Ep.

92: Israel-Gaza and all the light you cannot see

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: I’m Dina Temple-Raston, and this is Click Here.

[STINGER]

TEMPLE-RASTON: It’s been a month since Hamas launched its deadly attack on Israel. Its
fighters roared across the border and killed 1,400 Israeli civilians and then took 240 more
hostage. Israel responded with punishing airstrikes on Gaza that Hamas says has killed
some 10,000 Palestinians. And in the fog of war, especially in a simmering conflict like this
one that has raged for decades and only gotten more complex, one of the first things you
lose is the ability to communicate — emotionally, politically and even technologically.

And today, we are going to look at that last piece, how factions in this war have wielded
technology to their advantage.

[THEME MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: We will speak with people on both sides of the conflict and explore the
ways they’re trying to clear that fog and get to the truth. And we begin in southern Israel.

[MUSIC]

[BIRDS CHIRPING]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Hadas Kalderon says Kibbutz Nir Oz, not far from the Gaza border, was
such a beautiful place.

HADAS KALDERON: Full of flowers and peaceful, peaceful place just by nearby Gaza. Always
we had animals: Rabbits, birds, cats, dogs…

TEMPLE-RASTON: She was born there, spent some time away, and then returned 20 years
ago. She had four kids and her youngest, Erez, is 12.

KALDERON: He love to ride horses. He love to play football and ping pong. He loved
computers, like all children, you know. He loved to laugh. He laughed a lot. He had great
humor.

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TEMPLE-RASTON: She sent us videos of him. One with the family, sending a greeting to
someone…

[FAMILY VIDEO]

TEMPLE-RASTON: You can see him mugging for the camera.

[MUSIC FADING UP]

TEMPLE-RASTON: And then, October 7th came.

KALDERON: Saturday, normal Saturday. 6:30 in the morning I wake up. 7 o'clock, 7. 30, I
start to hear them. I can hear Arabs shouting and shooting and shooting everywhere.
Tatatatatata. Shooting everywhere. A lot of noises coming over.

TEMPLE-RASTON: She ran to the safe room they have in the house, and the gunmen were
right behind her.

KALDERON: I can hear them behind my door. Ta ta ta ta ta. Talking, talking. Allahu Akbar.
Ta ta ta ta ta. Arabic, you know. I used to love this language. I used to love it.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Hadas’ daughter and son had been spending the night with their father.
He lives less than a mile away. Hadas sent a text to her ex-husband to see if everyone was
okay.

KALDERON: The last message I got from him, it was 8. 30 in the morning. The terrorist is in
our house. We jumped from the window. We're hiding in the bushes. I said, Oh no. Oh my
God. Don't do that. Go back to the shelter immediately. But I don't think he saw this
message.

TEMPLE-RASTON: A short time later she got a message from her son.

KALDERON: He tell me, Mom, Mom, be quiet, be quiet. I love you.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And then there was silence.

[MUSIC UP AND OUT]

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TEMPLE-RASTON: Until just a few days later, when Hamas, which had been posting
real-time videos of the attacks, posted this online.

[VIDEO]

TEMPLE-RASTON: A short video clip of her son, Erez, the one who’d texted her. Hamas had
grabbed him in the chaos of that initial attack. It doesn’t have much sound. It’s the visuals
that are supposed to shock you.

It shows Erez being man-handled by an armed Hamas fighter. He looks tiny in a little black
T-shirt, and the fighter is pulling him around by the shoulder. Hadas knows the video is out
there. It’s gone viral. But she won’t watch it.

KALDERON: I don't want to see my son, my small baby helpless. So helpless, so confused,
so terrified. I don’t want to see that.

TEMPLE-RASTON: If you look at the video, Erez looks like he’s trying to be brave. There has
been no word since, and his sister and his dad have gone missing, too. So Hadas, like the
members of hundreds of other Israeli families of the missing, has no idea where they are or
if they’re even still alive.

KALDERON: We don't have any information. We didn't get any information.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Halfway across the country, in Tel Aviv, a woman named Karine Nahon
was thinking about how distressing it must be for people like Hadas, families missing loved
ones with so little information to go on. And it turns out information is Karine’s specialty.

