their locations, the timing of messages, and even message size, remains exposed despite encryption. These details, seemingly secondary, are sufficient to construct a comprehensive picture of communication and movement patterns among connected individuals. This grants intelligence agencies such as Mossad the ability to track individuals and pinpoint their locations with high accuracy.
With any direct compromise of a phone through advanced spyware such as Pegasus, privacy vanishes entirely, and the smartphone shifts from a personal communication tool into an open vault of secrets in the hands of adversaries.
In addition, the Global Positioning System, GPS, played another role in this conflict. Jamming and spoofing techniques rendered some Iranian missiles less accurate, causing deviations from their trajectories and failure to reach intended targets. This does not negate what was widely observed, namely the arrival of several missiles with immense destructive power into areas deep inside Israel, with explosive impact levels unprecedented in the occupying state.
The consequences of this operation were not limited to the military front, but extended into civilian navigation as well. On 15 June, the oil tanker Front Eagle collided with another vessel near the Strait of Hormuz after broadcasting contradictory location signals, veering off course and catching fire. Hundreds of ships and aircraft recorded similar disruptions in their location data.
This blending of civilian and military spheres is not an exception. It is part of a broader approach through which Israel has developed a security philosophy based on dissolving boundaries between the two domains and transforming everyday tools into integrated weapons within modern warfare arsenals. This approach is not new. Its first testing ground was not Iran, but Palestinian bodies and land.
In the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, advanced surveillance systems have been tested over recent years. Facial recognition algorithms and video tracking have been trained, and drones have been trialled as first responders to incidents.
Through this, the Israeli occupation authorities practice a mode of governance that harnesses civilian technology for security and military objectives, then re-markets it globally as smart solutions for cities, industry, or healthcare. This phenomenon, which can be described as the dual-use deception, recycles control expertise in a colonial context into profitable global products.
Whitewashing Tools of Repression
Dual use refers to goods or technologies that can be deployed for both civilian and military purposes, ranging from communications and internet tools to navigation systems, drones, and advanced software.
This trade is governed by a network of international agreements and national regulations, most notably the Wassenaar Arrangement, which defines lists of dual-use items and obliges member states to monitor exports to prevent their conversion into military capabilities for unlawful use.
Israel has not formally joined the Wassenaar Arrangement. Instead, it relies on domestic legislation imposing oversight on the export of military or dual-use goods. In practice, however, oversight is riddled with loopholes. While the law focuses on conventional weapons, technologies such as facial recognition systems or video analytics software are sold as civilian products, only to later be sold as public safety and security solutions.
This circumvention is known as purpose laundering, marketing control tools as if they were benign products, such as representing software used to track Palestinians at checkpoints as traffic management systems in Western cities. In the absence of strict oversight and genuine transparency, this flexibility becomes an open gateway allowing Israeli companies to export technologies first tested under occupation, then offered globally as civilian security innovations.
From Occupation to Smart Cities
One of the most prominent examples of civilian military overlap is the Israeli company BriefCam, a startup that developed a technology known as video synopsis. This algorithm analyses hours of surveillance footage and condenses key events into minutes, enabling much faster tracking of individuals and objects compared to traditional human review.
This technology did not remain a commercial innovation. It quickly became a tool in the hands of Israeli security forces to enhance surveillance in occupied East Jerusalem. It was used to monitor movement in the Old City and neighbourhoods such as Silwan under the pretext of protecting settlers, while in reality forming part of a broader security control network. The city was divided into zones managed through control centres linked to a central system, enabling precise real-time surveillance. The algorithm became a primary tool for imposing control over Palestinians, the first use case that proved its effectiveness.
Following this field experience, the company re-marketed itself globally as a public safety platform. In 2018, it was acquired by the Japanese company Canon and fully adopted the smart cities narrative.
On its official website, the company promotes the benefits of its technology in enhancing security, combating crime, and even managing traffic, citing examples from cities such as Chicago. What many Western clients do not know is that this algorithm was originally designed with Israeli military characteristics. While marketed as a tool for building safer cities, its roots lie in monitoring populations under occupation.
Thus, the narrative is reformulated, from a tool of control and surveillance in the narrow alleys of Jerusalem, to the protection of citizens in Western cities.
The paradox is that the same tool enforcing surveillance in Jerusalem can be used in a European city to manage traffic or police disturbances at a football match. While such applications may appear legitimate on the surface, their core remains unchanged, namely the immense capacity of these technologies to collect and analyse personal data, transforming any city into a comprehensive surveillance space that threatens privacy.
While BriefCam and similar companies deny responsibility, claiming the technology is merely a tool and that usage lies with the buyer, the fragility of this justification was first exposed inside Israel itself before collapsing globally. In 2020, during the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the Israeli government tasked the internal security agency Shin Bet, originally responsible for counterterrorism, with tracking infected individuals and their contacts using mobile phone location data.
This redirected surveillance tools originally designed to pursue Palestinian activists to cover all residents within the Green Line, triggering widespread debate over privacy and prompting Israeli human rights organisations to file a petition before the Supreme Court.
