Nate Bear

The developers behind hundreds of Android and iPhone apps with billions of downloads are former Israeli spies whose apps are generating significant revenues for Israel’s genocidal war economy.

The apps I’ve identified range from innocuous image and video editing apps to casual games, and most users won’t be aware they’re installing Israeli products on their phones. Many of these app developers operate under the radar, their ownership structures are opaque and the identity of their owners isn’t commonly known.

The identification of these apps should add another frontier to the boycott, divest, sanctions movement, as it provides a straightforward way for ordinary people to avoid Israeli products that contribute to apartheid, genocide and ethnic cleansing.

The proliferation of these apps on Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store also raises questions over privacy and the harvesting of personal data, given the reputation of Israeli technology and past scandals involving spyware being smuggled onto devices by apps made in Israel.

One of the most significant Israeli app holding companies and developers is ZipoApps, whose model is to buy-out and monetise apps at a large scale. The apps owned by Zipo (which also goes by the name Rounds.com) include a suite of photo and video editing apps that have received hundreds of millions of total installs. Individual apps include Collage Maker Photo Editor and Instasquare Photo Editor: Neon, both of which have received more than 50 million downloads from the Google Play Store. Other ZipoApps products include baby photo editing and retouching tools. In 2022, the founder and CEO of Zipo, Gal Avidor, told an interviewer (in his only interview to date), that all the founders of the company are former Unit 8200 Israeli intelligence personnel. On Reddit, users have complained about ZipoApps approach to privacy and data mining. One popular group of tools known as Simple Gallery went from free and open source to a paid product with ads and trackers just one week after ZipoApps acquired it.

Another Israeli-owned photo editing app on the Play Store is the AI-powered Bazaart, which was founded by Dror Yaffe and Stas Goferman, two former IDF intelligence officers. Goferman far exceeded his mandatory service, spending a decade in the IDF up to 2011.

Facetune, made by the developer Lightricks and available for Android and iPhones, is another Israeli photo editing app with over 50 million installs. Users on the Apple Store have called Facetune, which demands access to unique identifiers and your location, a scam. The co-founder of Lightricks, Yaron Inger, spent five years in Unit 8200.

If you’re into mobile gaming, or if you create mobile games to sell, you will have come across Israeli company Supersonic from Unity, probably without knowing it. With billions of downloads in recent years, Supersonic is one of the largest mobile game publishers in the world with revenues estimated at around $23 million per year. Earlier this year the company reported that they owned three of the top ten most downloaded casual player mobile games in the world: Build a Queen, Going Balls, and Bridge Race. Trash Tycoon is another popular title. The company also has a game called ‘Conquer Countries’ which has been downloaded millions of times and on its advertising tile features a cartoon version of Donald Trump. The founder of Supersonic, Nadav Ashkenazy, spent seven and a half years in the IDF where he rose to become the head of operations for the Israeli air force, managing almost half the full-time staff. You can see all Supersonic’s games here.

A better-known Israeli mobile game app maker whose revenues we don’t have to estimate is Playtika. Listed on the NASDAQ, Playtika brings in revenues of more than $2.5 billion, generating significant taxes for Israel’s mass slaughter machine. Playtika, which builds gambling apps, is firmly enmeshed in the genocidal Israeli war machine. The company was founded by Uri Shahak, son of the former head of the IDF, Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, and last year its annual report revealed that 14% of its staff had been called up as reservists to participate in the genocide in Gaza. Current CEO Robert Antokol says the company has a “responsibility” to Israel and the taxes paid by its staff are “wonderful for the Israeli economy.”

Another Israeli company whose apps have been downloaded billions of times is Crazy Labs. With an estimated company value of around $1 billion and sales estimated at up to $200 million, Crazy Labs is another app maker integral to the Israeli economy. Its best-selling titles are Phone Case DIY, Miraculous Ladybug & Cat Noir, and Sculpt People. You can see the full list of the Crazy Lab apps on the Google Play Store. The founders of Crazy Labs are all ex-IDF, including Sagi Schliesser, who well exceeded his mandatory service by staying in the IDF and helping build the digital architecture of apartheid for eight years.

