The system, which fuses data from smartphones, security and traffic cameras, Wi-Fi signals, drones, government databases and social media, has granted Israel what seems an almost omniscient ability to track Hezbollah cadres\u2019 every movement.<\/p>\n
Turmus, 62, was serving as a liaison between Hezbollah and residents of Talloosah, a small village less than three miles from the Israeli border which had turned into a battlefield during Israel\u2019s campaign against Hezbollah in 2024.<\/p>\n
Throughout the 15-month ceasefire that followed, he spent his time coordinating with repair personnel and civil defense crews to get the village running, even as Israeli strikes persisted across south Lebanon.<\/p>\n
His family described him as a former fighter for the militant Islamist group, but who in his older age had taken an administrative role. Israel said he was working on \u201cmilitary and financial matters … to rehabilitate Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure.\u201d<\/p>\n
Whatever his role, he too was now ensnared in Israel\u2019s kill chain \u2014 the culmination of an intelligence-gathering process that began years ago. <\/p>\n
There are multiple ways Turmus could have landed in the military\u2019s cross-hairs, none of them a smoking gun on its own, but all potential grist for the algorithm that eventually picked him to be killed that February day.<\/p>\n
For one, he lived in Talloosah, a Shiite-dominated village supportive of Hezbollah, meaning the movements of Turmus and other residents were constantly under the surveillance of Israeli drones. <\/p>\n
According to an AI specialist who worked with defense firms until he raised concerns about the use of such systems in Gaza, the drones\u2019 cameras probably filmed and recorded his face, along with the make and license plate of his car and his home. <\/p>\n
![\"Funeral](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/1777900875_398_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
A trailer carries the coffins containing the bodies of Hezbollah\u2019s former leader Hassan Nasrallah and his cousin and successor Hashem Safieddine through Beirut, Lebanon, on Feb. 23, 2025. The Israeli military has used high-tech to target Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders.<\/p>\n
(Hassan Ammar \/ Associated Press)<\/p>\n
The drones could have used cell-site simulators \u2014 known as \u201cstingrays\u201d \u2014 to masquerade as cellphone towers and trick his smartphone into connecting, granting them access not only to Turmus\u2019 data but his movements in real time. <\/p>\n
Even if Turmus switched SIM cards, he still would have been tracked, said the AI specialist, who was granted anonymity to be able to discuss his work.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a massive data pipeline: phone metadata, location pings, SIM card swaps, app usage, social media behavior, sometimes even banking or facial recognition inputs. A lot is \u2018scraped\u2019 from commercial platforms, mobile networks, partner intelligence agencies, or spies on the ground,\u201d the AI specialist said.<\/p>\n
Once collected, platforms, such as Palantir\u2019s Maven, standardize, tag and score all the data, linking it to identities across devices and accounts. Palantir has spoken openly about its work with the Israeli military.<\/p>\n
AI is then able to build a timeline of a subject\u2019s activity and map the network of their relationships.<\/p>\n
There too, Turmus could have been flagged: One of his sons was a Hezbollah fighter killed in early 2024; another was injured in the pager attacks. <\/p>\n
Tracking Turmus would have been made easier by Israel\u2019s deep and cumulative intelligence infiltration of Lebanon, said retired Gen. Mounir Shehadeh, who served as the Lebanese government\u2019s coordinator to the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.<\/p>\n
Much of the country\u2019s data infrastructure \u2014 including databases with information on mobile phone subscribers or vehicle registrations \u2014 has been accessible to the Israelis for two decades; they also hacked into Hezbollah\u2019s terrestrial network and its signal corps, he said. Hezbollah\u2019s involvement in the civil war in Syria from 2011 to 2024 further compromised the group\u2019s security. <\/p>\n
\u201cThese factors allowed Israel to construct a precise target bank encompassing both field commanders and high-ranking leadership figures,\u201d Shehadeh said.<\/p>\n
The AI comes in at this stage. Rapidly going through terabytes of data, it detects patterns, and compares them to the movements of someone who is a known threat or has shown up near flagged zones. It also analyzes deviations from a subject\u2019s routine. All that is used to create a so-called threat profile. <\/p>\n
The result, according to an Israeli colonel interviewed in a February 2023 Israeli military article about AI in combat, is a system that could find targets quickly.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe system does this process in seconds, while in the past would have taken hundreds of investigators several weeks to do,\u201d said the head of Israeli military\u2019s Artificial Intelligence Center, identified only as Col. Yoav. <\/p>\n
But one concern, the AI specialist said, is that these systems use data, not logic, to determine if someone is dangerous. And if that information is flawed, then it would keep repeating the same mistakes, but \u201cfaster and with more confidence.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt creates this illusion of certainty, and that\u2019s dangerous because it turns correlation into action without always having context,\u201d the specialist said. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not like a lab,\u201d he added. \u201cSo how does the system know who\u2019s who? And when it flags someone \u2014 is it a human decision or just an algorithm flipping a switch?\u201d<\/p>\n
Another problem is that such systems rely on tracking mundane, routine activities \u2014 like who is talking to whom, or where and when they\u2019re traveling \u2014 to calculate the probability that someone is a combatant, potentially leading to false positives, said Vasji Badalic, a professor at the Institute of Criminology in Slovenia, who wrote a 2023 research paper on the rise of metadata and big-data driven targeting processes. <\/p>\n
\u201cRelatives, or people engaging in propaganda or finances, they\u2019re not combatants, but the machine recognizes them as so because they have similar communication patterns,\u201d Badalic said.<\/p>\n