[MUSIC UP AND OUT]

KARINE NAHON: I'm a professor in my usual daily life. Uh, I'm a professor of politics of
information.

TEMPLE-RASTON: But she’s more than just a professor. For much of this year, she’s been
focused on a protest movement that broke out in Israel back in the Spring. She was one of
the protest organizers.

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NOHAN: I'm one of the, I would say, prominent voices in Israel in civil society.

TEMPLE-RASTON: People started taking to the streets to object to Prime Minister

Netanyahu’s efforts to reduce the authority of the Supreme Court in Israel — and to
dismantle some of its democratic institutions.

[PROTEST SOUNDS]

NAHON: We've been protesting for the last nine months. Millions of people in Israel.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So she already had a network ready to go. She controlled WhatsApp
channels brimming with tens of thousands of socially active individuals who had spent
much of 2023 taking their cues from her.

After the October 7th attacks, she put a call out to the network of people she’d been
working with asking if they wanted to help with a different kind of grassroots campaign. She
wanted them to help identify the thousands of people who were unaccounted for in the
confusion after that initial attack.

And…

NAHON: My WhatsApp really exploded

TEMPLE-RASTON: Tech bros, academics and ordinary citizens who had been marching in the
streets with her for months — they immediately responded. And she made a point of saying
that anyone who was willing to help, was welcome. It didn’t matter if you were a humanities
professor, a coder, or a doctor of philosophy. And for the past four weeks, she’s been sitting
in a conference center in Tel Aviv with 1,500 of these volunteers who have been trying to
put a name to the face of the missing.

KARINE VIDEO [IN HEBREW]: Super, super sensitive….

TEMPLE-RASTON: And they weren’t alone.

[MAN SPEAKING THROUGH BULLHORN]

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TEMPLE-RASTON: Other groups had recruited thousands of volunteers. And they were all
working in the expo center on different projects related to the attacks.

NAHON: One was responsible on evacuating people. One was responsible on making sure
that the soldiers get the right equipment. One was responsible on civilian equipment.

TEMPLE-RASTON: In Karine’s corner, the volunteers were fully focused on just identifying
people who either were killed, survived or were abducted during those initial attacks. And to
do that they needed to know who was in the area at the time.

NAHON: We didn't even know what the list was. We didn't know what we're talking about.
Who knew who was exactly in the South?

TEMPLE-RASTON: Who might have been near the border with Gaza? That would be like
saying, How do you identify who went to Central Park on a Saturday? So they decided to ask the
military.

NAHON: And we said, Okay, they probably have the right list. And we started with their list. But
very fast, we found out that the list was with a lot of noise.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Noise. In other words, not very helpful, not very accurate.

NAHON: And you have to understand, you can't make mistakes here. Because every person
counts. It's not like you did a small mistake and you can continue. Now we have to start
going one name after the other and start to understand what happened to each one of
them.

TEMPLE-RASTON: So they realized, we’re going to have to compile a list of the missing
ourselves. And since there was nothing reliable to build from they decided: why don’t we
just go straight to the people themselves. So they created a website for families and friends
to report someone was missing.

NAHON: So we created very fast. We created a website that started to get information from
the public. And that was our strength that we got a bottom up kind of straight and live
information from so many people around the country.

TEMPLE-RASTON [INTERVIEW]: So you were basically crowdsourcing.

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NAHON: Exactly, we started with crowdsourcing. So if we’re thinking about the sources of
information, we had, first of all, the public, which was our main strength at the beginning.

TEMPLE-RASTON: One of the first problems they tried to solve had to do with a giant music
festival that was going on not far from the Gaza border.

[MUSIC FESTIVAL SOUNDS]

TEMPLE-RASTON: As many as 4000 people were supposed to attend this rave in the desert.
And it wasn’t like a purely ticketed event. People were camping, milling in and out. So how
do you figure out who was there?

