Farrell McGuire’s documentary examines how digital technology has become entangled with the bombardment of Gaza, the policing of Palestinian life, commercial disinformation and attacks on Israeli civilians’ privacy.
Twenty seconds to review a person marked for a potential air strike. A smartphone photograph that adds a Palestinian resident to a military database. Thousands of fabricated social media identities available to clients seeking political influence. A stolen dating profile that threatens to expose someone’s most intimate private information.
These are among the cases brought together in Horrors on Israel’s Internet, a documentary by Farrell McGuire published on 29 August 2026. Across its examination of warfare, occupation, political manipulation and cyberattacks, the film asks what happens when the ability to collect and process information develops faster than the institutions meant to restrain its use. Watch McGuire’s documentary.
Its most consequential material concerns Palestinians living under bombardment or military occupation. Here, the systems described in the film can influence who becomes a target, who passes through a checkpoint and whose movements are recorded. Other chapters turn towards commercial influence operations and the vulnerability of Israeli citizens themselves, whose personal data has been exposed through both security failures and deliberate attacks.
The connections are disturbing, but the actors and responsibilities differ. Military targeting systems, private contractors selling manipulation services and hackers attacking civilians operate through distinct chains of authority. Understanding those distinctions is essential to tracing responsibility for the harm the documentary describes.
The film begins its substantive investigation with the acceleration of Israeli targeting in Gaza, drawing heavily on reporting by Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham for +972 Magazine and Local Call.
In an investigation published on 30 November 2023, Abraham described the use of Habsora, commonly translated as “The Gospel”, to generate potential bombing targets through automated analysis of intelligence. One former intelligence officer characterised the broader process as a “mass assassination factory”.
The system’s importance lay in the volume of recommendations it could produce. Former military chief Aviv Kochavi had described the generation of 100 new targets a day during the 2021 Gaza operation, compared with periods when the military produced 50 a year. These figures referred to target generation within the process being discussed; they were not a measure of completed strikes or deaths.
That chronology also matters. The technology preceded the October 2023 war. Its subsequent use formed part of an expanding approach to intelligence and targeting, rather than an invention assembled from scratch after the Hamas led attacks. Abraham’s November 2023 investigation.
The deeper controversy emerged with a second investigation, published on 3 April 2024, based on accounts from six Israeli intelligence officers. They described a system called Lavender that identified people suspected of belonging to the military wings of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, assigning scores derived from large quantities of surveillance data.
According to those sources, Lavender marked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as potential targets during the war’s early stages. One officer described spending approximately 20 seconds reviewing each recommendation, largely to check that the person was male. A separate system, known as “Where’s Daddy?”, reportedly helped identify when selected individuals entered their family homes.
Sources also described early authorisations allowing an anticipated 15 or 20 civilian deaths when striking some junior operatives. Those figures concerned permitted expectations of civilian harm, rather than a measured casualty ratio across all attacks.
The reporting alleged that human approval remained within the process but could become cursory. It also attributed a supposed 90 per cent accuracy rate to an internal sample described by anonymous sources, rather than an official military admission. The 37,000 figure was a list of people flagged, not a count of people killed. Abraham’s April 2024 investigation.
The Israeli military disputed central elements of that account. In its response on 3 April 2024, it denied using artificial intelligence to determine whether a person was a terrorist, described the relevant tool as a database for cross referencing intelligence, and said analysts must independently verify targets. It also rejected the allegation that categorical civilian casualty allowances governed strikes. The IDF’s published response.
The unresolved question is how those stated safeguards operated in practice. The officers’ accounts raise the possibility that the speed and apparent authority of a machine’s recommendation displaced meaningful scrutiny. Responsibility still rests with the people who design the rules, authorise the attacks and decide how much uncertainty to tolerate.
McGuire also cites reporting on the proportion of civilians among Gaza’s dead. A joint investigation by +972, Local Call and the Guardian, published on 21 August 2025, compared approximately 8,900 Hamas and Islamic Jihad military operatives recorded as dead or probably dead in an Israeli intelligence database with roughly 53,000 reported Palestinian deaths by May 2025.
The comparison led the reporters to estimate a civilian share above 83 per cent. They had aggregate figures, rather than the underlying names, and both totals carried limitations: the database did not necessarily capture every fighter, while the overall death toll could itself be incomplete. The military subsequently disputed the published figures. The findings significantly challenged official accounts of the war’s conduct, while leaving uncertainty about the exact civilian proportion. The August 2025 investigation.
From Gaza, the documentary turns to Hebron, where technology operates through the routines of occupation. McGuire introduces the city through a personal connection to Derry, where one of his grandparents grew up. His comparison concerns divided urban space, military checkpoints and the intrusion of political conflict into ordinary journeys.
