“Operation Wrath of Zion" Aims to Dox and Deport Pro-Palestinian Protestors in New York City Steered by a "right-wing Zionist" organization, the campaign is using facial-recognition technology to intimidate and out activists demonstrating against Israel Jack Poulson Jan 30 ∙ Guest post TONIGHT: We will be hosting a virtual screening of the documentary film “Belkî Sibê” tonight at 8 p.m. ET. The film follows American leftists who went to fight in the Syrian civil war. Following the film, there’ll be a Q&A with the director, a main character, and two Drop Site journalists, including Murtaza Hussain, who just returned from a reporting trip in Syria. We’ll be taking questions from paid subscribers and donors but the screening is open to everyone. You can RSVP here. Drop Site News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts=, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. ICYMI: Following our reporting on Microsoft’s role in facilitating Israel’s genocide, a petition has drawn more than 70,000 signatures calling on the company to cut ties. Let’s get it over 100,000. You can sign it here. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators march around Manhattan to demand an end to the Israeli attacks on Gaza following the announcement of the ceasefire / Mostafa Bassim / Anadolu via Getty Images “Operation Wrath of Zion" Aims to Dox and Deport Pro-Palestinian Protestors in New York City by Jack Poulson This week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to cancel the visas of college students who protest in support of Palestine, opening the path to their deportation. A small company called Stellar Defense & Cyber Intelligence is ready to help by deploying AI technology to identify anonymous, masked pro-Palestinian protestors, through a campaign it refers to as “Operation Wrath of Zion.” Stellar is the maker of NesherAI, a bespoke facial-recognition tool which it claims is capable of deanonymizing pro-Palestinian protestors. The name “Nesher” is Hebrew for “eagle,” the symbol for both NesherAI and the Terror Watch Agency, the brand under which it operates. Their slogan on social media is, “The Eagle listens, The Eagle watches, The Eagle knows.” Stellar's CEO is “Eliyahu” Hawila, who garnered headlines several years ago when he faced allegations of deceiving the New York ultra-Orthodox Jewish community by posing as a member despite being a Lebanese Muslim—a story he now disputes. Stellar advertises NesherAI as “an intelligence and mass surveillance project powered by AI, designed to support law enforcement and community security organizations in tracking terrorists, threat actors, and violent criminals.” The website also notes that the product is “marketed towards NGOs, activist groups, companies, and universities for profiling individuals with malicious intent, terrorist affiliations and online criminal behavior.” Betar is a self-described “right-wing Zionist” youth movement that has made prominent use of the facial recognition tool. Together, they hope to feed the names of pro-Palestinian protestors to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other law enforcement, according to statements made by both groups. Betar has ties to Menachem Begin, the leader of the Zionist terrorist group Irgun, founder of the Likud party, and former prime minister of Israel. According to its own history, Betar’s early members “were active instigators of disturbances and violence, frequently bombing Arab civilian areas in response to attacks and waging guerilla [sic] warfare against the British,” sometimes referred to as “Jewish fascists.” In December, The Times of Israel reported that Betar had worked with pro-Israel U.S. lawmakers including Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and John Fetterman (D-PA) on plans to round up “suspects” in anticipation of Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Ross Glick, the executive director of Betar US, told the paper the purpose of Betar’s use of facial recognition was to “give the Trump team a head start.” While Glick stressed that Betar supports free speech, he added that “if a foreign student is here on a visa, they don’t have the same rights as others to protest or promote anti-Zionist narratives.” On Wednesday, Betar did just as Glick said. “Join us at the jihad rally as we assist @ICEgov in deportation efforts,” the U.S. branch of Betar posted on the social media platform X. Hawila’s Terror Watch Agency reposted Betar’s statement. A post on Wednesday from the U.S. branch of the Betar Zionist movement, Betar Zionist Organization Inc., claiming that the Hawila’s NesherAI-powered “Terror Watch Agency” was to be used to deanonymize pro-Palestinian protestors at Zuccotti Park in New York later the same day. (The counter-protest flyer can be seen to use the wrong date of January 28.) On Wednesday evening, Betar US promised to counter-protest and surveil the attendees of a vigil co-organized by pro-Palestinian advocacy groups, including Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) and Within Our Lifetime, at Zuccotti Park in New York City. The gathering honored Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl who became a symbol of the resistance movement after surviving an initial attack on her car by an Israeli tank only to die after the ambulance sent to save her was subsequently destroyed by the Israeli Army. Betar’s social media post boasted that it would “document all attendees,” further promising that “even those in keffiyahs and masks” would be identified via the Terror Watch Agency and that Betar would submit the names of the attendees to President Trump. “Get out now,” the post continued, alongside a claim that Rajab’s story had been used to “to fake a genocide.” Notably, the Israeli government has similarly referred to a legal nonprofit named after Rajab as a “threat.” Over the past 24 hours, footage of an underwhelming counter-protest has been posted on social media, including a video by journalist Jeremy Loffredo. “And yea, we’re fuckin’ gonna’ get people deported,” one of the counter-protestors told Loffredo. Betar has yet to post the identities of any protesters, but such identifications could take days or weeks. On social media, Betar posts often include videos of their targets being asked if they “carry a beeper,” a reference to the Israeli government’s sabotaging of a line of pagers known to be carried by members of Hezbollah, an attack that wounded thousands of people and killed dozens. This week, Betar targeted António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations with one such veiled threat. The group similarly attempted to deliver pagers to Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) in November. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, banned Betar US in November for similarly targeting members of Students for Justice in Palestine. Senator Fetterman was recorded speaking with Betar about the ban later the same month, stating: “I’ve been very clear for the beepers thing, I mean, I love it.” An image posted to the social media platform X on January 24 by the “Terror Watch Agency” account of Mr. Hawila’s company Stellar Technologies, the producer of the “NesherAI” facial recognition tool. The linked YouTube channel for “Terror Watch Agency” contains a single video, published on January 17, titled “NesherAI In Action - Face Recognition” by the company “Stellar Technologies,” purporting to demonstrate how NesherAI’s facial recognition technology works. In the demo, a user uploads a photo of a pro-Palestinian protestor wearing a keffiyah into NesherAI’s recognition tool. The tool then displays the web profile of an employee of Coldwell Banker Realty, along with her full name, picture, role, and office address. In response to a general request for comment, Mr. Hawila stated that “We do not publicly disclose technical information about NesherAI or any of our products or solutions in order to protect our intellectual property [emphasis in the original].” Asked specifically about the company’s role in online doxxing, Hawila did not respond. The pinned post for Terror Watch Agency’s X account claims to demonstrate the de-anonymization of the same sales associate. “NesherAI has officially defeated their face mask counter-intelligence efforts. Months of them hiding their faces went down the drain!,” the post reads. The woman's supposed offense: “public harassment of Jewish individuals and public endorsement of the Hamas terror organization.” According to posts from January 18 and 19 from the Zionist advocacy organization StopAntisemitism, the protestor was fired from her job after being revealed by NesherAI. Hawila’s Terror Watch Agency social media account similarly credited StopAntisemitism with doxxing a Columbia University student protestor who was reportedly arrested by the NYPD in April; StopAntisemitism itself credited the identification to The New York Post. Like its underlying technology, Stellar Defense & Cyber’s founder’s origins are also cloaked in mystery. The CEO and founder of Stellar Defense & Cyber, which sells NesherAI, is a man who goes by the name Eliyahu Hawila. After his now-ex-wife caught a glimpse of his passport and saw a different name than the one he was known by, his true identity was revealed to their ultra-Orthodox community and beyond: Ali Hassan Hawila, a Muslim man born in the city of Tyre in southern Lebanon. Hawila then became a prominent figure in the Jewish community, sometimes referred to as the “Lebanese Chosson.” A detailed profile of Hawila in Tablet Magazine in November 2021 reported that Mr. Hawila had lied to his wife about his religious background, country of birth, his parents’ place of birth, his employment with the National Security Agency, his name, and those of his parents and grandparents. When the couple married, Hawila reportedly fabricated a congratulatory email from the NSA. After Mr. Hawila’s deceptions came to light, the FBI launched an investigation into whether he was possibly infiltrating the New York Jewish community as part of an Islamic terrorist plot. Once New York authorities concluded that there was no such threat, Hawila made a show of flying to Israel during Passover weekend in 2022 so that he could begin a conversion to Judaism. In subsequent interviews, Hawila claimed he later learned that his mother was in fact Jewish. “To be clear I am not someone converted to Orthodox Judaism,” Mr. Hawila told Drop Site News. “I was born Jewish in Lebanon to a secular Jewish mother whose Jewish origins come from Aleppo, Syria, and a Shia Muslim Lebanese father [emphasis in the original].” In addition to Mr. Hawila’s role as the CEO of Stellar being disclosed in a cache of the company’s website from June 2024, he also listed his role on his LinkedIn profile. While the company’s New York corporate registry does not list any corporate officers, its corporate records do disclose that the official U.S. address of its advertised joint New York City and Tel Aviv operations, is 1304 Ave. M in Brooklyn, home to a small kosher restaurant named Say Bagel & Cheese. (Roughly fifteen years ago, the small shop was a frequent stop-in for cast members of the popular soap opera “As the World Turns,” which filmed its final episode across the street in JC Studios in 2010.) A photo of “Eliyahu Hawila” on the “about” page of Stellar Defense & Cyber Intelligence LLC as of June 2024 A person who answered the public number for Say Bagel & Cheese claimed no knowledge of either Mr. Hawila or Stellar, and asserted that the phone number is now associated with a new company at the same address as Say Bagel & Cheese, which they declined to name. “The company [Say Bagel & Cheese] does not exist anymore. Goodbye,” they stated, shortly before hanging up the phone. Mr. Hawila confirmed his company’s connection to the address by email, stating “this is a former residential address for one of the company's co-founders at the time the company was officially incorporated back in March, 2024.” Yet, contrary to claims made by phone of closing down, Say Bagel and Cheese promptly accepted my online order for a single serving of cream cheese. “We hope you’ll enjoy your order!” read a confirmation email on Thursday morning. A guest post by Jack Poulson I am an independent journalist focused on the intersection of technology and national security. I am also the ED of techinquiry.org, where I map international ecosystems of surveillance and weapons. Send me tips on Signal at @poulson.01. Become a Drop Site News Paid Subscriber Drop Site News is reader-supported. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber today.