Karine and the team started cross referencing names with festival organizers, cities, the
network of nearby kibbutz to start winnowing down the list.

[MUSIC FADING UP]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Harvey ended up not going to the festival. Norman went in his place. That
sort of thing.

NAHON: It was really crafting a kind of a picture from so many sources of information. It's
really an investigative effort.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And as they built that approximate list, they were also trying to gather all
the available information they could about the status of those potential victims. They
scoured videos taken at the festival, images online. Which meant that a lot of the source
photographs they were looking at were taken on the fly. These weren’t images with two
eyes and two ears or someone looking at the camera. These were blurry — maybe taken
from the side or moving by quickly.

So they had to find ways to decode those, and they ended up having people write
algorithms that addressed those problems. They’d unblur photos or rework facial
recognition software so it could identify half a face. And then they started looking beyond
faces to other clues.

NAHON: So, for example, we identified a person by the fabric of his underwear. We identified
people by looking at their tattoos, by looking at their properties, at their unique properties

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of their body and, by that, identifying their face. So it's a flip, right? Usually you'd identify
the face and then you identify the body. But here we did something opposite.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And then they need to cross reference all the information they’d gathered
on potential victims with videos Hamas had posted themselves.

NAHON: For example, 150 channels of Hamas Facebook, TikTok, WhatsApp, Twitter, et
cetera, et cetera, to try to find out whether that person is found in any one of the videos
with the terrorists. And so it's really to start a similar kind of assembling — you know, kind
of a portfolio, a kind of a dossier, about each one of the people. That's what gave our ability
to understand the big picture and also the small picture.

[MUSIC UP AND OUT]

TEMPLE-RASTON: They’d get a name, try to identify all the pictures they could of that
person, train facial recognition software on it, and then a human, one of the 1500 people on
her team, in the room, would check it all. And if they found a match, they would pass that
information to the authorities.

NAHON: And the fact that we were in one physical space. We refuse to work on online
spaces because everybody just walks between the tables and gets their solution. I call it, uh,
creative chaos.

[ROOM AMBI UNDERNEATH]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Creative chaos, she says.

NAHON: And I said, you know, we're not trying to do an optimization. We're trying to find the
fastest and best solution.

TEMPLE-RASTON:And that’s actually, for example, how they were able to solve that blurry
photo problem. Because with all those random people in one room, when they said, Hey,
there are blurry photos. Does anyone know what to do? Some of the professors and scholars who
were there actually had a solution.

NAHON: There were technologies that were developed in scholars' heads. They were in
compartments sitting in universities, but never were implemented. So you had this kind of, I

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would say big bang, and after 110 hours, they were able to implement things that that so
far were in theory only.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Between the social media feeds, the Hamas posts, the improvised
technologies and all that people power, they ended up identifying just about everyone at
the festival.

TEMPLE-RASTON [INTERVIEW]: This is the ultimate lesson that machines can't do it alone. It
needs a human.

NAHON: And you have to have interdisciplinary spaces. The challenges today are very
interdisciplinary. It's not about technological people. It's really about having diverse groups.

TEMPLE-RASTON:But in a way the most improbable thing about it, was that it was led by
Karine Nahon at all. She even alluded to it during a bullhorn speech she gave to the
volunteers when the project started.

[KARINE ON LOUDSPEAKER]

TEMPLE-RASTON: In normal times, she had told them, we wouldn’t have the right to do
even a tenth of what we’re doing here both ethically and legally. That’s because this was a
giant project of scraping the internet, a giant project to invade the privacy of thousands of
people who, by no fault of their own, went missing on a terrible day in Israel. And that’s the
kind of project that went against everything Karine stood for.

TEMPLE-RASTON [INTERVIEW]: One of the things you said was, in normal times we wouldn’t
have the right to do even a tenth of what you were doing here. What did you mean?

NAHON: I established the digital right movement and I established Privacy Israel.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Privacy Israel, it’s a kind of digital rights group.

NAHON: I'm the one who's all the time complaining, even appealing, to the high justice
court for breaching privacy.

TEMPLE-RASTON: But, she said, this was different.

