WEST BANK (Dispatches) – The Zionist regime military’s electronic spying Unit 8200 has used a vast collection of intercepted communications to develop an artificial intelligence model similar to ChatGPT aimed at snooping on Palestinians, a new investigation reveals.
The probe was conducted by the British daily The Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call.
It said Unit 8200 trained the AI model to understand spoken Arabic using large volumes of telephone conversations and text messages, obtained through its extensive surveillance of the occupied territories.
The spying unit accelerated its development of the tool after the start of the regime’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023 and trained it in the second half of 2024, the probe noted, adding that it is not clear whether the model has yet been deployed by the occupation’s army.
“We tried to create the largest dataset possible [and] collect all the data ... Israel has ever had in Arabic,” the former official, Chaked Roger Joseph Sayedoff, told a military AI conference in Tel Aviv last year. The model, he emphasized, required “psychotic amounts” of data.
Meanwhile, sources familiar with the project said the sophisticated chatbot-like tool is capable of answering questions about people and providing insights into the massive volumes of surveillance data.
“AI amplifies power,” one of the sources said. “It’s not just about preventing shooting attacks, I can track human rights activists, monitor Palestinian construction in Area C [of the occupied West Bank]. I have more tools to know what every person in the West Bank is doing.”
Nadim Nashif, director of 7amleh digital rights and activist group, said Palestinians have “become subjects in Israel’s laboratory to develop these techniques and weaponize AI, all for the purpose of maintaining [an] apartheid and occupation regime.”
Zach Campbell, a senior surveillance researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), said using surveillance material to train an AI model was “invasive and incompatible with human rights.”
In a related development, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has initiated an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted drive to detect and annul the visas of foreign nationals and students supporting the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas on American soil.
The Virginia-based news website Axios reported on Thursday that the U.S. State Department plans to use AI to revoke visas of foreign students who it perceives as supporters of Hamas, which has been designated by Washington as a “terrorist” organization since 1997.
“The AI-fueled ‘catch and revoke’ effort will include AI-assisted reviews of tens of thousands of student visa holders’ social media accounts,” the report said, citing senior State Department officials.
“Officials will also check news reports of previous demonstrations against Israel’s policies and Jewish students’ lawsuits highlighting foreign nationals allegedly engaging in anti-Semitism.”
The news website underlined that, “The reviews of social media accounts are particularly looking for evidence of alleged terrorist sympathies expressed after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.”
Axios said the State Department would also look into foreign students who were arrested in anti-Israel demonstrations and were allowed to remain in the country under the Biden administration.
The website censured the Trump administration’s visa revocation bid via AI as a “dramatic escalation in the US government’s policing of foreign nationals’ conduct and speech.”