Secret Israeli military bunker located in shadow of Tel Aviv tower struck by Iran, analysis shows
A U.S. Army photo outside Israel's secretive 'Site 81' underground bunker has been geolocated meters away from an Israeli Air Force tower within a densely populated civilian neighborhood.
Published in partnership with The Grayzone
When Iran struck a series of targets in the heart of north Tel Aviv with ballistic missiles on June 13, Israeli authorities immediately cordoned off the area to prevent journalists from filming the damage. “The building on this compound was just hit,” Trey Yingst of Fox News declared as he arrived that evening at the site of HaKirya, Israel’s Defense Ministry headquarters, and the nearby Azrieli Center. Israeli police officers aggressively shunted Yingst away from where he was standing, just north of the HaKirya Bridge on the west side of Menachem Begin Road.
Iranian airstrikes the same day struck the north tower of the Da Vinci apartment complex roughly 550 meters southwest of Yingst’s location. The Grayzone has determined that the building sits immediately south of the “Canarit” / “Kannarit” Israeli Air Force towers and above an underground military intelligence bunker jointly administered by the US and Israeli militaries. According to an analysis of leaked emails, public documents, and Israeli news reports, the location is a highly secretive, electromagnetically shielded intelligence facility known as “Site 81.”
Israel aggressively censors information relating to its urban military and intelligence facilities while simultaneously accusing its adversaries of engaging in ‘human shielding’ – a practice of protecting military targets with civilian populations that is prohibited by international humanitarian law. While the existence of a U.S. Army project to expand Site 81 to a 6,000 square-meter facility was widely reported from government records circa 2013, the location was never specified beyond central Tel Aviv.
A photo taken outside of Site 81 has now been geolocated to the grounds of the Da Vinci apartment complex, which one resident decried as a shield for the Israeli military headquarters. Leaked emails from a former chief of the general staff of the Israeli military further indicate that Site 81 is used for military command and control. The Jerusalem Post also reported that an Iranian missile which struck the Da Vinci towers was “just a stone’s throw from Netanyahu’s office,” which renamed from “Building 22” to the “Shimon Peres House.” The prime minister’s office began undergoing renovations just weeks after the Israeli-Iranian Twelve Day War and is rumored to have been damaged in the strikes.
In more recent years the Israeli military constructed a larger underground command center in Kirya known as the “Fortress of Zion,” which is a circa 2019 extension of an older command center known as “The Pit.” Given their temporal, spatial, and functional proximity, it is likely that “The Pit” was, at a minimum, connected to Site 81. A final $758,461 payment to the American construction firm Oxford Federal for its “phase 2” work on Site 81 was processed on February 26, 2019.
Journalists from Israel Hayom and then The New York Times have visited the Fortress of Zion but have chosen not to reveal its precise location or entrance.
Geolocating ‘Site 81’
Google Maps noticeably does not allow street views of the section of Leonardo da Vinci St. directly in front of the Da Vinci Towers, nor of much of the area surrounding the military headquarters, which is synonymous with the Kirya region. An associate director of the Federation of American Scientists likewise published extensive evidence of Israeli censorship and forgery of satellite imagery data surrounding its military bases in late 2018. Google Maps, meanwhile, has blurred satellite imagery of Israel despite the end of U.S. legislation banning its publication.
The region east of Leonardo Da Vinci St. and west of Azrieli Center is also censored by the Moscow-based Yandex Maps, with both satellite imagery and metadata of even the Da Vinci towers completely blocked.
A photo of Site 81 published by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in February 2013 as part of a corrosion test of the underground structure’s concrete overlay and galvanized steel plating can be geolocated to what is now the site of the Da Vinci apartment towers, with the southern of the two 18-story Israeli Air Force Kannarit towers just meters away. According to a website for the Kannarit towers published by the Israeli construction firm Danya Cebus, they were “constructed for the [Israeli] Air Force Headquarters.” The Israeli aluminum building enclosure company Alumeshet described its work on the towers in 2002 as including the construction of “a blast mitigation system ensuring maximum security.”
Haaretz has reported the existence of the Army Corps report, concluding that Site 81 was located somewhere in central Tel Aviv. A closer analysis of a photograph in the report reveals it was taken roughly 60 meters north of Eliezer Kaplan St. on the east side of Leonardo da Vinci St., in the southwestern corner of an Israeli military base containing the country’s rough equivalent of the U.S. Pentagon.
The east face of the 29-floor Daniel Frisch Tower fills much of the background of the Army Corps photo, which shows two large instrument cases set to be transported into the basement of Site 81. Located roughly 160 meters northwest from the photographer, trees from the Gerry Pencer Park partially obstruct the base of the tower, with the top of the London Ministores Tower also visible just to the right.
The features from the Army Corps photo precisely match those of a February 2019 image published to Google Maps from the southwest corner of Eliezer Kaplan and Leonardo da Vinci, which includes the same five distinctive curved pipes connected to the Kannarit tower just north of the razorwire.
