“Double Panopticon”: Amnesty International Slams Israeli Facial Recognition Surveillance

Amnesty International has issued a report criticizing Israel’s use of surveillance technology around Jerusalem’s Old City to monitor and control Palestinians, and warning foreign companies supplying the equipment that they are in violation of international law.1

Israeli authorities have deployed over 1,000 cameras in the Old City, Amnesty International describes, with one-to-two cameras located every five meters in conjunction with video analysis technology. In the approximately two kilometers between the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah and Bab al-Amud leading into the Old City there is “blanket camera surveillance” recording Palestinians’ every move in this area targeted by Israeli settlers and the site of frequent demonstrations. The organization Who Profits reported in March 2022 that 400 CCTV cameras broadcast live feeds of Palestinian movements (there are few cameras in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City) directly to a central police control and command center.2 Cameras are installed on surveillance towers and on buildings occupied by settlers, pointing outward and down at Palestinian markets and homes.

Palestinians report being approached on the street by unfamiliar Israeli police who know their names or addresses, ostensibly through facial recognition, or being contacted after they leave their homes to be asked where they were going at that particular time. Israeli police also use the surveillance network to identify protesters whom they later detain from their homes during night raids.3 Its effect has been chilling for public protest, and Palestinians in some areas say the cameras appear to reach inside their homes.

The Amnesty International report, “Automated Apartheid,” also describes how Israeli soldiers in the West Bank city of Hebron have photographed Palestinians to register them in a biometric database, and are now using an app on their phones to access that database to learn details about every Palestinian they encounter—restricting their movements at checkpoints accordingly. Despite the widespread use of facial recognition technology in East Jerusalem, biometric identification is not yet being deployed in this same way—although the cameras in place have the capacity to be used to identify every Palestinian they record.

“Most cities are just one software upgrade away from being able to have ubiquitous facial recognition capabilities,” says Amnesty International researcher Matt Mahmoudi in an interview with Democracy Now. “East Jerusalem is no exception to this, except we’re dealing with a context that is internationally recognized as an illegal annexation. And so you’re dealing with a double-edged sword of both having the technology that we see as being fundamentally incompatible with international human rights law, whilst also having it apply in a context that is fundamentally against international law, which is to say the context of apartheid and the context of the illegal annexation.”4

In Silwan, just southeast of the Old City and where Israeli settlement organizations have targeted Palestinian homes and control a large archaeological park, Amnesty International calls the surveillance system a “double panopticon.”5 A high surveillance tower sits inside a circle of Palestinian homes, which are then surrounded by a ring of cameras stationed on Israeli settlement houses pointing in toward the same Palestinian residences. Some of the cameras are operated by private security companies, which share resources and communications lines with Israeli security and police.

Between 2008 and December 2022, one researcher estimates that the number of cameras turned on Palestinians in Silwan rose from 60 to 243.6

Director of the Wadi Hilweh Information Center Jawad Siyam has unsuccessfully sued settlers in court to have them remove surveillance cameras installed directly outside his home for over a decade. “Whether the cameras are installed by the police or by the settler guards, Israeli police have access to them, and when settlers filed a case against me alleging that I had assaulted them, the court referred to video recordings extracted from the cameras back in 2011,” he says.

Jerusalem youth have successfully protested the installation of these surveillance measures, holding a sit-in at the Lion’s Gate in 2017 when Israel installed metal detectors at the entrance to the al-Aqsa Mosque, where Palestinian Muslims enter to pray.8 The metal detectors were removed and replaced with cameras, but the protesters insisted that the cameras also be removed before they would end their demonstration.

In Silwan, a surveillance pole holding several cameras was burned down by youth protesters in July 2021 and has yet to be replaced by security agencies.9

Amnesty International identifies several international companies that manufactured the cameras it observed in Jerusalem. These include TKH Security, a Danish security company, and Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co, Ltd, located in China. TKH Security repeatedly stated that it no longer distributed its products through the Israeli company Mal-Tech and has no “direct business relationship” with the Israeli security forces. Hikvision did not response to inquiries.10

Other companies identified in the report include hardware vendors VideoTec, Dahu Technology, Sony Corporation, and Evron Systems, which reportedly installed the Mabat 2000 system.11

Amnesty International warns that these companies “must formulate public plans and commitments to ensure their products cannot be used to further Israel’s apartheid, or risk being held complicit in the perpetuation of the system.”