Herkin is struggling to break the routines he was forced to adopt during his two horrific years in Gaza. He walks hunched over, a relic of moving through Gaza's low, narrow tunnels, and he clasps his hands behind his back as if they were still shackled.

"I got used to sitting and sleeping on the ground, and that has turned into a habit," he explained to Israel Hayom. "I might be with family or friends, get up to grab a cup of coffee, and then come back and simply sit down on the floor. My legs are always crossed and pulled tight to my body, because I sat scrunched up for two years. I only notice after many minutes and then return to a chair."

Maxim Herkin was freed in the recent hostage exchange on October 13, having endured 738 days in Hamas captivity. He now shares a harrowing personal experience and discloses that one of his captors boasted about having previously guarded Gilad Schalit, the Israeli soldier who was held captive for 4 years after being taken captive in 2006. 

"My eyes were covered, and my hands and legs were tied," he recounted softly. "I couldn't see anything, but I suddenly felt my clothes being pulled off. One of the terrorists took a knife and just cut them away until I was naked. The terrorist didn't ask me to strip; he did it himself."

"The reason became clear in an instant. He was sure I was a special forces soldier and asked if I had a GPS in my body. I was shocked. The terrorist must have seen too many spy movies and thought they had implanted a chip in me. I stayed calm and told him there was no chance he would find anything on me. After searching me and confirming there were no chips inside me, the terrorist pulled up my underwear himself. I stayed like that for several days – in my underwear, a sealed ski mask covered in blood, and my hands and feet in handcuffs."

In the article, which Israel Hayom will publish this weekend, Maxim Herkin returns to the trauma of October 7 and the physical and psychological abuse he suffered in Gaza. He openly discussed the panic attack he experienced when he heard a song played at the Nova Festival, from which he was abducted , his anxiety for his family, the crowdfunding campaign started by his friends, and the guilt he feels toward his 13 and a half-year-old little brother.

"I see the impact this period has had on him," he added. "He's a fighter, but now he's rebelling. He told me about his pain and that he had to be strong for our mother. This is a 13-year-old boy talking like a 40-year-old. I stole two years of his childhood, and no one can give them back to him."

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A team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin has uncovered evidence linking an Israeli air base to widespread GPS disruptions affecting civilian airline navigation in the Middle East, according to the New York Times. 

The disruptions, known as "spoofing," involve the transmission of manipulated GPS signals that cause airplane instruments to misread their location. Professors Todd Humphreys and Zach Clements, the lead researchers, stated they are "highly confident" that Ein Shemer Airfield in northern Israel is the source of these attacks. When approached for comment on Tuesday, the Israeli military declined to respond.

Using data captured by low-Earth orbit satellites and ground-based collection in Israel, the researchers were able to trace the origin of the spoofing signals to the air base. This finding comes amidst a sharp increase in GPS interference over the past three years, particularly near conflict zones in Ukraine and Gaza, where militaries employ such tactics to counter missile and drone threats.

The Middle East has emerged as a hotspot for GPS spoofing, with the NYT reporting that a separate analysis estimates over 50,000 flights have been affected in the region this year alone. Researchers from SkAI Data Services and the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, analyzing data from the OpenSky Network, found that these attacks have led pilots to mistakenly believe they were above airports in Beirut or Cairo.

Swiss International Air Lines reported to the NYT that their flights experience spoofing almost daily when flying over the Middle East. The issue extends beyond the region, with Estonia and other Baltic nations accusing Russia of signal disruptions in their airspaces. In April, Finnair temporarily suspended flights to an Estonian airport after two flights were forced to turn back due to severe GPS jamming.

While the attacks have not yet posed significant safety risks, as pilots can rely on alternative navigation methods, they do raise concerns. Jeremy Bennington, vice president of Spirent Communications, a company providing testing for global navigation systems, told the NYT, "Losing GPS is not going to cause airplanes to fall out of the sky. But I also don't want to deny the fact that we are removing layers of safety."

The spoofing attacks can trigger false alerts about planes being too close to the ground and cause navigation confusion, potentially compromising flight safety. As these disruptions continue to affect large areas far from active conflict zones, the aviation industry and international authorities face growing pressure to address this emerging threat to air travel security.

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In the not-too-distant future, the skies will grow increasingly crowded with drones, and civil aviation authorities are concerned about safety.

