Israeli command system identified 850,000 targets in Gaza and Lebanon wars, says supplier | Israel

Israel identified about 1,000 potential targets a day during the first two years of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon with its command and control system, according to a presentation by the country’s largest arms supplier, Elbit Systems.

A total of 850,000 targets were detected in real time by the Israeli Tzayad digital army programme across all the military’s theatres of war between 7 October and the end of 2025, the company said at a military conference in London.

It describes the number of people, vehicles and other objects detected in real time for possible follow-up attack from land, sea or air, and illustrates the high intensity of the deadly wars fought by Israel over the last three years.

The 850,000 total was presented at a land warfare conference organised last week by the Royal United Services Institute by Miki Edelstein, an IDF reservist major general, who is an executive vice-president of Elbit.

Nato’s second most senior military commander, Britain’s Air Chief Marshal Sir Johnny Stringer, was sitting next to him on a panel at the event. A third speaker at the session was a brigadier from the British army.

Though the presence of the two senior British officers had been advertised on the agenda in advance, Edelstein was simply billed as a “speaker to be announced” until the session on “integrating novel with core capabilities” began.

A slide presented by Edelstein to the largely military audience included a line describing the “high-tempo operations” run by the Israel Defense Forces, and cited more than 20,000 IDF battle plans and 850,000 “R.T. [real-time] intel targets”.

The targets were described by Edelstein as “an enemy that we are not aware of before”, that “pops up” from under the ground or by manoeuvre, “and we want to hit it accurately” but “don’t have enough ammunition” to do so immediately.

Wes Bryant, a former senior targeting adviser and policy analyst at the US Pentagon who specialised in civilian harm assessments, said he believed the 850,000 figure was highly concerning.

There were 2.2 million people and 300,000 buildings in Gaza before October 2023, the main theatre of war in the two years following, Bryant said, suggesting that the IDF had at one point or another targeted “up to or over half the entire population and infrastructure” of the territory.

Elbit supplies the IDF’s Tzayad, or Hunter, digital army programme, a command system that maps the positions of friendly units and of those deemed to be enemies. Earlier this year, the company won a contract to further develop Tzayad, using artificial intelligence to support tactical decision-making.