Israel identified about 1,000 potential targets a day during the first two years of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon using its command and control system, according to a presentation by the country's largest arms supplier, Elbit Systems. A total of 850,000 targets were detected in real time by the Israeli Tzayad digital army programme across all military theatres of war between 7 October 2023 and the end of 2025, the company said at a military conference in London.
Scale of Target Detection
The number describes people, vehicles, and other objects detected in real time for possible follow-up attack from land, sea, or air, illustrating the high intensity of the deadly wars fought by Israel over the last three years. The 850,000 total was presented at a land warfare conference organised 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.
Concerns Over Civilian Harm
Wes Bryant, a former senior targeting adviser and policy analyst at the US Pentagon, 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 noted, suggesting that the IDF had at one point or another targeted 'up to or over half the entire population and infrastructure' of the territory. According to the World Health Organization, 71,269 Palestinians were killed in Gaza to the end of last year, a little over half of whom were children, women, and elderly people. A total of 3,961 were killed in Lebanon during the war in autumn 2024, about a quarter of whom were women and children.
System Capabilities and Human Oversight
Edelstein said the Elbit-run digital army programme helped increase the speed of external fire support from '40 to 50 minutes to one to seven minutes.' A line on the Elbit slide adds there were more than 46,000 'joint strikes and closing fire on real-time intel,' or a little over 50 a day. A 'man in the loop' would decide on whether fire support missions went ahead, Edelstein said, because it was 'the right thing to do.' However, an Elbit spokesperson denied that the 850,000 figure referred to targets, 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.'
AI-Assisted Targeting Systems
Israel's military also uses two other AI-powered databases, Lavender and Hasbora, to increase the pace of attacks. Lavender at one stage identified 37,000 people as potential targets based on its assessment of their apparent links to Hamas. Hasbora recommended buildings to target and was able to generate 100 targets a day, according to reports in 2023. One Israeli intelligence officer said targets flagged up by Lavender were assessed by a human for '20 seconds a time' because so many had been generated. Two intelligence officers said it was permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants during the early stages of the Gaza war.
