Israel identified about 1,000 potential targets a day during the first two years of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon with its command and control system, according to a presentation by the country’s largest arms supplier, Elbit Systems.

A total of 850,000 targets were detected in real time by the Israeli Tzayad digital army programme across all the military’s theatres of war between 7 October and the end of 2025, the company said at a military conference in London.

It describes the number of people, vehicles and other objects detected in real time for possible follow-up attack from land, sea or air, and illustrates the high intensity of the deadly wars fought by Israel over the last three years.

The 850,000 total was presented at a land warfare conference organised last week by the Royal United Services Institute by Miki Edelstein, an IDF reservist major general, who is an executive vice-president of Elbit.

Nato’s second most senior military commander, Britain’s Air Chief Marshal Sir Johnny Stringer, was sitting next to him on a panel at the event. A third speaker at the session was a brigadier from the British army.

Though the presence of the two senior British officers had been advertised on the agenda in advance, Edelstein was simply billed as a “speaker to be announced” until the session on “integrating novel with core capabilities” began.

A slide presented by Edelstein to the largely military audience included a line describing the “high-tempo operations” run by the Israel Defense Forces, and cited more than 20,000 IDF battle plans and 850,000 “R.T. [real-time] intel targets”.

The targets were described by Edelstein as “an enemy that we are not aware of before”, that “pops up” from under the ground or by manoeuvre, “and we want to hit it accurately” but “don’t have enough ammunition” to do so immediately.

Wes Bryant, a former senior targeting adviser and policy analyst at the US Pentagon who specialised in civilian harm assessments, said he believed the 850,000 figure was highly concerning.

There were 2.2 million people and 300,000 buildings in Gaza before October 2023, the main theatre of war in the two years following, Bryant said, suggesting that the IDF had at one point or another targeted “up to or over half the entire population and infrastructure” of the territory.

Elbit supplies the IDF’s Tzayad, or Hunter, digital army programme, a command system that maps the positions of friendly units and of those deemed to be enemies. Earlier this year, the company won a contract to further develop Tzayad, using artificial intelligence to support tactical decision-making.

When contacted by the Guardian, an Elbit spokesperson denied that the 850,000 figure cited by Edelstein referred to targets, despite the slide specifying this, saying it reflected “aggregated system activity and operational data generated through the IDF’s digital army program across all operational theaters since October 7, 2023”.

The spokesperson added that it demonstrated the volume of information being processed by the Israeli military: “The figures represent system activity and operational data, rather than the number of enemy targets or actual strikes.”

Bryant said it was impossible for soldiers in any military to adequately assess each piece of information to conclude if the threat was real and the target legal at the volumes indicated.

“I will say, definitively, that there is no way each and every one of the 1,000 targets a day – let alone 850,000 targets in aggregate – are thoroughly and effectively characterised in terms of collateral damage analysis and assessed risk to civilian populations. Even characterising 50 a day is hard enough (but possible),” the former US military officer said.

Military leaders across Nato countries believe that wars between states or against near-state opponents are being conducted at a faster rate than previous counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, where there was far greater time to consider the legality of targeting decisions.

Israel has been engaged in a series of wars after Hamas launched its surprise attack on 7 October 2023, which killed 1,200 people, and has repeatedly been criticised for killing tens of thousands of civilians in high-intensity attacks on Gaza and Lebanon.

A UN inquiry has found Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a claim the country is fighting in international courts.

According to the World Health Organization, 71,269 Palestinians were killed in Gaza to the end of last year, the IDF’s principal theatre of operation during the time referenced by Edelstein. A little over half were children, women and elderly people.

A total of 3,961 were killed in Lebanon during the war in the autumn of 2024, according to the country’s ministry of public health, about a quarter of whom were women and children. The recent war of 2026 is outside the period cited.

Edelstein said the Elbit-run digital army programme helped increase the speed of external fire support – extra attacks on targets confirmed by the IDF from artillery, warships or fighter jets – from “40 to 50 minutes to one to seven minutes”.

A line afterwards on the Elbit slide, not directly referred to by the speaker, adds there were more than 46,000 “joint strikes and closing fire on real-time intel”, or a little over 50 a day. A “man in the loop” would decide on whether fire support missions went ahead, Edelstein said, because it was “the right thing to do”.

Sophia Goodfriend, a research fellow at Cambridge University specialising in the impact of artificial intelligence on warfare, said she believed it would be very difficult for intelligence and air force units to thoroughly vet 1,000 targets a day without relying on support from artificial intelligence.

“Any military would struggle to do so without outsourcing verification to other automated systems, which raises questions of accountability and concern about shrinking amounts of human oversight,” she said.

While Tzayad detects possible enemy activity on the battlefield, Israel’s military also uses two other AI-powered databases, Lavender and Hasbora (or the Gospel), to increase the pace at which it can attack people and buildings, having previously run out of targets in wars in 2014 and 2021.

Lavender at one stage identified 37,000 people as potential targets based on its assessment of their apparent links to Hamas. Hasbora recommended buildings to target and was able to generate 100 targets a day, according to reports in 2023.

One Israeli intelligence officer said targets flagged up by Lavender were assessed by a human for “20 seconds a time” because so many had been generated by the system. Two intelligence officers said it was permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants during the early stages of the Gaza war.