Israel Defense Force’s Unit 9900 is a specialized military team that is being credited with playing a key role in dismantling Hezbollah’s leadership by extracting intelligence clues while sifting through years and years of satellite data.

These soldiers were tasked with finding a needle in a haystack — and they succeeded. Again and again. How did they pull it off? 

Their brains are built differently. Literally. 

Ro’im Rachok, known in English as, “Watching the Horizon,” is a team within Unit 9900 that is composed of Israeli soldiers with autism whose neurodivergence makes them particularly talented in monitoring and analyzing satellite images. 

“To the average eye, a picture of a forest in Lebanon or a field in Gaza might not look exceptional, but for the soldiers of 9900, a bush out of place or a sand dune bigger than it should be could mean that underneath is a Katyusha rocket launcher or the opening to an attack tunnel,” the Jerusalem Post wrote in an analysis of a 2020 precision assassination of Islamic Jihad commander Baha Abu al-Ata.

While Israelis with autism are exempt from military service, Unit 9900 offers them an opportunity to harness their unique strengths and become highly effective and respected members of the nation’s defense force. The Israeli military describes these  “gifted” soldiers as “some of the most specialized in the IDF” whose work “helps greatly in protecting Israel’s population.” 

As the IDF has grown its surveillance programs over the past few years, Unit 9900 has become critical to making sense of the huge amounts of raw data collected by the military. 

In serving Israel’s mission to infiltrate Hezbollah, the unit sifted through swaths of images in search of “the slightest changes” which could lead them to identify “an improvised explosive device by a roadside, a vent over a tunnel, or the sudden addition of a concrete reinforcement, hinting at a bunker,” the Financial Times reports. 

Once a Hezbollah member was identified, records of the operative’s daily patterns were gleaned from devices that “could include his wife’s cell phone, his smart car’s odometer, or his location,” an official told the FT. Any break in the pattern would be flagged for analysis by Israeli intelligence. 

The technique is credited with helping Israel “to identify the mid-level commanders of the anti-tank squads of two or three fighters that have harassed IDF troops from across the border” and even determine whether commanders had been called up in anticipation of an attack, writes the FT. 

With Unit 9900’s help, Israel has gutted the terrorist group’s chain of command, eliminating seven key Hezbollah leaders. Israel also succeeded, after three failed attempts in 2006, to assassinate Hezbollah’s chief commander, Hassan Nasrallah, who perished on Friday during an attack on his bunker nearly 60 feet below ground at Beirut. 

The news of Nasrallah’s death came as Prime Minister Netanyahu delivered an address before the United Nations General Assembly at New York, pledging to defeat “the quintessential terror organization” stationed in Lebanon. 

“We will not accept a terror army perched on our northern border ready to carry out another 7 October style massacre,” Mr. Netanyahu said.