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In 2020, the number of consumer-level drone services in the United States surpassed $1.25 billion, and according to Markets Insider, drone-related services are projected to make $63.6 billion by 2025.

Drones are playing bigger roles in a host of civilian sectors, including retail delivery, agriculture, construction, insurance, fire surveillance, powerline monitoring, media tasks and law enforcement. And it has aviation authorities and regulators concerned about the associated risk of accidents.

"Unlike 20^th Century traffic, you can't just pull off to the side of the road if you have a drone accident," David Harel, CEO of Asio Technologies, an Israeli company that specializes in solutions for military ground forces, told the Jewish News Syndicate.

Drone accidents can occur for any number of reasons, such as engine or rotor failure, or a power supply fault. While those risks can be overcome by introducing backup components in the drones, the loss of a satellite signal and the cutting off of Global Navigational Satellite System (GNSS) guidance could not be overcome by the drones, leading them to hit the ground.

A crash could mean a free fall into a busy highway with all of the obvious risks that entails.

As a result, Asio has developed a system called NavGuard to provide drones with their own ability to process video feeds from onboard cameras, analyze their surroundings and convert that information into precise location information. In other words, even if satellite signals are cut, drones equipped with the system still know where they are and can continue their journey.

'The need is real, and the market is endless'

Originally developed for the defense and homeland security sectors – Asio has signed a number of contracts to sell NavGuard to such clients – the company has now turned its attention to the civilian market.

"We very quickly learned that the civilian market is our main market," said Harel. "There are much larger quantities of drones here. The need is real, and the market is endless. We are just at this stage where we are breaking through to it," he added.

The problem of unreliable drone navigation may sound theoretical, but once the skies become increasingly crowded with drones, the issue will become acute, he stated.

Retail deliveries by drone are an estimated 70% to 90% cheaper compared to vehicle deliveries, making the financial incentive to switch to drone deliveries clear.

"The problem will be too many drones in the air, and many of the services will begin flying in overpopulated areas," cautioned Harel. "In the past, civilian drone use was mainly limited to agricultural and more remote areas. Now they are being sent to homes. Safety has become critical."

The issue of dependence on GPS signals has therefore become critical as well. With anyone able to order GPS jammers for tens of dollars off the Internet, the ease with which drones can be downed creates what Harel described as "real liability issues" for operators, alongside safety issues.

"If something happens, the operators are liable to lawsuits," he said.

Meanwhile, the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States and the Israel Airports Authority, have designated a 120-meter limitation on permitted altitudes for civilian drones.

One way to overcome the loss of satellite signal is through a system called inertial navigation system (INS), which uses sensors and computers to figure out locations without satellites. But those solutions are expensive and often heavy in weight, noted Harel, making them more suitable for aircraft than small drones.

'A comprehensive solution to navigating independently'

NavGuard's technology is based on a credit-card-sized card that links to the drone's navigation system. It contains a unique algorithm – the hardware – and a software program that runs on the basis of that algorithm. The system connects to day and night cameras.

It then analyzes real-time video feeds from around the drone and matches them to a digital map of the relevant route.

This technology generates a precise geographical location of the drone in the air. "It does not rely on an external signal," said Harel.

The drone can then continue on its route even if it suddenly finds itself without any satellite connection.

"This is a comprehensive solution to the problem of navigating independently of GNSS. It gives a high degree of mission certainty, even when there is a GNSS signal problem," explained Harel.

As a growing number of aviation authorities demand backups to GNSS guidance systems onboard drones, Harel said his company is getting ready to make a big difference to civilian drone use.

"Once there are many drones in the air, authorities will want to know where each one is, just as they know where every plane is. If they don't have such a system, they can't know their location for sure," he said. "Those who don't have this kind of system are also exposed to crashes caused by cyber attacks."

Earlier this year, Asio took part in a large drone trial in southern Israel led by Israel's National Drone Initiative (NDI), which is dedicated to developing agile regulation and supporting ecosystems that enable drone flights in Israel's crowded and limited airspace.

During the trial, the NDI positioned GPS jammers on the ground, and once it made sure there was no satellite signal in the vicinity, challenged drones made by the Blue White Robotics company (with NavGuard installed) to take off and fly accurately along pre-selected routes.

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The tests are part of Israel's initiatives to enable drones to conduct missions such as transferring medicines and corona test results around the country.

To promote autonomous drone flights in urban areas, the NDI "looks for technological solutions that will ensure flight safety and will allow control of the drone," said Dror Ben-David, an NDI content expert on behalf of Ayalon Highway.

