Using mosques as sensors to guide you to the location of conflict.

Introduction

This is a blog entry that was earlier written by me as a thread on Twitter. Because it was well received by people from the open source community, I have decided to also place it on here. It describes how the architectural features of a mosque such as a minaret or dome, can serve as a sensor that will guide you to the location of a human rights violation, place of combat, or target of the Israeli Defense Forces during a military raid in Palestine.

Detecting sensors in regional conflict areas

When looking at regional conflict areas, often there are no obvious clues to be directly found in an image or video that was shared. At least, not as obvious as a street name or a shop sign. During the Israeli military raid on February 4, 2023, on Aqabat Jabr refugee camp, three kilometers southwest of Jericho, I saw the following piece of footage pass by.

A few things stand out to me in this clip, one is that there is a big tree at the end of the path on the right. Two is the minaret of a mosque that is shown on the left from the perspective of the filmer as the camera moves during the recording. A third detail is the MDT David, an Israeli military vehicle, coming from a road that runs obliquely.

Mosques as a guidance sensor during the Israeli raid on Aqabat Jabr RC

Palestinian villages and refugee camps, tend to have more than one mosque, which is why it becomes important to first look at how many are present and which one matches the architectural features seen in the video footage. In this case, we used the one that seems most prominent in the camp and encircled that one.

Given that the mosque was at the left side from the perspective of the individual who recorded the video, the possibilities to where this took place, are likely East or South from the mosque. It’s a hypothesis that we set for ourselves as a starting point for further investigation.

As you can see, two of them, the road coming from the South and the top one coming from the East, appear to also have big tree’s at the right side of the path. Only the one from the South is too close to the mosque to be it. So the one from the East remains.

Remember the third detail? A military vehicle, MDT David, was seen driving from the road that comes from the Southeast. By having made these annotations, we can clearly see that the geolocation is at the 31.83906999790788, 35.44047979759575 coordinates.

Sometimes you’ll have the luxury that Mapillary has available crowd-resourced street-level imagery for further verification. But this isn’t always the case. Nonetheless, it is important to mention, because regular Street View from Google and Bing doesn’t have much in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The minaret as a sensor that tracks the Israeli Defense Forces during their mission

Simultaneously, the Israeli Defense Forces also released footage of their military raid in Aqabat Jabr RC, which also was worth of using the same methodology on. It is recorded in a very closed-up manner and as you can see, they placed a purple filter on it, which made it a little more difficult.

When it comes to looking at footage of raids happening in the occupied Palestinian territories, as shown before, clues do exist such as the minaret of the mosque, seen at 0:01 seconds in the video published by the Israeli Defense Forces.

In this case, the minaret becomes a sensor that also serves as a tracking device to follow the Israeli forces, and narrow down the area that they were operating within.

The area with the white rectangle drawn around it, started to become the area that I was going to move through using Mapillary, simulating what the IDF did. By doing this, we managed to match the footage, with our findings at the 31.837810, 35.439456 coordinates.

Jenin

Mosques have become an important sensor that we continue to use in more than one raid. During the operation by the YAMAM unit, paired with Israeli forces, on February 12, 2023, in Jenin, my investigative partner, Gabòr Friesen, applied the same technique when looking at the following footage.

In the first 4 seconds of the video clip, Gabòr Friesen noticed the mosque on the left from the filmer’s perspective. The mosque appears to have a golden dome that stands out, this becomes the architectural feature to keep in mind, during the geolocation-based research on this raid.

Gabòr Friesen has mapped all of the mosques that are located in Jenin in preparation of continued raids by Israeli forces. While we didn’t have this mosque, at first, pinned down in Google Earth Pro, we did manage to find this one because it was nearby the area of the Tawalbeh Mosque in the Al-Zahra’ neighborhood.

By identifying the landmarks and working his way back, he managed to find the location at the 32.459288, 35.281846 coordinates, which was Southwest of Jenin Refugee Camp during the YAMAM unit their operation, on the hill close to the Assir mosque.

We hope that you enjoyed this and helped you gain more knowledge on one of our methodologies during a geolocation research.