An Israeli defense firm said its command system flagged 850,000 possible targets in 25 months

A major Israeli defense contractor told a London defense conference last week that its artificial-intelligence targeting system had flagged 850,000 potential targets across all Israeli military theaters since October 2023, roughly 1,000 targets a day, in real time, across land, sea and air.

Miki Edelstein, an Israel Defense Forces reservist major general who is now executive vice president at Elbit Systems, disclosed the figure on a panel at the Royal United Services Institute's Land Warfare Conference 2026. Elbit is Israel's largest defense firm and the maker of Tzayad, a digital command-and-control system the company markets under the English name "Hunter." Tzayad ingests feeds from sensors, drones and ground units and overlays them on a shared tactical map of friendly and enemy positions. It produces a stream of candidate targets for human review; weapons release is an operator decision.

Edelstein's number covers people, vehicles and other objects the software flagged in real time as candidates for follow-up attack. It is not a strike count, and it is not a civilian-harm figure. It is the upstream pipeline, what defense analysts call the target-nomination funnel, and it ran, on Elbit's own telling, at roughly 1,000 candidates a day for 25 months.

Gaza's prewar population was about 2.2 million, and its prewar building stock around 300,000 structures. Against those numbers, Wes Bryant, a former US Pentagon targeting adviser who now works on civilian-harm analysis, said in a Democracy Now interview in March that the rate Elbit has now put on the record meant the IDF had "at one point or another" targeted "up to or over half the entire population and infrastructure" of Gaza. The Guardian's write-up of the RUSI panel carries Bryant's reaction that the disclosure is "highly concerning."

On the panel, Edelstein described the targets as an "enemy that we are not aware of before" that "pops up," framing the software's output as discovery rather than as decisions made by named operators about named objects. He also acknowledged the system's limitation in a way that doubles as a sales pitch: at the volumes the system produces, Israel "didn't have enough ammunition" to engage everything it found. The bottleneck on a high-tempo AI-nominated targeting pipeline is no longer target identification. It is the human and material capacity to act on what the software surfaces.

Edelstein disclosed the 850,000 figure on a panel alongside NATO's second-most-senior military commander, UK Air Chief Marshal Sir Johnny Stringer, and a British army brigadier. The audience was the export customers and allied procurement officials Elbit is selling Tzayad to. The disclosure was also a public claim about what AI targeting throughput looks like at scale, a benchmark future vendors and governments will be measured against or measured down from.

Bryant appeared at RUSI separately and reacted to the disclosure: his "highly concerning" assessment appeared in The Guardian's write-up of the panel, and his broader analytical extrapolation — that the IDF had at one point or another targeted "up to or over half the entire population and infrastructure" of Gaza — appeared in his March Democracy Now interview.

Elbit has separate contracts worth more than $100 million with the Israel Ministry of Defense to advance digital warfare and border defense, signed in the same period the 850,000 figure covers. RUSI's audience is not only the IDF; it is the procurement officials of countries that buy Israeli or Israeli-adjacent kit, and the parliamentary and civil-society oversight bodies attached to those programs.

Elbit has the incentive to make its system sound consequential, and the 850,000 is a self-reported number from one vendor on one stage. Independent verification of what the figure actually represents, whether confirmed targets, dismissed targets, struck targets, or civilian objects misclassified, does not exist in public, and the survey of AI-assisted targeting in Gaza maintained on Wikipedia makes clear that even the category boundaries ("target," "object," "infrastructure") are contested between Israeli, UN and humanitarian investigators.

Before RUSI, the only public throughput number anyone outside the IDF had was the casualty count. After RUSI, the vendor has handed the outside world its own input figure, and outside analysts can now run the math in the other direction. The next pressure point is whether NATO-adjacent vendors disclose similar numbers at the same kind of forum. A second disclosure would harden the institutionalization read; silence would make Elbit's stage appearance a selective signal.