Elbit Systems, Israel's largest arms supplier, said its Tzayad digital army program identified about 1,000 potential targets per day during the first two years of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.
At a military conference in London, the company said a total of 850,000 targets were detected in real time by the Israeli Tzayad digital army program across all the military's theatres of war between 7 October 2023 and the end of 2025. The number includes people, vehicles and other objects detected in real time for possible follow-up attack from land, sea or air.
The figure was presented at a land warfare conference organized by the Royal United Services Institute by Miki Edelstein, an IDF reservist major general and executive vice-president of Elbit. NATO's second most senior military commander, Britain's Air Chief Marshal Sir Johnny Stringer, was sitting next to him on a panel. A third speaker was a brigadier from the British army.
A slide presented by Edelstein included a line describing "high-tempo operations" run by the IDF, citing more than 20,000 IDF battle plans and 850,000 "R.T. [real-time] intel targets". Edelstein described the targets as "an enemy that we are not aware of before", that "pops up" from under the ground or by manoeuvre, "and we want to hit it accurately" but "don't have enough ammunition" to do so immediately.
Wes Bryant, a former senior targeting adviser and policy analyst at the US Pentagon who specialized in civilian harm assessments, said he believed the 850,000 figure was highly concerning. There were 2.2 million people and 300,000 buildings in Gaza before October 2023, Bryant said, suggesting that the IDF had at one point or another targeted "up to or over half the entire population and infrastructure" of the territory.
Elbit supplies the IDF's Tzayad, or Hunter, digital army program, a command system that maps the positions of friendly units and of those deemed to be enemies. Earlier this year, the company won a contract to further develop Tzayad, using artificial intelligence to support tactical decision-making.
When contacted by The Guardian, an Elbit spokesperson denied that the 850,000 figure cited by Edelstein referred to targets, despite the slide specifying this, saying it reflected "aggregated system activity and operational data generated through the IDF's digital army program across all operational theaters since October 7, 2023". The spokesperson added that it demonstrated the volume of information being processed by the Israeli military: "The figures represent system activity and operational data, rather than the number of enemy targets or actual strikes."
Bryant said it was impossible for soldiers in any military to adequately assess each piece of information to conclude if the threat was real and the target legal at the volumes indicated. "I will say, definitively, that there is no way each and every one of the 1,000 targets a day – let alone 850,000 targets in aggregate – are thoroughly and effectively characterized in terms of collateral damage analysis and assessed risk to civilian populations. Even characterizing 50 a day is hard enough (but possible)," the former US military officer said.
Military leaders across NATO countries believe that wars between states or against near-state opponents are being conducted at a faster rate than previous counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, where there was far greater time to consider the legality of targeting decisions.
Israel has been engaged in a series of wars after Hamas launched its surprise attack on 7 October 2023, which killed 1,200 people, and has repeatedly been criticized for killing tens of thousands of civilians in high-intensity attacks on Gaza and Lebanon. A UN inquiry has found Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a claim the country is fighting in international courts.
According to the World Health Organization, 71,269 Palestinians were killed in Gaza to the end of last year, the IDF's principal theatre of operation during the time referenced by Edelstein. A little over half were children.