An app you may have heard of, but not have known is Israeli, is Moovit. The urban transport app was founded by a number of ex-IDF including Nir Erez who spent years at the IDF’s specialist computing centre known as Mamram, which Israeli propaganda says creates ‘cyber warriors.’ As the unit which runs the military’s intranet, Mamram is central to Israel’s genocide of Gaza. Moovit, which has close to one billion users and delivers significant revenues to Israel, has been an official partner of the Olympic Games, the European football championships and also partners with Microsoft.

With hundreds of millions of installs, Call App, which screens phone calls for spam, is another product of Israel’s military economy. The founder and CEO of Call App, Amit On, spent three years in Unit 8200 in the 2000s. The app has over 100 million users.

On the ride-hailing front, Gett, which is focused on corporate passengers and is particularly popular in London as a way to hail black cabs, was founded by ex-Unit 8200 Roi More and Shahar Waiser. A notable mention for GPS navigation app Waze, probably the most famous Israeli app of the last decade, acquired by Google in 2013 for $1.3 billion and also founded by ex-Unit 8200 spies.

Another fast-growing Israeli app which has been featured on Oprah, in the New York Times and on CNN is Fooducate, whose founder, Hemi Weingarten, flew bombing missions for the Israeli air force.

Other Israeli air force veterans behind popular apps include husband and wife team Gilad and Liat Mordechay Hertanu, who run the personal assistant and calendar-syncing app 24me. Liat was an officer in the Israeli air force while Gilad was a pilot who flew bombing missions.

This expose, which follows my investigations into former Unit 8200 building AI for big tech giants, and the ex-IDF soldiers working at Meta and Google, further confirms how deeply and insidiously embedded Israel is in our digital lives.

These investigations also reveal how Israel is foundationally reliant on being in a permanent state of dominance over the Palestinians, because the only thing of value the country produces are tech companies founded by ex-IDF. Without being able to train their citizens as spies and soldiers, and butcher Palestinians at will, Israel’s economy would collapse.

Yet most people who use these apps will have downloaded them in good faith with little idea they are contributing to Israel’s occupation-apartheid-genocide economy. In addition, these apps will be gathering information and data, including large amounts of personal images, and delivering them to devotees of Israel committed to maintaining the country as an apartheid state.

[…]

Via https://www.donotpanic.news/p/the-best-selling-apps-made-by-israeli

Episode 4 – The Islamic World’s Greatest Writer al-Jahiz

Islamic Golden Age (2017)

By Eamon Gearon

Film Review

Al-Jahiz (776-868 AD) wrote over 200 books, mainly fiction and satire. Thirty are still in print today.* The Arabic alphabet (derived from Aramaic) first emerged in the in the first half of the fourth century in the Nabataean kingdom.

Before that all Arabic stories and poems were transmitted orally. Because it borrowed a number of words and expressions from Persian, the Abbasid caliphate undertook a systematic effort standardize the Arabic language so it wouldn’t become too Persianized.

Al Jahiz was born in the port city of Basra, an important center of trade,culture and learning surpassed only by Baghdad and Samara. One of his grandfathers was a freed African slave. As a child he helped sell fish to support his family until his mother found the money to send him to a Koranic school to learn to read and write. After completing school he attended lectures on philology (study of language), lexicology (study of derivation of words) and poetry.

His first publication was a treatise on the nature of the Abbasid caliphate. He also wrote animal fables, satires about the rich and famous and books about zoology (he’s considered the world’s first zoologist, rhetoric and polemics, grammar, etymology and literary criticism.

He moved to Baghdad when he was 40 after Harun al-Rashid’s son al-Ma’mun summoned him to tutor his children. Unfortunately the children, frightened of his boggle eyes, rejected him as their tutor because his boggle yes scared them (his nickname al-Jahiz translates as “Boggle Eyes” in English).

