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In the Search for Hostages, the U.S. Is Israel's Key Intelligence Partner

(Washington Post) Shane Harris - The daring hostage rescue that Israeli military forces mounted in Gaza on June 8 relied on a massive intelligence-gathering operation in which the U.S. has been Israel's most important partner. Since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, the U.S. has ramped up intelligence collection on the group in Gaza and is sharing an extraordinary amount of drone footage, satellite imagery, communications intercepts and data analysis using advanced software, some of it powered by artificial intelligence, according to U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials. Israeli officials said they were grateful for the U.S. assistance, which in some cases has given the Israelis unique capabilities they lacked. But they also insisted that the U.S. was, for the most part, not giving them anything they couldn't obtain themselves. The Biden administration has forbidden Israel from using any U.S.-supplied intelligence to target regular Hamas fighters in military operations. The intelligence is only to be used for locating the hostages as well as the top leadership of Hamas. The U.S. provided some of the intelligence used to locate and eventually rescue the four Israeli hostages. The information, which included overhead imagery, appears to have been secondary to what Israel collected on its own ahead of the operation. Before the Oct. 7 attacks, the U.S. intelligence community did not consider Hamas a priority target. That changed almost immediately following Oct. 7. In the first weeks of the war, Israeli officials in charge of locating the hostages requested specific information from the U.S., as well as technologies and expertise for analyzing large volumes of imagery and overlaying different images to create more detailed pictures, including in three dimensions, of the terrain in Gaza. They provided some "capabilities to us that we never had before Oct. 7," said one Israeli official. A second Israeli official indicated that the U.S. provided highly detailed satellite imagery that Israel lacks. U.S. analysts have helped mine the servers, computers, cellphones, notebooks and other documents recovered from Hamas hideouts or command posts for clues about hostage whereabouts.
2024-06-16 00:00:00
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