The comparison leads into a specifically Palestinian experience. In Hebron’s H2 area, Israeli settlers live among a much larger Palestinian population under Israeli military control. Movement restrictions shape access to homes, businesses and streets, while surveillance adds another layer of control over those journeys.
Amnesty International’s Automated Apartheid investigation, published on 2 May 2023, documented a system called Red Wolf at checkpoints in Hebron. It described facial scans being checked against databases containing information about Palestinians, with the results used to determine passage and new faces automatically registered.
The organisation also examined Blue Wolf, a mobile application allowing soldiers to retrieve information on Palestinians. Testimony described rankings and prizes linked to the number of people registered, turning the expansion of surveillance into a competition among military units.
For residents, the consequences extended beyond privacy. Amnesty documented restrictions and surveillance that eroded social life and made people feel continually exposed. A person’s ability to reach home could depend on what a military database recorded about them. Amnesty’s May 2023 findings.
McGuire uses the language of digital dystopia to describe these systems, but the practical problem is readily recognisable: people are being required to submit their identities and movements to an authority whose decisions they have little power to challenge. The convenience promised by automation is experienced differently by the soldier operating a device and the resident waiting for permission to pass.
The Israeli military has defended its surveillance activity as necessary for security and intelligence purposes. Amnesty’s assessment is that these technologies reinforce discriminatory restrictions and an existing system of apartheid. That disagreement concerns the purpose and structure of the surveillance, as well as the accuracy of any individual facial match. The military’s response to the surveillance findings.
The documentary then changes scale, following a single smartphone into a scandal over alleged abuse at the Sde Teiman detention facility. The device belonged to Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the former military advocate general, whose office had pursued allegations against Israeli reservists.
On 19 February 2025, five reservists were indicted over an alleged assault on a Palestinian detainee on 5 July 2024. The case involved severe injuries, including broken ribs, a punctured lung and a rectal tear requiring surgery. Prosecutors alleged severe injury and aggravated abuse; the indictment did not include the aggravated sodomy charge initially investigated. The indictment reported in February 2025.
The investigation had already produced an extraordinary political confrontation. Suspects were arrested in July 2024, prompting protests and incursions into military bases by supporters. Channel 12 subsequently broadcast surveillance footage on 6 August. Shields obscured part of the scene, leaving the footage to be assessed alongside the detainee’s account and medical evidence.
The question of who authorised that broadcast later became a separate criminal matter. An investigation into the leak began on 29 October 2025. Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned two days later, acknowledging that she had approved the release of material to counter attacks on military investigators and prosecutors. The chronology of the abuse and leak investigations.
She briefly disappeared on 2 November and was found alive, while her missing phone became the subject of a police search. A swimmer recovered the device from the sea on 7 November. The episode supplied the documentary with a striking narrative thread, but the central public question remained the treatment of the detainee and the ability of the military justice system to investigate its own personnel. Reporting on the phone’s recovery.
On 12 March 2026, Tomer-Yerushalmi’s successor, Itai Ofir, withdrew the indictment against the five reservists. His decision cited a combination of evidentiary and procedural difficulties, including the obscured footage, differing accounts, the detainee’s release to Gaza and problems arising from the leak investigation.
The decision did not establish that the injuries were invented or that the underlying assault allegations had been fabricated. It still described the evidence as presenting a “grave and troubling picture”. Withdrawal meant the prosecution would not proceed on the available basis; it did not deliver a judicial finding resolving what happened to the detainee. The military’s written decision.
Legal scholars Yuval Shany and Amichai Cohen subsequently examined both the evidentiary problems and the consequences of abandoning the case. They noted that the television broadcast had mixed images from two facilities without clearly distinguishing them. That editorial problem was distinct from the existence of original CCTV and medical evidence. Their April 2026 analysis.
The record also shows that the leak investigation was not the only occasion on which someone was arrested or punished. Suspects in the alleged assault had been detained long before Tomer-Yerushalmi’s arrest. In a separate Sde Teiman case, another reservist received seven months’ imprisonment in February 2025 after pleading guilty to repeated abuse of bound and blindfolded detainees. The IDF’s statement on that separate conviction.
These distinctions sharpen the accountability question. Evidence can reach the public, generate a political crisis and still fail to produce a completed trial in the case that first caused the outrage. The controversy surrounding its disclosure can come to dominate public attention, while the alleged victim’s experience remains unresolved.
Beyond the military, McGuire examines an industry in which covert digital capabilities are offered to paying clients. His principal example is Team Jorge, exposed by an international reporting consortium coordinated by Forbidden Stories in February 2023.
During undercover meetings in 2022, journalists recorded Tal Hanan, who used the name Jorge, offering hacking and influence services. His claims included participation in 33 presidential campaigns, with 27 successful outcomes, a record the investigators cautioned was difficult to verify.
