ISTANBUL
The Israeli army is using an artificial intelligence-powered program that generates thousands of Palestinians as potential targets for military strikes in the Gaza Strip, a new investigation has found.
The AI system, called Lavender, is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the armed wings of Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad as potential bombing targets.
As many as 37,000 Palestinian men and their homes were listed by Lavender as potential targets for strikes, according to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have been involved in the use of AI to generate targets for assassination.
Lavender was developed by the army’s elite intelligence division, Unit 8200.
“There has been an illogical amount of (bombings) in this operation,” B., a senior intelligence officer, told the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call.
“This is unparalleled, in my memory. And I have much more trust in a statistical mechanism than a soldier who lost a friend two days ago,” he said.
“The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”
'Sweeping approval'
According to intelligence sources, Lavender’s kill lists were given sweeping approval by the Israeli army, with no requirement to thoroughly check the raw data.
One source said army officers would only give “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing an airstrike, even though the AI system makes “errors” in approximately 10% of cases.
The result was that more than 33,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting, were wiped out in the Israeli onslaught.
According to two sources, in the first early weeks of the Israeli war on Gaza, army forces were permitted to kill 15-20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking targets.
Attacks on such targets were carried out using unguided munitions known as “dumb bombs,” which can destroy entire buildings and cause significant casualties.
“You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage (of those bombs),” said C., another intelligence officer.
Killing 'more than 100 civilians'
Another source said that they had personally authorized the bombing of “hundreds” of private homes of alleged junior operatives marked by Lavender.
According to the sources, if the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.
“Because we usually carried out the attacks with dumb bombs, and that meant literally destroying the whole house on top of its occupants,” testified C., the intelligence officer.
“But even if an attack is averted, you don’t care — you immediately move on to the next target. Because of the system, the targets never end. You have another 36,000 waiting.”
The Israeli army, for its part, dismissed the report, claiming that “each target is examined individually, while an individual assessment is made of the military advantage and collateral damage expected from the attack.”
Israel has waged a deadly military offensive on the Gaza Strip since an Oct. 7 cross-border attack by Hamas which killed around 1,200 people.
At least 33,037 Palestinians have since been killed and nearly 75,700 injured amid mass destruction and shortages of necessities. Israel has also imposed a crippling blockade on the Gaza Strip, leaving its population, particularly residents of northern Gaza, on the verge of starvation.
The Israeli war, now in its 181st day, has pushed 85% of Gaza’s population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine, while 60% of the enclave's infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.
Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which last week asked it to do more to prevent famine in Gaza.
