Inside the ‘civilian war room’ where Israeli volunteers hunt for the prisoners of Hamas

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Hamas attack, Sigi Cohen lost contact with her son. All she knew was that he and his girlfriend were at a music festival that Hamas had targeted.But at around 11 a.m. that Saturday, she saw a photo of him in Gaza, and she knew: he was a prisoner of Hamas.The Oct.

7 assault on Israel was widely captured on phone, security, dashboard and body cameras. Now those images are being closely analyzed for traces of the more than 200 people taken hostage that day.Hamas not only killed 1,400 during its attack, but it also took prisoners, among them kids and seniors. Freeing the captives has become a national cause in Israel, but first they have to be found.It’s a significant challenge, and Rafael Franco decided to try a technological approach.

The day after the attack, he reconfigured his Tel Aviv cyber company to search for the disappeared.Franco’s office is now a “civilian war room,” where volunteers scour the internet for the prisoners. The system they built consists of 300,000 images downloaded from TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.Face recognition technology compares them with photos provided by the families of those missing. So far, they have found about 50 matches.They also geolocate landmarks in the images to determine where the prisoners were last seen.

Their findings are passed to the Israeli military.“The most important thing is to know they are alive,” said Franco, the former deputy director of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate. “So this is what we do.”Forty volunteers are working on the hunt, with support from Google and Microsoft, Franco said. The method is working but the news isn’t always good.One of the young men they were looking for turned up in a video uploaded in Gaza.