Israeli general-turned-Elbit executive brags about mass targeting of Palestinians

Israeli general and Elbit Systems executive Miki Edelstein has bragged that Elbit technology was used to track hundreds of thousands of targets in Gaza and Lebanon. Edelstein was speaking at a ‘land warfare’ event held at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) thinktank. He appeared on a panel with two British officers.

The Guardian reported on 6 July:

A total of 850,000 targets were detected in real time by the Israeli Tzayad digital army programme across all the military’s theatres of war between 7 October and the end of 2025.

The legacy outlet also claimed that RUSI kept Edelstein’s planned appearance alongside serving British officers very quiet until the last minute:

Nato’s second most senior military commander, Britain’s Air Chief Marshal Sir Johnny Stringer, was sitting next to him on a panel at the event. A third speaker at the session was a brigadier from the British army.

Though the presence of the two senior British officers had been advertised on the agenda in advance, Edelstein was simply billed as a “speaker to be announced” until the session on “integrating novel with core capabilities” began.

Underhand behavior, if true. And it is worth noting that the event was sponsored by three arms firms Babcock, Stark Industries and new kid on the block Helsing.

The Guardian also reported:

A slide presented by Edelstein to the largely military audience included a line describing the “high-tempo operations” run by the Israel Defense Forces, and cited more than 20,000 IDF battle plans and 850,000 “R.T. [real-time] intel targets”.

Adding:

The targets were described by Edelstein 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.

The system in question is called Hunter, or Tzayad. It is described as:

a command system that maps the positions of friendly units and of those deemed to be enemies.

The paper added:

Earlier this year, the company won a contract to further develop Tzayad, using artificial intelligence to support tactical decision-making.

Elbit’s strenuous denials

An Elbit spokesman later told the press that the slide Edelstein showed as not accurate, denying:

that the 850,000 figure cited by Edelstein 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 said:

it demonstrated the volume of information being processed by the Israeli military: “The figures represent system activity and operational data, rather than the number of enemy targets or actual strikes.”

A United Nations committee has found that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. This has not stopped Israel’s allies arming the settler-colonial state. The UK has flown spy flights over Gaza, sent arms to Israel and even trained Israeli personnel since the genocide began.

Despite an active genocide, British generals are still comfortable sitting alongside an Israel arms firm boss/general at a thinktank conference. We probably shouldn’t be shocked at this stage RUSI would platforming such a figure makes more sense when you understand that ‘thinktank’ itself is funded by arms firms like BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin and Leonardo, as well as the US and UK governments.

Featured image via the Canary / Barold