Falcon powers – The Washington Post, in a report on Friday, June 14, 2024, revealed that “US intelligence agencies provided an unusually high level of support to their Israeli counterparts since the October 7th attack,” noting the role of these agencies in the search for prisoners held by the resistance in the Gaza Strip.
In the details, the Washington Post quoted current and former US and Israeli intelligence officials as saying that the United States “intensified the collection of intelligence on fighters in Gaza, where it shared an unusual amount of drone footage, satellite imagery, communications intercepts, and data analysis using advanced software, some of it supported by artificial intelligence.”
The officials said that one prominent example of these capabilities was the recent hostage rescue operation carried out by Israel.
According to the newspaper, citing current and former US and Israeli intelligence sources since the October 7th massacre, the United States has increased intelligence gathering on Hamas.
The officials added that in the first weeks of the war, “Israeli officials requested specific information from the United States to help fill the gaps, which included specific information as well as techniques and expertise to analyze large amounts of imagery and assemble different images to create more detailed pictures, including three-dimensional terrain maps, of Gaza.”
Accordingly, “members of the US military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) began working side by side with Israeli intelligence agency officers, while members of the Defense Intelligence Agency began meeting daily with their Israeli counterparts,” according to US officials.
The newspaper, in the framework, noted that “the United States is considered Israel’s main intelligence partner in the process of searching for Israeli prisoners in the Gaza Strip.”
It added that the operation to retrieve the prisoners in the Al-Nuseirat camp last week “relied on accurate information about the location of the prisoners,” noting that “this level of actionable intelligence is something that Israel has lacked for years in the Gaza Strip.”
Officials said that “Israeli intelligence analysts found intelligence information among servers, computers, mobile phones, laptops and other documents in Gaza, while American analysts helped in sifting through these sources for evidence of the prisoners’ whereabouts.”
One senior Israeli official stated that “integrating the information they obtained from electronic and physical records with other intelligence sources helped Israel identify the location of the prisoners.”
The result of all this, according to the newspaper, is a “rare partnership in the exchange of intelligence information, even for two parties who have historically worked together in areas of common interest.”
But “the US-Israeli partnership is sometimes tense,” according to the Washington Post, as “some US officials feel frustrated by Israel’s demands for more intelligence, as it is never enough, and it sometimes relies on the wrong assumption that the United States might be withholding some information.”
