Here's To The Faceless Ones
A photo essay about soldiers whose faces are blurred out by the Israeli Military Censor. There's been a lot of them lately.
The man with the functioning face in the center of this photo is Lt. Gen. Herzl Halevy, the Israeli army’s chief of staff.
This post is not about him, although Halevy does deserve a profile someday, perhaps when he’s less busy. This is a photo essay about the men, and some women, who appear in the many photos going around the Israeli WhatsAppesphere lately, and whose faces have been blurred out by the Military Censor (a unit of Military Intelligence).
There are several reasons why some soldiers’ faces are blurred in photos, but the main reason is usually because they serve in Special Forces units that operate behind enemy lines.
We suspect there are enemy databases of IDF soldiers’ faces scraped off the web. We suspect there are sophisticated computer vision algorithms designed to match faces in crowds with these databases.
There’s another reason to blur the faces of intelligence officers and special operators: Israel is being put on trial at the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide against the Palestinians. Just as Israelis see a group of warriors operating in Gaza as heroes, Israel’s opponents see a group of war criminals whose faces they want to rip off.
This is a family: father, son, 2 daughters. The photo was released by the usually secretive Shabak, Israel’s FBI/MI5.
Sometimes the Shabak thinks its operatives are so secret that it blurs their faces from behind their heads.
This next photo was released by City Hall. The guy on the left is from my town. He doesn’t look like he’s an in-shape elite commando, so he’s probably “just” a reservist intelligence officer. Still, he deserves a better blur than this green blot.
Here’s a whole video of a rescue operation under fire in Northern Gaza, where all of the faces —men and women soldiers— are blurred.
And now the last photo. The only reason we can see this warrior’s face, and not the others standing around in the background, is because he died on Sunday.
Kleinman served in the elite Maglan (Ibis bird in English) commando unit, whose speciality is clandestine operations behind enemy lines. In this war, not only did Maglan operate behind enemy lines in Gaza, it operated under enemy lines, inside the Hamas’ tunnels. Those tunnels are death traps. Soldiers who go in them know they may not come back out.
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