The Israeli army is reportedly using an artificial intelligence system to target Palestinians to kill with drones and attacks from the sky. During the assault on the Gaza Strip, its use was said to be systemic and automated, defining thousands of people as legitimate targets to be struck, and who were then actually struck. This is what emerges from a joint investigation conducted by independent Israeli newspapers +972 Magazine And Local Call, using Israeli intelligence sources. According to reports, the artificial intelligence system adopted by the Israeli army, called Lavender, was designed to judge in 20 seconds whether or not an identified person is to be considered affiliated with the Palestinian armed resistance movements and, in case of a positive judgement, of the car, without any further verification, the Israeli soldiers proceed with the killing.
The independent newspaper, made up of Israeli and Palestinian journalists, +972 Magazinewith Local Call, carried out an investigation into the use of artificial intelligence in the current war that Israel is waging in Gaza. The two publications’ investigation is based on conversations with seven members of Israeli intelligence – current and former – including personnel involved in the Israeli operation currently underway in the Strip, as well as official statements from the spokesperson of the IDF and other state institutions Israeli reports as well as testimonies, data and documentation collected directly in the Gaza Strip. A rather horrifying picture emerges: a calculated mass killing based on calculations produced by artificial intelligence.
“Lavender” is the artificial intelligence system designed to flag all those deemed suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets. Sources told +972 Magazine And Local Call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army relied almost completely on “Lavender”, which generated a list of 37,000 Palestinians suspected of being militants, and therefore as targets to hit. To this end, another artificial intelligence system, “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), contributes to mass extermination. The reason for the large number of buildings, including houses, designated as targets, and the widespread destruction and death among civilians in Gaza, lies in the use of “Habsora”, which can “spawn” targets almost automatically at a speed that far exceeds what was previously possible. This combination of AI programs was described by a former intelligence officer as one “mass murder factory”.
«Especially during the early stages of the war, the Israeli military gave broad approval to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, without any obligation to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw data of the intelligence on which they were based.” One source said that human staff often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that they typically “personally dedicated only about 20 seconds at each target before authorizing a bombing run.”.
The software “Lavender” analyzes the information collected on the majority of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip, through the mass surveillance system implemented by Israel, then evaluates and classifies the probability that a single person is active in armed resistance. According to sources, LThe machine gives a score from 1 to 100, expressing how likely it is that the analyzed individual is a militant. “Lavender” learns to identify and classify suspects based on known information about Hamas and PIJ militants, initially entered by operators as training data, and then begins to automatically generate its calculations towards the total population. Visual information, cellular information, social media connections, field information, phone contacts, photos, emails, contacts, interests, everything is scanned by artificial intelligence in order to decide whether a person has a high probability of being a Palestinian resistance militant. In short, however powerful and fast the machine may be, it depends on what it is taught to look for, introducing into it any human evaluation or prejudice, and still expressing a probability.
According to four of the sources they spoke to +972 Magazine And Local Call, as already reported above, Lavender marked approximately 37,000 Palestinians as suspected “Hamas militants” and placed on the assassination list. And with the use of the other artificial intelligence system, “The Gospel”, which automatically designates buildings that are a target to hit, the Israeli army systematically attacked the individuals identified by “Lavender” while they were in their homes, even killing their entire families.
Which is significant for several reasons that go beyond the simple violation of international law, why these individuals are not killed on the battlefield, while fighting, inescapable proof that they are indeed resistance fighters. The problem is much broader. These human targets are sentenced to death for the calculations of a machine which, however sophisticated, powerful and fast, remains a machine – opening, among other things, the discussion on the further deresponsibility of human actions through the massive use and automated artificial intelligence – which learns from initial human instructions, which, among other things, can be totally wrong. Thirdly, to kill an individual who a machine has said is, perhaps, a member of the resistance, it is decided to kill him while he is in his home, together with the rest of his family, including women and children. In short, the investigation conducted by the two newspapers reveals a dystopian and inhuman reality of mass extermination that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza and is a warning for a near future that has already overlooked the present in a macabre way.
[di Michele Manfrin]
