Ever since October 7, Israel has been churning out creative and innovative solutions to unprecedented problems. Below are the ones that have caught my attention.
The Oct 7 Tech Rescue Team
Ami Daniel, co-founder and CEO of Windward, woke up on October 7 and realized that people needed help. He pivoted to use tech and AI to deploy anyone available to rescue individuals trapped in the South, coordinating requests via hundreds of WhatsApp messages sharing location pins and cries for help with people who could get those people out. Listen to the entire story featured on this podcast episode of “Invested by Aleph.” Here’s an excerpt.
And and I'm getting these locations from people and I think at that time I think what's crazy is there are terrorists in the houses. It's not that this is done and the army's like, you know, there are three to five terrorists in every house.
Oftentimes and I've spoken to many many families- and I help them- they're in their shelter locked the the dad is pushing the the door handle so people don't open it. The terrorists are setting the house on fire because they can't open it because of that; they are waiting for hours and the door is becoming hot and the terrorists either putting it on fire or not putting it on fire and waiting outside the door ambushing the forces.
So at that time what I end up telling the forces is not just that there are people in this house- because they don't know where they are because many have been kidnapped- but also where the terrorists are. To the extent that right now, listen, they send me WhatsApp pictures from the ground and send me live location and I send them back maps with drawings that I do on my iPhone of where the terrorists are and and I try to help them [the IDF] understand in which windows are the terrorists and where did they miss them. And we had one family, the Mor family, where the dad has ALS and he just- he’s in a wheelchair. So we had to tell the two kids to jump through the bathroom window while the forces go in and blow up the door. And we knew there are two terrorists hiding from them, one in the stairs and one on the second floor. And it's very surreal because I'm just like, I'm just a CEO of a tech company, right? I don't usually, I don't usually work with ground forces to tell them where the terrorists are.
It’s also worth reading Ami’s LinkedIn post about this experience.
Using A.I. to Help Identify Victims
Watch this New York Times video about Brothers and Sisters in Israel. Originally founded to protest judiciary reforms, they “shifted their mission to helping victims of the attacks, and together with volunteers from Israel’s leading tech companies, created a sophisticated data operation to help find out more about those missing, taken hostage or killed.”
Here’s an excerpt.
Right now, we have around some hundreds of problems of missing people that we try to understand whether they’re missing or whether they’re dead. We are not the army. We are civilians and can only use open information. You want to look in the Facebook, internet, whatever you can. This is something that tech can help. So let me give you an example. We saw a video of a wife and a husband sitting on the floor where a Hamas person is with a rifle above their head. Using techniques of sound and using techniques of A.I., by identifying the specific fabric of their underwear, we were able to find another video where you don’t see his face. That means that the Hamas took him in captive and we think he’s dead or unconscious. I have another example. A father got interviewed to one of the channels. He showed the movie of his kid and three children where a soldier protects them. We knew that their life — when they came back to find their children, they didn’t find anything, only traces of blood. So they thought they were captured. Two minutes after, a woman calls me and said, I have the two minutes after the video of the father that showed you. And I said, what? What the video shows. She sent it to me. And unfortunately, at that video, we see the children slaughtered. So we know that if they are in Gaza, they are dead or they are somewhere in Israel as a corpse, but they are not, unfortunately, alive. Those are kinds of information that is tragic information, but it’s very important for the families to know that. People are coming day after day, making sure that we find another person, another person. I was not a combat soldier in the army. I was doing tech also in the army. But here, sitting together, shoulder to shoulder, I learned how to fight.
I am amazed that these volunteers were able to use information like the specific fabric of someone’s underwear to scour the Internet to discover whether an individual was dead or alive.
If the NYT video is paywalled for you, you can also read ‘I found a hostage!’: Inside the Tel Aviv war room where civilians locate the kidnapped from The Forward.
DNA Extraction from Degraded Remains
We want to bury every individual with dignity. We also want to make sure every individual receives an answer as to whether their loved one is dead or alive. In order to do this, Israel had to get very creative. One example of how they achieved this is below (excerpted from this article):
“We have had to get creative. For instance, we were dealing with the remains of some unidentified babies. The Health Ministry has a list of missing people, and people from the ministry went to the hospitals where the babies on the list were born. They were able to get the cards with the blood samples taken from the babies at birth for clinical diagnosis,” Bublil said.
By extracting the DNA from the blood on those hospital cards, it was possible to positively identify the dead bodies of six infants on the missing persons list.
This is, of course, extremely sad, but it is also ingenious.
Calling Archeologists to Aid in the Identification Effort
The Israel Antiquities Authority sent archeologists to aid in the identification effort. See this video for details.
A Times of Israel article elaborates on this, stating
In an announcement Tuesday, the Israel Antiquities Authority said that since joining the effort two weeks ago, its archaeologists had helped authorities identify 10 men, women and children previously thought missing.
Using techniques from their experience in excavations of burnt and destroyed ancient sites, the archaeologists have been combing and sieving ash from burnt houses in Be’eri, Kfar Aza and Nir Oz, three kibbutzim devastated in the attacks. They have also examined the contents of cars from an outdoor festival where Hamas terrorists slaughtered 260 people.
Art Installations & Online Videos To Raise Awareness About the Plight of the Hostages
Read this Haaretz article entitled “Israeli Artists Get Creative in Order to Highlight Plight of Hostages Held in Gaza.”
Here’s an excerpt:
Another innovative appeal making its way onto Instagram and other platforms is a sophisticated, lifelike animation depicting the experience of the two sons of Renana Gome. It shows her two sons – Or, 16, and Yagil, 12 – experiencing the Hamas assault on their home at Kibbutz Nir Oz, where they were sleeping alone on October 7.
Gome also narrates the film, which in Hebrew is called “Don’t Take Me, I’m Only a Boy.”
“They got into the safe room,” she recounts in the animation, “they called me, scared to death. They said they hear someone breaking into our home. Over the phone, I heard voices speaking in Arabic. Even though my son was trying hard to hold it closed, the door to the safe room was pushed open.”
A frightening figure is then seen looming over the boys. “Last I heard was my youngest saying ‘Don’t take me – I’m too young.’”
You have likely already seen other art installations and efforts including but not limited to:
The “Kidnapped” posters (link here)
The Empty Shabbat Table project (link here for one example- but this has also occurred in places as central as Times Square in New York City)
The captive teddy bears (link here)
The empty stroller project (link here)
Balloons attached to teddy bears on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame
Amidst all the horror, it is heartening to see Israeli creativity and innovation thrive. In order to win this war, we don’t only need physical strength. We also need the kind of creativity we see here- the ability to think flexibly and adapt. As long as we can do that, we can rise to meet - and hopefully, ultimately, in the future, prevent- any crisis.
ביחד ננצח.