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NAHON: So, and here, basically, I switched my hat to 180 degrees to get any information,
any information, right, about those people. We were in a situation where this is a disaster
and time was running out. And I knew, I mean, you can't, you can't wait. And so you pass, for
me, it was passing a red kind of line that before I didn't cross. It was obvious that we needed
to do that.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: We talked to Karine just a day after she said they decided to shutter the
war room. They did what they came to do, she said.

NAHON: We're still missing between 40 to 100 people.

TEMPLE-RASTON: 40 to 100 cases they’re still working on.

NAHON: We're working, you know, online on particular cases. But it's time to close it
because when we created this war room, we didn't create it for the structure of the war
room. We created it basically to do something, to have a goal, to accomplish that goal. So
we accomplished it, I think.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: I asked her if the team had worked on the Kalderon case, whether they’d
tracked down more information on what had happened to Erez or his sister or his dad.

NAHON: The Kalderon family, yeah.

TEMPLE-RASTON: She said they had a policy of not talking about specific cases publicly and
then she added.

NAHON: By the way, we know all the names. Unfortunately, we know all of them.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: When we come back, a grassroots campaign that is fixing a very different
but very big problem — on the other side of the conflict, in Gaza.

[MODEM SOUND]

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TEMPLE-RASTON: This is Click Here.

[BREAK]

[CLICK HERE STINGER]

MOHAMMAD ABUAJWA: So, I'm Hamad Abuajwa, and I'm a 22-year-old. Right now I'm in
central Gaza, in a city called Deir al-Balah.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Hamad is an English teacher in Gaza and was about to go to Germany to

start work on a Masters degree when the war began. We wanted to talk to him on the
phone, but the Internet was so patchy we couldn’t get through. So we sent him some
questions and had him record the answers for us.

ABUAJWA: Right now I'm standing at a window at the staircase, and I'm looking out to a
bunch of rubble that has been left by the bombings, by the bombing that happened, I think,
10 days ago or so.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Israeli airstrikes hit the house next door. Trucks arrived a couple of days
later.

ABUAJWA: In order for them to be able to extract the bodies from underneath the rubble. A
lot of people died, and some of them were never found. So, yeah, it is pretty, pretty terrible.

TEMPLE-RASTON: The internet blackouts – the sinking feeling that people in Gaza were
suddenly cut off from the world – began a short time after that.

ABUAJWA: The first time it happened, I was waking up from sleep to the sound of my
brother-in-law saying they cut off the internet and the service of the phones. And I picked
up my phone. They did cut off the phone and everything.

[MUSIC]

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ABUAJWA: I mean, imagine if you were abroad and you had a family here in Gaza, and that
internet connection was stable for some point, but then suddenly 24 hours or so goes down.

TEMPLE-RASTON: People outside Gaza immediately assumed the worst.

ABUAJWA: The worst-case scenario that comes to your mind is that your family and friends
were bombed here in Gaza. So my family and friends cried so much and they were so
anxious and afraid that we were under the rubble.

TEMPLE-RASTON: When the internet came back on, his friends and family flooded him with
calls.

ABUAJWA: We comforted them. We told them that, hey, everything is fine. We're, we're doing
okay. And, and yeah.

TEMPLE-RASTON: The first time, the internet disappeared for about 36 hours.

ABUAJWA: The other one was a couple of days ago. And it was quite shorter. The wifi came
back quickly. It feels like someone's pulling the plug and plugging it back in whenever they
please.

[MUSIC]

NEWS CLIP: Phone lines and internet services have once again been cut right across the
Gaza strip. That's according to the telecommunications company, Paltel…

TEMPLE-RASTON: Gaza is about twice the size of Washington, D.C. and Paltel started in the
1990s. Its very existence was set out as part of the Oslo Accords and Paris Accords. It was
supposed to be part of an effort that would allow Palestinians to manage their own
infrastructure: roads, water, telecoms. But PalTel’s fiber-optic cables run through Israel.

HELGA TAWIL-SOURI: So it's easy to be able to kind of shut the internet down.