"Several technologies worldwide attempting to supply such a solution – NavGuard's technology, in which the drone can geo-locate itself at any given moment – have been found to fulfill the requirement in a satisfying manner," said Ben-David. "As far as we know, the approach demonstrated is the only technology capable of doing so to such level of accuracy."

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In a new study published in Nature Wednesday, Weizmann Institute of Science researchers, in collaboration with colleagues from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, unveiled for the first time how three-dimensional space is represented in the mammalian cortex by the brain's "GPS" system.

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The team of researchers, led by Prof. Nachum Ulanovsky of Weizmann's Neurobiology Department, were surprised to find that this representation is very different from the way in which two-dimensional space is represented, turning several long-standing hypotheses on their heads.

Mammals, including humans, know their position in space, owing to several types of specialized neurons in the hippocampus and its next-door neighbor the entorhinal cortex – regions located deep inside the brain. Head-direction cells, the internal compasses of the brain, indicate to the animal the direction in which its head is turned. Place cells, thought to construct a mental map of the environment, are activated when an animal crosses a specific location. Grid cells, by contrast, respond not to one, but to multiple such locations, and they are thought to provide the brain with a GPS system of sorts.

The study of grid cells and the brain's GPS was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2014. However, these and other studies focused solely on how two dimensions are represented and said very little about the representation of three-dimensional space. To bridge this gap, Ulanovsky and colleagues set out to elucidate how grid cells act in three dimensions in freely behaving bats.

In the past, when grid cells were studied in rodents running on two-dimensional surfaces, they were found to be activated in multiple circular areas, known as firing fields, which are arranged in a symmetrical hexagonal pattern – resembling millimeter graph paper – that tiles the surface. This unparalleled symmetry and periodicity suggest that these cells may be involved in geometric spatial computations that form the core of the cerebral GPS. The entorhinal cortex, where grid cells are located, is the brain area that is first affected in Alzheimer's disease, and it is possible that spatial disorientation, one of the early manifestations of Alzheimer's, is due to the grid cells' dysfunction – and the loss of the hexagonal "millimeter paper" of grid cells.

Mathematically, the optimal way to pack circles in two dimensions is in a hexagonal pattern, like a honeycomb: This is possibly the reason why the circular firing fields of grid cells are represented in the brain in a hexagonal lattice when animals walk over two-dimensional surfaces. Therefore, the researchers expected the activity pattern in three dimensions to be similarly symmetrical and hexagonal. "We and many other researchers hypothesized that we'd see hexagonally stacked balls, like oranges in a grocery store neatly stacked in a pyramid, or any other extremely ordered three-dimensional arrangement," Ulanovsky says.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers, led by doctoral student Gily Ginosar, together with Staff Scientist Dr. Liora Las, recorded the activity of grid cells in bats that had small mobile devices mounted on their heads, as the bats were flying around a room the size of a large living room. Feeding stations at different heights ensured that each bat covered most of the room's volume in every run. Once the data started coming in, the researchers saw that grid cells did not behave as expected when responding to three-dimensional coordinates. "The well-ordered global grid that is the hallmark of their two-dimensional activity was altogether gone," explains Ulanovsky.

Instead, the three-dimensional firing fields of the grid cells, shaped in this case as spheres rather than circles, were packed like a box full of marbles. They were not completely disordered, but were certainly less organized than the three-dimensional equivalent of a hexagonal lattice – as the new arrangement allowed the "marbles" some extra degrees of freedom. Whereas any noticeable global order was lacking, the spheres did commit to a local order wherein the distance between one sphere and its nearest neighbors remained constant.

To offer a mechanistic explanation of this phenomenon of local rather than global order, the experimental team – Ginosar, Las and Ulanovsky – collaborated with theoreticians Dr. Johnatan Aljadeff, a former postdoctoral fellow at Weizmann and now a professor at the University of California in San Diego, and Prof. Haim Sompolinsky and Prof. Yoram Burak from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Together they constructed a model that uses principles, borrowed from statistical physics, that describe the interaction between particles. The model revealed that the spherical firing fields of grid cells seem to interact in almost the same way as particles do – they are "attracted" to one another when at a distance and are "repelled" once they get too close. In particular, the balance of forces acting on particles could explain the local order that kept the spheres at constant local distances from one another, while avoiding any global lattice. Compared to other models that were used in the past to predict the three-dimensional organization of grid cells' firing fields, the new model was the most loyal to the experimental data.

