BEIRUT — The buzz of the Israeli drone was constant that day, and every time Ahmad Turmus looked up, it seemed to be circling over him, like an all-too-patient bird of prey.
So when the phone rang as he was visiting family one Monday afternoon in February, Turmus wasn’t too surprised that the person speaking accented Arabic was an Israeli military officer.
What surprised him was the question.
“Ahmad, you want to die with those around you or alone?”
Turmus, according to family members interviewed, answered with one word before hanging up: “Alone.”
The targeting of Turmus, which Israel acknowledged, demonstrates how, time and again, its military has mastered an intelligence war for which Hezbollah appears to have no answer.
Ever since the spectacular pager attacks of September 2024 — when Israel remotely detonated explosives hidden in pagers carried by Hezbollah members — foot soldiers, support personnel, field commanders, chiefs of staff and even a revered secretary general have been felled by a targeting system powered by artificial intelligence.
The system, which fuses data from smartphones, security and traffic cameras, Wi-Fi signals, drones, government databases and social media, has granted Israel what seems an almost omniscient ability to track Hezbollah cadres’ every movement.
Turmus, 62, was serving as a liaison between Hezbollah and residents of Talloosah, a small village less than three miles from the Israeli border which had turned into a battlefield during Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah in 2024.
Throughout the 15-month ceasefire that followed, he spent his time coordinating with repair personnel and civil defense crews to get the village running, even as Israeli strikes persisted across south Lebanon.
His family described him as a former fighter for the militant Islamist group, but who in his older age had taken an administrative role. Israel said he was working on “military and financial matters … to rehabilitate Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure.”
Whatever his role, he too was now ensnared in Israel’s kill chain — the culmination of an intelligence-gathering process that began years ago.
There are multiple ways Turmus could have landed in the military’s cross-hairs, none of them a smoking gun on its own, but all potential grist for the algorithm that eventually picked him to be killed that February day.
For one, he lived in Talloosah, a Shiite-dominated village supportive of Hezbollah, meaning the movements of Turmus and other residents were constantly under the surveillance of Israeli drones.
According to an AI specialist who worked with defense firms until he raised concerns about the use of such systems in Gaza, the drones’ cameras probably filmed and recorded his face, along with the make and license plate of his car and his home.
A trailer carries the coffins containing the bodies of Hezbollah’s former leader Hassan Nasrallah and his cousin and successor Hashem Safieddine through Beirut, Lebanon, on Feb. 23, 2025. The Israeli military has used high-tech to target Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders.
(Hassan Ammar / Associated Press)
The drones could have used cell-site simulators — known as “stingrays” — to masquerade as cellphone towers and trick his smartphone into connecting, granting them access not only to Turmus’ data but his movements in real time.
Even if Turmus switched SIM cards, he still would have been tracked, said the AI specialist, who was granted anonymity to be able to discuss his work.
“It’s a massive data pipeline: phone metadata, location pings, SIM card swaps, app usage, social media behavior, sometimes even banking or facial recognition inputs. A lot is ‘scraped’ from commercial platforms, mobile networks, partner intelligence agencies, or spies on the ground,” the AI specialist said.
Once collected, platforms, such as Palantir’s Maven, standardize, tag and score all the data, linking it to identities across devices and accounts. Palantir has spoken openly about its work with the Israeli military.
AI is then able to build a timeline of a subject’s activity and map the network of their relationships.
There too, Turmus could have been flagged: One of his sons was a Hezbollah fighter killed in early 2024; another was injured in the pager attacks.
Tracking Turmus would have been made easier by Israel’s deep and cumulative intelligence infiltration of Lebanon, said retired Gen. Mounir Shehadeh, who served as the Lebanese government’s coordinator to the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.
Much of the country’s data infrastructure — including databases with information on mobile phone subscribers or vehicle registrations — has been accessible to the Israelis for two decades; they also hacked into Hezbollah’s terrestrial network and its signal corps, he said. Hezbollah’s involvement in the civil war in Syria from 2011 to 2024 further compromised the group’s security.