TEMPLE-RASTON: Helga Tawil-Souri is an associate professor of media, culture, and

communication at NYU Steinhardt.

TAWIL-SOURI: I generally actually write about media and media infrastructure, mostly in the
Palestinian territories, but across Israel-Palestine.

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TEMPLE-RASTON: And she says throttling the Internet takes more than just bombing of cell
towers like we’ve seen in Gaza. She says the Internet outages could not just be caused by
some sort of collateral damage, getting caught in the war.

TAWIL-SOURI: There has been bombing of, um, cell towers but that in and of itself is not
enough to just shut down in the way that we saw. That requires the metaphorical flip of a
switch. So, it is a purposeful kind of shutting off.

TEMPLE-RASTON: That said, even when the Internet is not being intentionally turned off —
even at the best of the times — connectivity in Gaza is patchy. And that has more to do with
the technology itself.

TAWIL-SOURI: So Palestinian providers are still functioning on a network that was initially
able to sustain about 200, maybe 300,000 cellular users on the older 2G network. Today
you have obviously sort of million more users, but they're still operating on that same kind
of infrastructure.

TEMPLE-RASTON: With three to five times more users on a network built for essentially flip
phones, it means either you don’t get a signal because too many people are trying to use
the network at the same time. Or you get dropped calls. Helga says people still have dial up
modems there.

[MODEM SOUND]

TEMPLE-RASTON: But she says those issues don’t change the fact that turning off the
internet – even when the Internet isn’t great to begin with – has a huge impact.

TAWIL-SOURI: It's not just simply preventing communication in and out of Gaza, but also
within Gaza, right? So people can't call each other, you can't call the ambulance, you can't
get through to anybody. Nevermind that it's dark and there's bombs and there's no
electricity and so on, right?

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Mohammad said when the internet disappears, it’s unnerving.

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ABUAJWA: When we don't know what's going on, it's more scary, basically. These blackouts,
this lack of internet connection and so on, it really covers up so much of the atrocities that
they're doing to the point where no one knows about it. And that's the issue to begin with.
No one knows how bad the situation in Gaza is because they can't know when there isn't
anyone to report.

TEMPLE-RASTON: That was also a concern for a marketing executive in Saudi Arabia named
Bashar Shaheen.

BASHAR SHAHEEN: I'm a Jordanian that comes from Palestinian origins.

TEMPLE-RASTON: He was watching events unfold in Gaza — the bombings, the internet
blackouts — and he thought there must be something he could do. Bashar already had a bit
of a history organizing people.

SHAHEEN: I had created the Translators Movement in the Gaza War of 2021, which I
collected more than 300 people that speak all the languages of the world, to just translate
the news and just to reveal the truth to the world.

TEMPLE-RASTON: As he was trying to think about solutions for the communications issues
in Gaza, he saw some people floating one particular idea — people were posting that they
should try to get Starlink into Gaza. That’s Elon Musk’s satellite network that has been
working so well in Ukraine.

[SATELLITE NOISE]

TEMPLE-RASTON: But Bashar didn’t think that would be an option.

SHAHEEN: And I saw that and I tweeted about it. I said, Listen guys, this is impossible to be
happening right now because Gaza is closed. Nobody is allowed to enter, nobody is allowed to go out
of it. So the Starlink thing won't happen.

[MUSIC FADING UP]

TEMPLE-RASTON: So he started to look for other things. He’s not a techie guy, but he
thought about this one technology you may not even know exists: an eSIM.

[MUSIC]

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TEMPLE-RASTON: It’s been around since 2016 but has only become popular in the last
couple of years. Like a regular SIM card, it holds your phone number and your account
information. But to install it you don’t need to go to a store. You just need to scan a QR code
with your smartphone. And what it does is essentially turn your non-functioning Paltel
phone into a phone that now can connect to a different network. It’ll roam for one that is
online and use that one instead.

SHAHEEN: So people closer to the northern part of Gaza, they connect to the Israeli cellular
towers, and the people closer to Rafah, which is in the south, they connect to the Egyptian
towers.

