It looks like any other scrappy Tel Aviv tech start-up, with staff in hip clothing huddled around laptops and downing espressos, but they are the volunteers in a “war room” assembled to help Israel bring home the hostages.
Militants from Hamas seized more than 220 people — including Israelis, foreigners and dual-nationals — when they stormed across Gaza’s border with Israel on Oct. 7 and, according to Israeli officials, killed more than 1,400 people.
Within days, as Israel launched reprisal strikes that the health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip says have killed more than 6,500 people, volunteers from Israel’s thriving tech sector teamed up to lend a hand in the hostage crisis.
Photo: AFP
“We are a civilian war room. Our main purpose is to save lives,” said Refael Franco, 48, the chief executive of Code Blue Ltd — a cyber crisis management firm leading the effort at Gitam BBDO communications group in Tel Aviv.
“We collect. We compare. We deliver,” Franco said with a brand-ready slogan, as he pored over detailed, digital maps of Gaza dotted with color-coded markers linked to specific information about the captives.
For years, Israel’s tech sector has emerged as a formative pillar underpinning the country’s economy, with cybersecurity firms in particular serving as a powerful driver of growth and innovation.
Photo: AFP
Seemingly overnight, volunteers from the sector began meeting at the Gitam group’s offices where they pooled their expertise with artificial intelligence and innovative platforms to assist in identifying the missing in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks.
In this makeshift response center, volunteers have spent days combing through the deluge of social media posts across myriad platforms to gather information about the captives.
After amassing a database of images from social media in tandem with photos provided by families of the missing and kidnapped, the team then feeds the evidence into artificial intelligence software specializing in facial recognition.
With assistance from experts in geolocating, programmers and Arabic speakers, the team has rapidly pieced together an emerging picture of who was abducted, when they were last seen and where.
The information is then shared with the Israeli military’s special unit overseeing the hostage crisis, with about 60 captives successfully identified by the team to date.
The tech community’s reaction to the hostage crisis represents just a microcosm of the sweeping mobilization happening across Israel, with the young and old volunteering en masse to support affected families, soldiers and a range of other response efforts after the Oct. 7 attacks.
The hostage crisis has been particularly haunting.
Amid the trauma unleashed by the Hamas massacre, the hostage crisis remains an open wound, fueling anxiety and uncertainty during what Israeli leaders say will be a long war with the militant group.
“People here left their jobs. There are CEOs and CTOs [chief technology officers] and founders of companies that put everything aside and just came here ... to help,” said Ido Brosh, a 24-year-old volunteer programmer at Gitam BBDO with expertise in military intelligence. “It’s horrible that this event made us so unified, but that’s also the beauty of this country. In times of crisis, we come together.”
Even as the tech community pools its resources to help with the hostage response, the agony for the families of those held captive remains excruciating.
For 82-year-old Holocaust survivor Tsili Wenkert, the abduction of her grandson, Omer Weknert, from a music festival in southern Israel near the border with Gaza has brought an unending torrent of pain.
“What I’ve been through in the past is small. I’m now living through a nightmare,” she said. “It’s very hard for a grandmother at my age to know her grandson is a captive.”
The 22-year-old was last seen in footage posted on a Hamas-linked Telegram channel, showing him stripped to his underwear and bound in the back of a truck filled with armed militants, celebrating as they returned to Gaza.
Just four hostages have been released to date, thanks in part to backchannel negotiations involving Egypt and Qatar.
Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, was among those freed.
Following her release this week, she told reporters from a wheelchair that she was led through a “spiderweb” of tunnels under Gaza, where she was held with other captives.
The presence of the hostages would likely complicate the widely anticipated ground offensive by Israeli army following weeks of airstrikes across the besieged Gaza Strip.
Even amid the exhaustion and trauma triggered by the Oct. 7 attacks, the ongoing hostage crisis has stirred resolve in many.
For Omri Marcus, a creative director working on a campaign to battle misinformation at Gitam BBDO, the project is personal.
Marcus pointed to the wallpaper image on his laptop — a picture of his best friend’s cousin who is among the kidnapped.
The photograph serves as a constant reminder of the mission at hand, he said.
“She’s now ... in Gaza,” he said. “And we need to bring her back.”
When an apartment comes up for rent in Germany’s big cities, hundreds of prospective tenants often queue down the street to view it, but the acute shortage of affordable housing is getting scant attention ahead of today’s snap general election. “Housing is one of the main problems for people, but nobody talks about it, nobody takes it seriously,” said Andreas Ibel, president of Build Europe, an association representing housing developers. Migration and the sluggish economy top the list of voters’ concerns, but analysts say housing policy fails to break through as returns on investment take time to register, making the
NOT TO WORRY: Some people are concerned funds might continue moving out of the country, but the central bank said financial account outflows are not unusual in Taiwan Taiwan’s outbound investments hit a new high last year due to investments made by contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and other major manufacturers to boost global expansion, the central bank said on Thursday. The net increase in outbound investments last year reached a record US$21.05 billion, while the net increase in outbound investments by Taiwanese residents reached a record US$31.98 billion, central bank data showed. Chen Fei-wen (陳斐紋), deputy director of the central bank’s Department of Economic Research, said the increase was largely due to TSMC’s efforts to expand production in the US and Japan. Investments by Vanguard International
WARNING SHOT: The US president has threatened to impose 25 percent tariffs on all imported vehicles, and similar or higher duties on pharmaceuticals and semiconductors US President Donald Trump on Wednesday suggested that a trade deal with China was “possible” — a key target in the US leader’s tariffs policy. The US in 2020 had already agreed to “a great trade deal with China” and a new deal was “possible,” Trump said. Trump said he expected Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to visit the US, without giving a timeline for his trip. Trump also said that he was talking to China about TikTok, as the US seeks to broker a sale of the popular app owned by Chinese firm ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動). Trump last week said that he had
STRUGGLING TO SURVIVE: The group is proposing a consortium of investors, with Tesla as the largest backer, and possibly a minority investment by Hon Hai Precision Nissan Motor Co shares jumped after the Financial Times reported that a high-level Japanese group has drawn up plans to seek investment from Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc to aid the struggling automaker. The group believes the electric vehicle (EV) maker is interested in acquiring Nissan’s plants in the US, the newspaper reported, citing people it did not identify. The proposal envisions a consortium of investors, with Tesla as the largest backer, but also includes the possibility of a minority investment by Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) to prevent a full takeover by the Apple supplier, the report said. The group is
RSS