Taken together, the surprising experimental data and theoretical model offer a new way of looking at the neural basis of three-dimensional navigation and the role that grid cells play in this cognitive process. While previous models extrapolated a similar three-dimensional arrangement from the two-dimensional grid, the work of Ulanovsky and colleagues and their "box of marbles" model show that things are much more complex. Since no periodic lattice is formed in three-dimensional space, the classical theories for understanding the intriguing behavior of grid cells will need to be revised.

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The application allows users in quarantine to supply updates about their location, and matches the user's address with their physical location, or the physical location of their device. The only information passed along to the government is the location from where the report was sent, the time, and the telephone number of the quarantined user.

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Synel stressed that the app cannot access any hardware on user's phones, because it is based on GPS data.

In March, the company reached out to the relevant ministries and offered them the use of its app, but the government did not express an interest. Now that the second wave has arrived, with an increasing number of Israelis testing positive for COVID and being ordered to quarantine themselves, Synel has repeated its offer.

"Today, in the midst of the second wave, with tens of thousands of citizens in quarantine, as a proud Israeli business concerned about the health of the public, we are again reaching out and offering effective, immediate help in enforcing quarantine for thousands of Israelis," the company stated in a letter to the government.

Currently, despite movement tracking measures, Israeli COVID patients are largely responsible for policing their own quarantine. The more Israelis are assigned to quarantine, the harder it is for the authorities to ensure that they are following instructions.

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The Al-Manar network, which is identified with Hezbollah, claimed that the device had fallen out of an Israeli aircraft.

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There was no comment from the Israeli defense establishment.

The discovery of the device comes as tensions between Israel and Hezbollah are running high after Hezbollah operative Ali Mohsen was assassinated in Syria. The IDF remains on high alert in the north, and earlier Sunday, Al-Jazeera quoted an unnamed IDF official saying that the high alert would continue "until it was no longer necessary."

The IDF source repeated Israeli messages from the past few days: "We have no intention of carrying out a preemptive attack against Hezbollah or Lebanon. However, we will respond harshly to any Hezbollah attack, and our potential targets include Lebanese state infrastructure."

"We aren't seeking a conflict with Hezbollah, because our top priority is preventing Iran and Syria from entrenching themselves," the source said.

Head of the IDF Spokesperson's Unit's Arab division, Lt. Col. Avichay Adraee, dismissed the comments by the source, saying that the "IDF is ready for any possibility."

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The seizure of commercial vessels and attacks on tankers near the Strait of Hormuz have unsettled shipping lanes that link Middle Eastern oil producers to global markets.

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The United States, which has increased its military forces in the region, has blamed Iran for blasts on several tankers near the strait, a charge Tehran denies.

Britain said on Monday it was joining the United States in a maritime security mission in the gulf to protect vessels after Iran seized a British-flagged tanker.

"Heightened military activity and increased political tensions in this region continue to pose serious threats to commercial vessels," the US Maritime Administration (MARAD) said in an advisory on Wednesday.

"Associated with these threats is a potential for miscalculation or misidentification that could lead to aggressive actions," it added.

Ships should also alert the US Navy's Fifth Fleet and the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations in the event of any incident or suspicious activity. It warned they could face interference to their global positioning systems (GPS).

MARAD said in at least two incidents involving commercial vessels and Iran since May 2019 ships had reported interference with their GPS and "spoofed" communications from unknown entities falsely claiming to be US or other warships.

It advised crews to decline Iranian forces permission to board if the safety of the ship and crew would not be at risk but said they should not forcibly resist any boarding party.

Traffic through the strait, through which about a fifth of the world's oil passes, has become the focus for a standoff between Iran and the United States after President Donald Trump quit a 2015 nuclear pact and reimposed sanctions on Tehran.

Iran says the responsibility of securing these waters lies with Tehran and other countries in the region.

"The maritime coalition that US is trying to form will create more instability and insecurity,"Iran's Defence Minister Amir Hatami was quoted as saying by Iran's Tasnim news agency on Thursday during phone calls with his counterparts from Qatar, Oman and Kuwait.

Washington is lobbying other nations to join the coalition along with Britain, which has the largest naval presence in the area after the United States.

Britain's P&O Cruises said it had canceled cruises around Dubai and the Gulf because of the increased tensions.

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