Civilian shielding of the Kirya
A detailed report from France 24 regarding Israeli censorship of reporting on the Iranian strikes concluded that coverage of the attack on the 42-story Da Vinci Towers had likely been purposefully delayed, stating that “it looks like censorship is at play.” “Israeli newspaper Haaretz waited until June 29 to mention this strike in an article – a full two weeks after the attack took place, even though the images of it had already circulated online,” wrote the newspaper’s ‘Observers’ team.
When recounting the incident to Israeli media weeks later, one resident recalled being informed of the tower’s true purpose in a conversation with a friend, who asked: “Brother, don’t you get that they approved the construction of all those towers to protect the Kirya?”
“Today, I realize I’ve been paying 12,000 shekels a month to protect the Kirya,” the resident explained, using the common shorthand for the Israeli military headquarters.
The geolocation of the Site 81 photo suggests that the Da Vinci Towers are also protecting the secretive underground intelligence facility. The apparent location of the bunker is also directly across the street from a children’s playground, and a 2,500 square-meter community center opened at the base of the towers in July 2023. By situating some of its most sensitive military installations in the heart of a civilian area, Israel has engaged in the human shielding practice it routinely accuses Palestinians of exploiting.
The tenants of an eight-story commercial building nestled inside the Da Vinci complex also enjoy direct ties to military intelligence. The Israeli generative artificial intelligence company AI21 Labs, which was founded by veterans of the IDF’s signals intelligence arm, Unit 8200, earlier this year, confirmed the participation of AI21 employees in developing a ChatGPT-like military AI tool targeting Palestinians. AI21 – which has also been affiliated with Stanford University – announced its lease of space on the fourth and fifth floors of the Da Vinci office building in late 2023.
American financing of the towers
The Kannarit towers were built by the major Israeli construction company Danya Cebus, which described the work as part of a joint venture with another firm, known as Solel Boneh. The controlling stake of Shikun & Binui was passed from Israel’s then-richest woman, Shari Arison, to the Los Angeles-based real estate developer Netanal H. “Naty” Saidoff in mid-2018.
Saidoff has overseen several Israeli government-affiliated nonprofits in the Los Angeles area, including by chairing the Likud-oriented Israeli-American Council (IAC) and underwriting the legal program of StandWithUs, a pro-Israel training group. Saidoff’s fellow board member at Shikun & Binui, Sagi Balasha, was the first CEO of both the IAC and the Israeli government’s controversial propaganda initiative, Concert / Voices of Israel.
(The journalist who first reported from inside the Fortress of Zion was indicated in a recent leak to have helped create a predecessor to Concert’s cyber intelligence arm.)
The headquarters of the cybersecurity company Perimeter 81 – now part of the publicly traded Check Point Technologies – is also located roughly 40 meters to the west of the apparent location of Site 81. Check Point is in the process of developing a new headquarters in Tel Aviv with Israel Canada Group, which, along with Acro Real Estate, purchased the rights for the Da Vinci complex in 2015 from what was previously a Ministry of Defense site for NIS 830 million (roughly $207 million). The current CEO of Check Point, Nadav Zafrir, commanded Unit 8200 circa 2009 to 2013.
Public U.S. contracting records show that the Plano, Texas-based branch of the German engineering solutions company M+W Group – now known as Exyte – began a $7.4 million contract for Site 81 in June 2011, spanning the company’s support for the Army Corps study. The much larger ‘Phase 2’ of the Site 81 project was subsequently awarded to the controversial Oxford Construction of Pennsylvania for $29.6 million in August 2013, with the contracts being shifted to Oxford Federal after a Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2017. In 2018, Oxford Construction was slapped with a lawsuit accusing its owners of racketeering, fraud, and negligent misrepresentation.
Leaked emails on Site 81’s use for “command and control”
A previously unreported leaked email exchange between former Israeli military Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi and ex-NATO commander James Stavridis offers further details of the presence of a command and control network operating inside the Site 81 bunker – and established smack in the middle of a densely populated civilian area.
“Hi Gabi,” opened an apparent email Stavridis to Ashkenazi on September 1, 2015. “I am working with an exciting company called Think Logical here in the USA. They build command and control networks, and just won a big contract out at Site 81 with the IDF [Israel Defense Forces],” continued the message.
Published as part of a leaked archive from a pro-Palestinian hacktivist group known as Handala, and then curated by the American nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, Ashkenazi’s email are part of a trove of documents which have received widespread recent attention from international journalists.
“I am enjoying my new job as Dean of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy here in Boston -- a top school of international relations,” noted the apparent email from Stavridis, before asking Ashkenazi for a recommendation for “someone to help [Thinklogical] navigate in Israel as a consulting [sic].” “I was thinking a retired IDF 1-star?”
Admiral Stavridis’s reply to a request for comment appears to have been accidental, copying his wife and executive assistant in an email which only read “Just seeing this? Are you sure!? He is ending,” followed by a long footer mentioning his current roles as vice chairman of global affairs of The Carlyle Group and chairman of the board of The Rockefeller Foundation.
Gen. Ashkenazi and Mr. Pajer did not respond to requests for comment. The Israel Defense Forces similarly did not respond to requests emailed to three separate spokesperson addresses.
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