A civil society project made up of hundreds of volunteers is using facial recognition software to match faces with names of those still missing
Several rooms at Expo Tel Aviv buzz with people scouring the Internet, sharing clues with each other as they try to match the faces they see in videos posted by survivors of the attack.At a convention centre in the heart of Tel Aviv, Israel’s largest city, hundreds of volunteers spend their days staring at photos and videos, some of them horrific, trying to match the faces they see with the names of those still missing after the recent Hamas invasion.
The second decision was that they would take the energy, and the connections, of the protest movement, and redirect all of it to helping the victims of the unfolding tragedy. “When a startup starts with three or four people in a garage, if it is upscaled to 500 persons, normally that happens in like, seven years, five years. And it’s also very difficult to do it and to maintain it. This was done in five days. It’s unbelievable,” said Amit Feldman, a documentary movie director who on Sunday was volunteering at Expo Tel Aviv.
Four days after the invasion, the volunteers realized they would need to set up a separate desk for foreigners and dual nationals caught up in the attack. The Israeli military says at least 126 people are being held hostage by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Vivian Silver, a 74-year-old grandmother and peace activist with roots in Winnipeg who was at her home in Kibbutz Be’eri when it was attacked by Hamas gunmen, is still on the list of the missing. Ariella Giniger, a friend of Ms. Silver’s, told The Globe and Mail on Sunday that there was still no trace of Ms. Silver. The only clue to her whereabouts is that her mobile phone has been located in Gaza, Ms. Giniger said.
As the lists of those dead and taken hostage continue to grow, so will the political pressure on Mr. Netanyahu, whose government is viewed by many Israelis as having been too focused on its domestic agenda, instead of the threat posed by Hamas.
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