TEMPLE-RASTON: And they’re pretty cheap. You can get one that lasts a week for $5. Or a
higher end one with more connectivity and more time for about $30.

SHAHEEN: And I'll be completely honest, I didn't know that the eSIMS initiative would work.
So I took a leap of faith.

[MUSIC UP AND OUT]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Bashar tweeted out his plan and asked if there was anyone in Gaza who
wanted him to send them a couple of eSIMs. The next morning his social media was filled
with barcodes for eSIMs he could send to Gaza.

SHAHEEN: When the people knew that one actually worked, they started sending me tens.
Then it turned to hundreds. Then it turned to thousands. So we couldn't keep up with the
numbers.

TEMPLE-RASTON: A little more than a week into the project he had more messages in his
inbox than he had time to reply to.

SHAHEEN: There were at least 800 messages. We're sending thousands. People actually
found my account on Instagram, so they decided to flood me there. So they're now sending
me on Instagram. They're sending me on Twitter.

TEMPLE-RASTON: At first he was just sending them to journalists and emergency medical
personnel. Now he says anyone who asks can get one. He has a couple of friends helping
him manage all the requests.

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TEMPLE-RASTON [INTERVIEW]: So you're literally sending thousands of eSIM cards to Gaza.

SHAHEEN: It was just an idea that came up. And I'm really glad that it came up. It helped a
lot. There was a lot of messages of people thanking us.

[MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Thanking him for giving them back their voice and their connection to the
rest of the world.

SHAHEEN: There was a lot of emotional messages telling us that this eSIM might have
provided us with one last call to our loved ones outside of Gaza, and just to tell them
goodbye.

[MUSIC BEAT]

TEMPLE-RASTON: It’s not a perfect solution. We spoke to half a dozen people in central Gaza
who said they were too far away from working networks in Egypt or Israel for the eSIMS to
work. But in a time of war, when everything seems so unsure, just being able to hear a
familiar voice on the other end of the phone can be a welcome lifeline.

This is Click Here.

[HEADLINES MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: Here are some of the top cyber and intelligence stories of the past week:

Microsoft has announced a new vision for tackling the cybersecurity problems that have
plagued the company and its customers in recent years. They call it the Secure Future
Initiative, and it lays out a plan that will rely on artificial intelligence tools to prevent attacks
before they happen. The company also plans to change the way it develops software and
shorten the response and patch release times when they find a vulnerability. Microsoft said
all this in a blog post late last week and the effort comes after cyber criminals and
state-hackers have found their way into Microsoft systems and those of their customers.

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Okta, the identity and access management company, had its own blog post on Friday saying
that from September 28 to October 17, a threat actor had gained access to files inside its
customer support system affecting some 134 of its customers. Okta said the hackers had
accessed files that provided tokens that could allow them to hijack Okta sessions. They said
it had only affected 5 customers. Three of them — 1 Password, BeyondTrust and Cloudflare
— have already come forward with their own reports of the breach.

And finally, the American Airlines pilots union appears to have been a victim in what has
become a rash of ransomware attacks targeting the aviation industry. The union represents
some 15,000 pilots. A notice on its website said they first discovered the cyberattack on
October 30th. They said they are trying to restore their systems and assess the damage.

[THEME MUSIC]

TEMPLE-RASTON: I'm Dina Temple-Raston, and I'm the executive producer and host of the
show. Sean Powers is our senior producer and marketing director. Will Jarvis is our producer,
and Lucas Reilly and Jade Abdul-Malik are our staff writers. Our editing team is led by Karen
Duffin and Lu Olkowski, and Darren Ankrom does our fact-checking.

Our theme and original music compositions are by Ben Levingston. We also use music from
Blue Dot Sessions. And as always, we'd love to hear from you. Please leave us a review and
rating wherever you get your podcasts or send us an email at ClickHere [at]
RecordedFuture [dot] com. And check out our website with details about our shows and our
whole show catalog at ClickHereShow [dot] com. That's a wrap for this week. I'm Dina
Temple-Raston. We'll be back on Tuesday.

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