The Israeli military has increased in surveillance efforts across the West Bank, including expanding the use of facial recognition technology, The Washington Post reported Monday.
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The "Blue Wolf" surveillance initiative, rolled out over the past two years, "involves in part a smartphone technology that captures photos of Palestinians' faces" and matches them to security forces' database of suspected terrorist operatives.
According to the report, a color-coded system alerts he soldiers monitoring it in real-time if anyone is flagged by the software as a match.
The report said that in addition to Blue Wolf, the IDF has installed a wide network of face-scanning cameras in various hotspots across the West Bank, so as to help soldiers at checkpoints identify Palestinians even before they present their ID cards.
In Hebron, for example, the military has deployed a wide network of CCTV cameras, to provide real-time monitoring of the city's population.
The Washington Post noted that to build the database used by Blue Wolf, "soldiers competed in photographing Palestinians, with prizes for the most pictures collected by each unit. The total number of people photographed rans well into the thousands."
The IDF said deploying the sophisticated system was "part of the defense establishment's war on terror and the efforts to improve the quality of life for the Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria.
"Naturally, we cannot comment on the IDF's operational capabilities in this context," the statement added.
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