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15,000 Israeli Civilian Volunteers Help Victims of Hamas
(Times of Israel) Sue Surkes - Israeli civil society has quickly mobilized to support fellow citizens in distress. Volunteers organize medical supplies, psychological support, and clothing and equipment for evacuees from the Gaza border area - many of whom left just with the clothes on their backs. More than 100,000 Israelis have been evacuated and displaced. At a massive underground parking lot, hundreds of volunteers were unloading donated equipment, unpacking and sorting it, and repacking it into boxes for transport all over the land. As of Oct. 19, volunteers based at the Tel Aviv International Convention Center had distributed nearly 2/3 of 12,526 items of civilian equipment donated, found accommodation for 8,000 displaced families, distributed 120,000 food portions and 200 packs of medical supplies, transported 8,000 civilians and soldiers, provided 1,000 activities for evacuated children, and sent out 150 sets of shiva (seven-day mourning period) equipment. 2,000 volunteers from the high-tech sector used their skills to identify missing and kidnapped Israelis. The unit, headed by internet expert Prof. Karine Nahon, used artificial intelligence to try to identify the missing, with volunteers going through hours of video material, frame by frame, looking for clues. "We did facial recognition, matching social media with visual material from different scenes and used AI to identify clothes. We even identified distinguishing marks like tattoos because some of the bodies had been decapitated," said Chava Rotman. "The high-tech people came here and invented new algorithms to find out where the missing people were" and were able to whittle the names of thousands of missing people down to a couple of hundred. "We might be sending a washing machine to people who have lost their house, or 400 mattresses to a place where evacuees are staying, or 5,000 (donated) portions of food from a restaurant in Tel Aviv," Daniel Sweig explained, adding, "We're people who haven't been mobilized [to the army] yet, but want to help, rather than sit at home."