“These factors allowed Israel to construct a precise target bank encompassing both field commanders and high-ranking leadership figures,” Shehadeh said.
The AI comes in at this stage. Rapidly going through terabytes of data, it detects patterns, and compares them to the movements of someone who is a known threat or has shown up near flagged zones. It also analyzes deviations from a subject’s routine. All that is used to create a so-called threat profile.
The result, according to an Israeli colonel interviewed in a February 2023 Israeli military article about AI in combat, is a system that could find targets quickly.
“The system does this process in seconds, while in the past would have taken hundreds of investigators several weeks to do,” said the head of Israeli military’s Artificial Intelligence Center, identified only as Col. Yoav.
But one concern, the AI specialist said, is that these systems use data, not logic, to determine if someone is dangerous. And if that information is flawed, then it would keep repeating the same mistakes, but “faster and with more confidence.”
“It creates this illusion of certainty, and that’s dangerous because it turns correlation into action without always having context,” the specialist said.
“It’s not like a lab,” he added. “So how does the system know who’s who? And when it flags someone — is it a human decision or just an algorithm flipping a switch?”
Another problem is that such systems rely on tracking mundane, routine activities — like who is talking to whom, or where and when they’re traveling — to calculate the probability that someone is a combatant, potentially leading to false positives, said Vasji Badalic, a professor at the Institute of Criminology in Slovenia, who wrote a 2023 research paper on the rise of metadata and big-data driven targeting processes.
“Relatives, or people engaging in propaganda or finances, they’re not combatants, but the machine recognizes them as so because they have similar communication patterns,” Badalic said.
“Where do they put the threshold, that divides combatants and civilians?”
The effort to deploy machine-learning to suss out targets or anticipate events in a war zone is not new. During the Iraq war under President George W. Bush, the U.S. military hoovered phone metadata and processed it to look for what it deemed suspicious activity.
The National Security Agency also developed a behavioral profiling program, SKYNET, to identify Al Qaeda couriers in Afghanistan.
By 2019, companies like Amazon and Microsoft had developed sufficient “compute” — computing power — to run the math on more complex scenarios that would improve forecasting.
The U.S. military in Afghanistan used those advances to develop Raven Sentry, an AI trained on reports of insurgent attacks stretching back to the ‘80s, along with ancillary information such as the amount of street lighting in various areas.
By the time the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021, the model’s predictions on locations of upcoming attack achieved a 70% success rate, putting it roughly on par with human analysts, according to Col. Thomas W. Spahr, who wrote about Raven Sentry at the U.S. Army’s War College.
Despite Israel’s success in Lebanon, there are signs Hezbollah is adapting to being in Israel’s AI-fueled sights.
During the current conflagration — which began after the group struck Israel in response to its killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and repeated violations of the 2024 ceasefire — Hezbollah returned to its guerrilla warfare roots, adopting smaller unit sizes with a decentralized structure. It also relied on more secure, albeit less convenient, forms of communication, according to Shehadeh, the retired general.
What action triggered the algorithm to move Turmus from surveillance to the kill list is unclear. In his role as a liaison, he was a noncombatant member of Hezbollah and family members said he didn’t even bother changing phones. (“The Israelis already know me, so what does it matter?” he would say.)
On Feb. 15, a day before his killing, he turned off his smartphone, and left it at home when he went to a municipal meeting in a nearby village the next day. The phone call from the Israelis came soon after he went home to Talloosah and turned his smartphone on.
When he hung up, his face changed, family members told The Times. He told them the Israelis were after him, and that they should leave the house and let him die alone. They pleaded with him to try to escape, to give him some disguise so he could leave.
But Turmus refused. He went to the door. “They know my face. There’s nothing we can do against this,” he said. His wife was walking in as he left, but he didn’t acknowledge her, family members said, so she wouldn’t try to stop him.
He got in his car, started it up, and drove off. Less than 30 seconds later came the shriek of the two missiles that lanced through Turmus’ car.