He was also the first writer in history to discuss evolution and competition among animals to pass on their successful characteristics to their offspring.

Some of his more famous titles include

• The Book of Misers
• The Art of Keeping One’s Mouth Shut
• Against Civil Servants
• Levity and Seriousness
• The Book of Mule (concerns men’s fixation with penis size)

*I think this says a lot about the role of the House of Wisdom in standardizing the Arabic language. English books from the 9th century AD are impossible to decipher without years of study.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/5756987/5756995

U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told USA Today that the wireless radiation from cellphones, cell towers and other wireless infrastructure is a “major health concern.”

Kennedy spoke with USA Today on Jan. 16, one day after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched a new study into the health effects of cellphone radiation — a step that advocates say could reflect a major shift in federal policy.

The same day HHS launched the study, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration under Kennedy’s direction scrubbed old webpages stating that cellphones aren’t dangerous.

Kennedy said he was “very concerned” about the negative health impacts of electromagnetic radiation (EMR), a term that encompasses both radiofrequency (RF) radiation and electromagnetic fields (EMFs).

According to Kennedy, there are “literally over 10,000 studies” on EMR documenting “ill effects, including cancer tumor growth.”

Miriam Eckenfels, director of Children’s Health Defense’s (CHD) EMR & Wireless Program, said she was “excited” to hear Kennedy publicly address EMR’s health impacts.

“The time is right,” she said. “Although scientific evidence keeps piling up, the Federal Communications Commission is moving forward aggressively with its proposed rulemaking to strip local communities’ control over where cell towers are placed.”

Congress has proposed legislation that would do the same thing, Eckenfels said. “Many communities are faced with proposed cell towers where they least want them.”

Thousands of studies document harm from wireless radiation

Kennedy, who previously was accused of exaggerating, did not cite a source for his assertion that more than 10,000 studies show harmful effects from wireless radiation.

However, online compilations show there are at least thousands of peer-reviewed studies attesting to the harms from wireless radiation.

For instance, a recent compilation by Henry Lai, Ph.D., shows there have been over 2,500 peer-reviewed studies published since 1990 that found significant adverse effects from EMF exposure.

Lai, a professor emeritus of bioengineering at the University of Washington, has been studying and compiling research on EMR for over two decades. For years, Lai’s updated compilations appeared on the BioInitative website. Now they are housed on SaferEMR.com, run by Joel Moskowitz, Ph.D., a public health professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

The EMF-Portal, run by the RWTH Aachen University in Germany, lists roughly 48,850 publications related to EMFs and summarizes around 7,000 of those studies.

Some are about the possible therapeutic uses of certain kinds of wireless radiation. For example, one paper discusses how electroconvulsive therapy can be used to treat depression.

But many show negative health effects, according to W. Scott McCollough, lead litigator for CHD’s EMR & Wireless cases.

“More than half report significant effects, although there are — as usual — differences of opinion on the quality of the research conclusions.”

The U.S. military has a long history of studying wireless radiation. In 1971, the U.S. Naval Medical Research Institute issued a report that reviewed 2,311 scientific studies that, together, linked EMFs to 132 different biological effects, symptoms and diseases.

By analyzing the Navy’s report, researchers Richard Lear and Camilla Rees showed that 23 of the top 36 fastest growing chronic illnesses were conditions identified in the report as being linked to EMFs, yet federal regulators did nothing to protect the public.  “I am delighted to see HHS will investigate the biological and health effects of wireless radiation,” Rees told The Defender.

Independent scientists: There’s ‘no assurance’ of wireless radiation’s safety

In USA Today’s report of its interview with Kennedy, the media outlet cited a 2024 systematic review commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO). The review, which analyzed 63 studies on cellphones and cancer, claimed to find no link between cellphone use and cancer.

The study was one of 12 WHO-backed systematic reviews on the possible health effects of RF radiation.