Surveillance Drills Under the Guise of Healthcare
The matter did not stop with Shin Bet. The notorious company NSO Group, developer of the Pegasus spyware, entered the scene, attempting to present itself as a technological saviour during the pandemic.
In March 2020, the company announced the creation of a coronavirus tracking system called Fleming. It promoted the system as capable of monitoring patient locations and phones and alerting authorities to contacts without violating privacy, a claim that was met with widespread scepticism.
At the time, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett supported and promoted the initiative. The company quickly marketed the system to governments worldwide, including the United States and several European countries. A firm that built its reputation on selling hacking tools to repressive regimes temporarily donned the mantle of public health protection.
The cover soon unravelled. In May of that year, an independent security researcher discovered a database belonging to NSO published online without any protection, linked to the Fleming system. It contained half a million movement records for approximately 30,000 real phones across several countries, including Arab states.
This discovery showed that the company had likely used real data to train its system. Despite its denial of leaking personal information and claims that the exposed material was merely anonymised demonstration data, the explanations appeared contradictory and unconvincing. Investigations demonstrated that movement patterns in the data could not be fabricated and matched real phone data. This deepened concerns over granting spyware companies access to highly sensitive health information under the banner of public service. Observers viewed it as further evidence of the company’s record of privacy violations and a broader indication of how Israeli firms deploy civilian technologies as back doors for surveillance and espionage.
Soldier Competitions and the Making of a Digital Prison
Another example of how civilian appearing technology can be transformed into a military tool of control is the case of the Blue Wolf and Red Wolf systems. While facial recognition is marketed globally as a traffic management or public safety tool, in Palestine, it has been used to build a massive biometric database, turning faces into access or denial keys at checkpoints.
Blue Wolf is a smartphone application developed by the occupation army, allowing soldiers to photograph any Palestinian they encounter. The application instantly matches the face against a vast central database akin to a secret Facebook for Palestinians. Upon scanning, a colour-coded signal appears indicating the person’s status. Green permits passage, yellow requires detention, and red mandates arrest.
To enrich the application’s database, the army organised competitions among soldiers in 2020 to capture the highest number of photos, including those of children and the elderly, offering rewards to the most active units.
Alongside Blue Wolf, the occupation deployed fixed cameras at town entrances and military checkpoints linked to another facial recognition system called Red Wolf. This integrated digital architecture constitutes one of the largest and most advanced biometric surveillance operations imposed on a population under occupation anywhere in the world. It combines random field photography, fixed cameras, and centralised databases. The result is a digital prison parallel to physical walls and checkpoints.
Despite this grim reality, these systems are not classified as conventional weapons but as dual-use technologies. Facial recognition software can theoretically be used in civilian applications, such as unlocking phones or controlling access to secure buildings. As a result, they are marketed abroad as civilian security tools.
Reports reveal that elements of Blue Wolf technology have reached other markets through intermediary companies. Human rights organisations have warned of their use against political dissidents in various countries. The issue is that current international law does not explicitly prohibit the sale of facial recognition software, as these technologies are not comprehensively listed under traditional Wassenaar controls.
This legal vacuum is exploited by Israel to promote an industry tested in Palestine, then repackaged and sold as urban security solutions to states seeking advanced tools to monitor populations or control borders.
Cosmetic Narratives
Israel and its companies rely on positive narratives when marketing dual-use technologies. They are presented as peaceful tools for public safety or civil development, serving noble goals if deployed in different contexts. Yet tracing these tools from laboratory to the Palestinian field reveals that most were born for control and military superiority, then re-wrapped in civilian discourse.
This is achieved through cosmetic marketing language that conceals the true nature of the technologies. Crowd surveillance systems are rebranded as crowd management platforms, while thermal cameras designed to detect living bodies behind walls and used to hunt resistance fighters are sold as night vision devices for rescue operations. This verbal packaging changes only the surface, not the essence. The technology remains unchanged while the narrative shifts according to the target audience.
One of the most prominent companies embodying this cosmetic marketing language is the Israeli firm Exodigo, founded in 2021 by Jeremy Suard and Ido Junin, both graduates of Israeli military intelligence units. The company developed advanced tunnel detection technologies based on experience acquired in a military context against Palestinians. It entirely avoided referencing their actual use in Gaza, instead re-marketing the technology as a civilian solution for border security or ground inspection before high-speed rail projects in the United States and Europe.
Thus, Israel plays on the mental separation between origin and current product. Systems developed in a repressive context are presented as neutral innovations or civilian tools. If buyers or public opinion are unaware that these technologies were tested on people under occupation, no prior ethical aversion arises. On the contrary, they may be perceived as advanced and necessary technologies sold under the banners of security or development.
Yet experience shows that surveillance systems inherently tend to expand in scope. A system that grants governments comprehensive visibility rarely resists the temptation to exceed its declared purpose. In Minneapolis, the city that witnessed the spark of the George Floyd protests in 2020, authorities had already begun using BriefCam systems during Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
The conclusion is that changing labels or civilian marketing does not alter the genetic code of these systems. A system born for espionage will continue to gravitate towards espionage, even if placed within a traffic department or wrapped in public safety language.
