Hamas video of Israeli hostage Mengistu sparks talks of ‘deep fake’ tech
'Technology today enables us to take a still photo and produce a short video out of it. It’s difficult to distinguish between real and deep fake'
Gaza’s ruling Hamas movement released rare footage on Monday of a man they claimed to be Israeli hostage Avera Mengistu, sparking concern about the Islamist group’s technology capabilities.
The video showed who was said to be Mengistu sitting in front of a blank wall and asking Israel for help. Mengistu, who according to his family suffers from mental health issues, crossed into Gaza in 2014 and has been held in captivity ever since.
The authenticity of the video was still not officially confirmed on Tuesday, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he received confirmation that he was alive: "Yesterday we received another confirmation of what we knew all along - that Avera is alive. This is a young man, not in good health, and responsibility for his fate rests entirely on Hamas.”
If verified, it would be the first proof of life of Mengistu. It was widely considered to be a challenge to Israel’s new army Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, and came a month after the release of a similar video of the second Israeli hostage being held in the Palestinian enclave, Hisham al-Sayed.
However, the potential of the video being fake was a top concern, as artificial intelligence and deep fake technology have been rapidly advancing in recent years.
“Technology today enables us to take a still photo and produce a short video out of it,” said (Ret. Gen.) Isaac Ben Israel, head of the Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Studies Center at Tel Aviv University.
“I would guess that it is [Mengistu] in the video, despite the fact that current technology allows us to generate artificial videos using a single image,” he told i24NEWS. “For example, I once got a video greeting from Leonardo Dicaprio speaking in perfect Hebrew. But this was produced artificially. It’s difficult to distinguish between real and deep fake.”
Ben Israel noted, though, that whether or not the video was fake, Hamas only posted the video to “press Israeli authorities to negotiate.”
In the past, Israel has engaged in prisoner swaps with Hamas – most notably in 2011, when Gilad Shalit, a soldier abducted by militants in a cross-border raid in 2006, was released in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinians held in Israeli jails.
“Hamas would like to get in return dozens of terrorists who have blood on their hands. This is usually a problem, and it's not a simple one,” Ben Israel said.