However, USA Today failed to mention that in October 2025, independent scientists with the International Commission on the Biological Effects of Electromagnetic Fields (ICBE-EMF) pushed back against the WHO reviews.

The scientists published a peer-reviewed report in which they argued that the WHO’s reviews provided “no assurance of safety.”

ICBE-EMF is a “consortium of scientists, doctors and related professionals” who study wireless radiation and recommend wireless radiation exposure guidelines “based on the best peer-reviewed scientific research publications.”

“The WHO-commissioned systematic reviews are simply inadequate to conclude that wireless radiation is safe,” ICBE-EMF Chairperson John Frank, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh and professor emeritus of public health at the University of Toronto, said in a press release.

It would “mislead the public” to present the WHO’s reviews as evidence that current wireless radiation exposure guidelines are safe, Frank said.

Most of the WHO reviews had “significant flaws” — including methodological problems and bias concerns — that undermined their conclusions about the safety of RF radiation, ICBE-EMF said.

The group said that, despite the flaws, one of the WHO reviews showed RF radiation exposure reduced men’s fertility, while another linked cellphone radiation exposure to two types of cancer in animals.

ICBE-EMF published a supplemental document alongside its report detailing examples of the WHO review authors’ ties to the wireless industry.

Will new HHS study lead to regulatory change?

It’s still unclear if Kennedy’s willingness to speak out about wireless radiation and the new HHS study on cellphone radiation risks will result in meaningful regulatory change.

“More research is not the answer,” wrote Theodora Scarato, director of the Wireless and EMF Program at Environmental Health Sciences, in a statement. “The existing scientific evidence and court rulings already require immediate policy action. Safety guidelines must be updated to reflect today’s continuous, real-world exposures, and enforceable safeguards must be put in place now to protect children.”

HHS could and should require cellphones to have labels that clearly disclose the amount of wireless radiation users are exposed to, she said.

Cellphones should have “prominent black box warnings” for especially vulnerable populations, including children, pregnant women, and people with medical implants or electronic medical devices such as a pacemaker.

McCollough agreed that regulatory change needs to happen. But he said the government’s new study could be a step in that direction. “We know wireless exposure leads to harm, but there are still knowledge gaps.”

The scientific and medical communities have, for a long time, outlined areas that need more research. For instance, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, in a 2008 report, identified a slew of topics related to wireless radiation that need to be studied. The topics include how wireless radiation is affecting young children, fetuses and pregnant women.

“HHS is well aware of what must be done regarding the science,” McCollough said. “But the change has to start with the FCC and it needs to start now.”

According to McCollough:

“The FCC must acknowledge that its current RF exposure guidelines are not biologically based and commit to establishing sound, science-based maximum exposure levels.

“It also needs to finally recognize that there are many people that have already been sickened, and even died, from exposure-related conditions and give them some means to avoid the kind of involuntary exposure that arises from cell towers and other sources in public spaces.”

Mona Nilsson, co-founder and director of the Swedish Radiation Protection Foundation — who has studied the telecom industry’s influence on EMR research — told The Defender she hopes the HHS study will prioritize “the well-being and protection of children and the general public” more than the wireless industry.

Lennart Hardell, M.D., Ph.D., agreed. “Industry-affiliated people, including researchers, have for a long time undermined and ignored scientific evidence on health hazards from RF radiation.”

Blair Levin, policy analyst at New Street Research and former FCC chief of staff, said it was unlikely that efforts by HHS would translate into federal policy changes, Broadband Breakfast reported.

Levin wrote in a statement, “Given the scientific evidence to date, if HHS attempts to force the wireless industry to adopt costly changes to their current operations, we do not see it as likely that the courts will uphold such HHS regulation.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics has not updated its advice on cellphone radiation in nearly a decade — and a link on the group’s parenting advice webpage lists AT&T as one of its corporate sponsors.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/rfk-jr-tells-usa-today-wireless-radiation-major-health-concern/