Israel's all-seeing eye is the stealthiest cruelty of all in Gaza

Discussions of the war in Gaza tend to focus on what’s visible. The instinct is understandable: Over two years of brutal conflict, the Israel Defense Forces have all but destroyed the diminutive strip on the Mediterranean coast, with the scale of the carnage illustrated by images of emaciated children, shrapnel-ridden bodies, and flattened buildings.

But underlying all of this destruction is a hidden force — a carefully constructed infrastructure of Israeli surveillance that powers the war effort and keeps tabs on the smallest facets of Palestinians’ lives.

Few people understand this system more deeply than Mohammed Mhawish, a Palestinian journalist who fled Gaza in 2024 after being targeted by Israeli airstrikes for his reporting. In a recent essay for New York Magazine, Mhawish traced the contours of Israel’s surveillance system through the eyes of the Gazans who live through it every day.

RS spoke with Mhawish over email to get his insights about how this system of surveillance has powered the war in Gaza and created a culture of fear among Palestinians. The conversation also touches on Mhawish’s decision to leave Gaza — and how he knows that Israel tried to kill him for his journalism.

RS: In your piece, you mention a poll saying that "nearly two-thirds of Gazans believed they were constantly watched by the Israeli government." How does this feeling of surveillance affect life in Gaza? How would you describe the feeling to those of us who have never experienced it?

Mhawish: In Gaza, surveillance actively structures daily life. It determines how people move, communicate, gather, and survive. Nearly everyone I spoke to understood themselves as data points inside a system that continuously observes, records, and evaluates them.

This awareness produces a constant state of constraint. Phones are treated with suspicion, even fear. People limit calls, change SIM cards, power down devices, avoid repeated routes, and hesitate before gathering with others. Parents instruct children not to linger in certain places. Journalists and medics described modifying their work because they knew patterns could be extracted and interpreted later. Surveillance works by narrowing the range of what feels safe for everyone there.

What distinguishes Gaza is that surveillance is both totalizing and opaque. People know they are being watched, but they don’t know how, by whom, or according to what criteria. There is no way to clarify a misunderstanding or correct a false assumption. The system does not explain itself. That uncertainty turns ordinary behavior into potential exposure.

For those who have never lived under it, they might need to imagine that every movement, call, or association could be logged and assigned meaning by an unseen authority, and that those judgments could lead directly to deadly consequences in real time. It is fear of being misclassified by a system that can not be challenged.

RS: Israeli officials often point to the fact that they withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2006 as evidence of their benevolence. They argue Israel had essentially allowed Palestinians to have a territory that they could govern on their own, and Palestinians had wasted that chance by allowing Hamas to take power. How does your work complicate the narrative of Israeli disengagement from Gaza? What did surveillance look like before the war?

Mhawish: My reporting shows that Israeli “disengagement” from Gaza was never a withdrawal from control. It was merely a shift in how control was exercised. Physical presence was replaced with technological dominance.

Long before the current war, Gaza existed under constant aerial surveillance, communications interception, population registries, and data-driven monitoring. Israel controlled Gaza’s borders, airspace, coastline, electromagnetic spectrum, and civil registries. Movement in and out of the Strip, access to medical care, imports, and even family reunification were all mediated through Israeli databases informed by surveillance.

Surveillance allowed Israel to manage Gaza remotely and comprehensively. Intelligence sources and prior investigations describe systems that mapped neighborhoods, tracked social and familial networks, and analyzed behavioral patterns. Control did not require soldiers on every street, only access to required sensors, databases, and algorithms capable of rendering the population legible from afar.

This fundamentally undermines the idea that Gaza was ever allowed to govern itself. Governance without sovereignty is not autonomy. Surveillance ensured that Israel retained decisive authority over Gaza’s population while maintaining the fiction of withdrawal.

RS: Israel bombed your apartment in late 2023, destroying your home and injuring you and your family. What led you to conclude that this attack was a response to your journalistic work? Did other press colleagues have similar experiences?

Mhawish: The bombing of my apartment was a direct result of my reporting.

In the weeks leading up to the strike, I received multiple threats from the Israeli military in response to my journalistic work. These included direct communications warning me about my reporting. Eventually, I received a phone call informing me that my house would be bombed. Shortly afterward, it was.

My apartment was civilian. There was no military activity there. My family was inside. The strike destroyed our home and injured my family members.

What made this experience even more unmistakable was how common it was among Palestinian journalists. Colleagues told me a similar sequence: reporting, threats, warning calls, and then strikes on their homes rather than on them in the field. These attacks often targeted family residences, maximizing harm while sending a clear message.

This is part of a systematic effort to intimidate journalists by demonstrating that reporting carries consequences not only for them, but for their family. It collapses the distinction between professional risk and private life and makes journalism itself a punishable act.

RS: What do we know about the role of American companies in this surveillance regime?

Mhawish: American technology companies are not peripheral to Israel’s surveillance architecture. Israeli military and intelligence units rely on U.S.-based cloud infrastructure, data storage, data processing, and AI-related technologies to collect, analyze, and retain vast amounts of information on Palestinians.

This relationship is reinforced by the movement of personnel between Israeli intelligence units and major tech firms, creating a feedback loop in which military expertise informs commercial products and commercial tools enable military surveillance. While companies often claim neutrality, their technologies are embedded in systems that monitor, categorize, and target a civilian population under occupation.

Gaza demonstrates how commercial technologies developed for efficiency, scale, and optimization can be repurposed for population-level surveillance and warfare. The issue is [companies] are not willing to accept responsibility when their tools become foundational to systems of domination.

RS: How could this surveillance regime be used for the proposed system of only allowing "vetted" Palestinians to live in rebuilt communities on the Israeli-occupied side of the yellow line in Gaza?

Mhawish: The proposed vetting system is only possible because the surveillance infrastructure already exists. Israel has spent years building databases capable of assigning suspicion and risk scores to individuals based on opaque criteria derived from communications data, movement patterns, and social networks.

Applied to reconstruction, this system could determine who is allowed to return, who receives travel permits, who is denied treatment outside, and who is permanently excluded. Vetting does not follow a transparent legal process, because it’s based on an algorithmic judgment rendered without explanation or appeal.

This kind of system enables displacement without explicit expulsion. People would be filtered out quietly — through denied access, stalled applications, or unexplained rejections — while the underlying logic remains hidden. Surveillance becomes a mechanism for shaping the postwar population under the language of security.

In that sense, Israel's surveillance of Palestinians in Gaza is about controlling who is allowed to exist, where, and under what conditions afterward.