What they could examine was the operation’s machinery. Its Advanced Impact Media Solutions platform, or AIMS, displayed a catalogue of more than 30,000 profiles. Journalists verified fabricated accounts and observed access to compromised messaging accounts, including accounts associated with Kenyan political figures. Hanan denied wrongdoing. Forbidden Stories’ original investigation.
In McGuire’s account, the sophistication of the fabricated identities lies in their apparent ordinariness. Accounts can establish histories across platforms, discuss unrelated subjects and then converge on a political message. The resulting activity creates the appearance of a public response while concealing the organisation and client directing it.
The documentary also describes efforts to introduce misleading material into established media, where it can acquire the authority of a recognised outlet before being amplified online. For readers and viewers, the difficulty is that the manipulation can be distributed across several stages, with no single post revealing the full operation.
A more recent investigation gives the issue a continuing relevance. On 11 June 2026, France’s VIGINUM agency published findings on an influence operation it called Rokh Solis, tracing technical connections towards the Israeli company Blackcore.
The report described campaigns against French political figures and coordinated activity involving Scotland and New York. In the Scottish case, it identified at least 256 accounts responsible for approximately 1,400 comments between January and May 2026. Its findings concerning New York included accounts joining political groups and two accounts sharing Andrew Cuomo posts in October 2025.
VIGINUM also recorded clear limits: the French operation had low online visibility, the precise responsible company and operators could not be identified with sufficient confidence, and the clients’ identities and origins were unknown. These findings documented suspected interference without establishing that election results had been changed. VIGINUM’s June 2026 technical report.
Reuters reported that Israel’s embassy denied any intention to interfere in French politics and said it awaited details of the investigation. BlackCore did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The company’s suspected role should not be conflated with Team Jorge or treated as proof of Israeli government direction. Reuters’ June 2026 reporting.
The documentary’s final cases bring the consequences of digital exposure into Israeli homes. They also challenge the assumption that a country’s offensive cyber capabilities necessarily translate into protection for its citizens’ personal information.
In February 2020, a security failure involving Elector, an election application used by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, exposed information relating to approximately 6.5 million eligible voters. Reporting described access to the national voter registry through a flaw that did not require advanced technical skills to exploit. Names, addresses and identity numbers were among the information at risk. Contemporaneous New York Times reporting, republished by Forbes India.
McGuire recounts how software developer and technology journalist Ran Bar-Zik demonstrated the weakness, describing administrative credentials being exposed through the application’s infrastructure. The broader issue was institutional: a system intended to organise political participation had become a point of access to highly sensitive information about an entire electorate.
Later that year, the Black Shadow hacking group attacked the insurer Shirbit and released private documents while demanding a ransom. The material included identifying documents and information about customers, some of whom worked in public service. As the insurer resisted payment, the attackers released additional information and increased their demands. Reporting from December 2020.
The same group returned in 2021 with an attack on CyberServe, whose clients included Atraf, an LGBTQ dating and social platform. On 2 November, after demanding $1 million, the hackers released what they said was the site’s user database.
The risk was intensely personal. Profiles could contain contact information, intimate images and HIV status, potentially exposing people who had not disclosed their sexuality to family members, employers or their wider communities. Hila Peer of the Israeli LGBTQ organisation Aguda told AFP that calls to its support line had doubled as fear spread. Some users faced potentially life threatening consequences from disclosure. AFP’s November 2021 reporting.
Israeli cyber authorities have linked Black Shadow to Iran’s intelligence ministry. That attribution places the attacks within a wider confrontation between states, but the immediate victims were civilians whose private lives had become instruments of intimidation. Reporting on the Israeli authorities’ attribution.
Across these cases, McGuire repeatedly returns to the people behind the data. His objection to treating Palestine principally as a Western political controversy is especially direct: “Mass human suffering doesn’t get erased by college students acting cringe.” However one judges the conduct of activists, his argument is that it cannot determine whether the underlying suffering deserves attention.
The legal scrutiny of Israel’s conduct has also continued beyond the investigations featured in the film. On 16 September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Israel rejected the findings. The commission’s conclusion is a specific investigative finding, distinct from a final judgment by an international court. The commission’s findings.
McGuire’s documentary brings together cases that are often reported separately: an intelligence recommendation, a checkpoint database, a leaked recording, a fabricated account and a stolen private profile. Taken together, they show how the collection and circulation of information can give institutions and individuals extraordinary power over others.
The resulting question is who can challenge that power. For a Palestinian family affected by a targeting decision, a resident stopped at a checkpoint or an Israeli civilian threatened with exposure, accountability requires access to evidence, an opportunity to contest decisions and institutions willing to investigate those responsible. The sophistication of the technology offers no guarantee that any of those protections will follow.
