Israel identified approximately 1,000 potential targets daily 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 between 7 October 2023 and the end of 2025, the company said at a military conference in London. The figure encompasses people, vehicles and other objects identified for possible follow-up attack from land, sea or air, illustrating the high intensity of the conflicts.
Presentation at London conference
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, sat next to him on a panel. A third speaker was a brigadier from the British army. Edelstein was billed only as a 'speaker to be announced' until the session began.
A slide shown by Edelstein included a line describing 'high-tempo operations' by the Israel Defense Forces, citing more than 20,000 IDF battle plans and 850,000 'R.T. [real-time] intel targets'. Edelstein described the targets as 'an enemy that we are not aware of before', that 'pops up' from under the ground or by manoeuvre, 'and we want to hit it accurately' but 'don't have enough ammunition' to do so immediately.
Concerns over civilian harm
Wes Bryant, a former senior targeting adviser and policy analyst at the US Pentagon who specialised in civilian harm assessments, said the 850,000 figure was highly concerning. With 2.2 million people and 300,000 buildings in Gaza before October 2023, Bryant suggested the IDF had at one point or another targeted 'up to or over half the entire population and infrastructure' of the territory.
An Elbit spokesperson denied that the figure referred to targets, despite the slide specifying this, 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'. The spokesperson added that it demonstrated the volume of information being processed by the Israeli military, not the number of enemy targets or actual strikes.
Bryant said it was impossible for soldiers to adequately assess each piece of information to conclude if the threat was real and the target legal at such volumes. 'I will say, definitively, that there is no way each and every one of the 1,000 targets a day – let alone 850,000 targets in aggregate – are thoroughly and effectively characterised in terms of collateral damage analysis and assessed risk to civilian populations. Even characterising 50 a day is hard enough (but possible),' he said.
Speed of targeting and AI role
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 slide, not directly referred to by the speaker, added 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 fire support missions, Edelstein said, because it was 'the right thing to do'.
Sophia Goodfriend, a research fellow at Cambridge University specialising in the impact of artificial intelligence on warfare, said it would be very difficult for intelligence and air force units to thoroughly vet 1,000 targets a day without relying on AI support. 'Any military would struggle to do so without outsourcing verification to other automated systems, which raises questions of accountability and concern about shrinking amounts of human oversight,' she said.
Broader context of civilian casualties
Israel has been engaged in a series of wars after Hamas launched its surprise attack on 7 October 2023, which killed 1,200 people. Israel has repeatedly been criticised for killing tens of thousands of civilians in high-intensity attacks on Gaza and Lebanon. A UN inquiry has found Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a claim the country is fighting in international courts.
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.
While Tzayad detects possible enemy activity on the battlefield, Israel's military also uses two other AI-powered databases, Lavender and Hasbora (the Gospel), 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 by Lavender were assessed by a human for '20 seconds a time' because so many had been generated by the system.
