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israel hamas war
Israel's AI Targeting Puts All the People of Gaza in the Crosshairs
It seems all restraints have been removed, but Israel's unrepentant backers in the West continue to turn a blind eye as the Palestinian people face a genocidal assault.
Dec 05, 2023
It should already have been evident from the scale of death and destruction inflicted on Gaza over the past eight weeks that Israel was implementing a policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide against Palestinians in the besieged enclave.
Now Israeli whistleblowers have provided details of how these crimes against humanity are being carried out - and how they are being rationalised internally within Israel’s military and political echelons.
An extraordinary series of testimonies jointly published by the Israel-based publications 972 and Local Call last week established that the huge death toll of Palestinian civilians is, in fact, integral to Israel’s war aims, not an unfortunate side effect.
The known dead so far are estimated at almost 16,000, with a further 6,000 missing, presumably crushed under rubble. Two-thirds of those killed by Israel are women and children.
Two years ago, during an earlier attack on Gaza, Israeli military officials admitted for the first time that a computer was supplying them with potential targets. The intention appears to have been to bypass the restraints imposed by human assessments of likely casualties by outsourcing the killings to a machine.
The whistleblowers confirm that, given new, generous parameters of who and what can be attacked, the artificial intelligence system, called “Gospel”, is generating lists of targets so rapidly the military cannot keep up.
Israel’s inputs are now so broad that they allow the bombing without warning of high-rise apartment blocks, so long as it can be claimed that one person residing there is believed to have a connection to Hamas.
As Hamas not only has a military wing but runs the enclave’s government, the new policy potentially widens the circle of targets to include civil servants, police, health workers, educators, journalists and aid workers.
That helps explain how, according to United Nations figures, some 100,000 homes in Gaza have been leveled or made uninhabitable and 1.7 million Palestinians displaced, or some three-quarters of the enclave’s population.
Basic survival
The revelations definitively give the lie to claims by Western politicians, such as US President Joe Biden, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer, that Israel is simply defending itself and trying to avoid civilian casualties.
In a report last Friday, the Guardian corroborated Israel’s reliance on the Gospel computing system. The paper quoted a former White House official familiar with the Pentagon’s development of autonomous offensive systems as stating that Israel’s no-holds-barred AI war on Gaza was an “important moment.”
The official added: “Other states are going to be watching and learning.”
Perhaps the most significant of the disclosures from current and former Israeli officials who have spoken to 972 and Local Call is the fact that Israel is aware its many thousands of air strikes on Gaza’s residential areas are having a minimal impact on the armed wing of Hamas.
This contrasts with public declarations that Israel is seeking to eradicate the group.
Even according to the Israeli military’s own claims, likely based on the new, much broader definition of who counts as a Hamas target, Israel has killed between 1,000 and 3,000 “operatives” - meaning that, even by Israel’s assessment, civilians comprise between 85 and 95 per cent of those dead from its bombing campaigns.
Israel is continuing long-standing military policies towards Gaza - but has changed the focus to allow for far greater bloodshed among civilians
This is not accidental, according to the sources.
Israel is continuing long-standing military policies towards Gaza—principally the so-called Dahiya doctrine, sometimes known as “mowing the lawn”—but has changed the focus to allow for far greater bloodshed among civilians.
The doctrine, which has guided Israel’s repeated attacks on Gaza over the last 15 years, is named after the destruction of an entire neighbourhood of Beirut in Israel’s war on Lebanon in 2006.
The doctrine has two key premises: that laying waste to an enemy area will force the population to concentrate on basic survival rather than resistance; and in the longer term it will encourage ordinary people to rise up against their rulers.
Traditionally, the Dahiya doctrine was chiefly about the destruction of infrastructure. At least officially, given the strictures of international law, Israel claimed it issued advance warnings. That was supposed to give civilians in the targeted area time to evacuate.
According to military officials, this notice period has largely ended, placing civilians directly in Israel’s crosshairs.
‘Not surgical’
A source explained the effects of the new policy to 972: “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior [Hamas] official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage.”
A former military intelligence official said the policy was designed to make most of Gaza’s infrastructure legitimate targets: “Hamas is everywhere in Gaza; there is no building that does not have something of Hamas in it, so if you want to find a way to turn a high-rise into a target, you will be able to do so.”
According to these sources, given that Hamas’ armed wing is underground in tunnels, Israel has struggled to identify primary targets, such as weapons sites, armed cells and headquarters.
Instead, it has focused on what it calls “power targets”—or more accurately, symbolic targets—such as high-rise buildings and residential towers in urban areas, as well as public buildings such as universities, banks, government offices, hospitals and mosques.
These attacks, say the sources, are seen as a “means that allows damage to civil society,” weakening the ability of the society to organise and function, and families to subsist. According to 972, the former Israeli officials it spoke to “understood, some explicitly and some implicitly, that damage to civilians is the real purpose of these attacks.”
Referring to the high death toll among civilians, another source stated: “Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”
Five different sources told 972 that Israel had compiled files on tens of thousands of private homes and apartments in Gaza where low-level Hamas members live. The homes, as well as everyone who lives in them, were viewed as a legitimate target as soon as a Hamas-linked person entered the building.
One noted: “Hamas members who don’t really matter for anything live in homes across Gaza. So they mark the home and bomb the house and kill everyone there.”
Another source observed of this practice that its equivalent would be for Hamas to bomb “all the private residences of our families when [Israeli soldiers] go back to sleep at home on the weekend.”
An official who had overseen previous attacks on Gaza said Israel would claim one floor in a high-rise was serving as the office of a Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesman to justify leveling the building. “I understood that the floor is an excuse that allows the army to cause a lot of destruction in Gaza.”
If the truth were known about what Israel was doing, the source added, “this would itself be seen as terrorism. So they do not say it.”
Another stated that Israel’s aim was to inflict maximum damage rather than hit the part of the building associated with Hamas. “It was also possible to hit that specific target with more accurate weaponry. The bottom line is that they knocked down a high-rise for the sake of knocking down a high-rise.”
Senior Israeli officials have made this goal explicit over the past few weeks. Omer Tishler, the head of the Israeli air force, told military reporters that entire neighborhoods had been attacked “on a large scale and not in a surgical manner.”
A source said Israel’s long-term aim was “to give the citizens of Gaza the feeling that Hamas is not in control of the situation.”
Holy war
In previous attacks on Gaza, Israel adopted a strategy that inflicted wanton destruction on infrastructure and led to large numbers of Palestinians being killed. But according to the sources quoted by 972 and Local Call, all restraints have been removed, dramatically scaling up the fallout for civilians.
Tishler, the head of the air force, has confirmed that, in many cases before bombing a building, Israel no longer provides a warning strike with a small shell - known as “ roof knocking.” The practice, he said, was “relevant to rounds [of fighting] and not to war.”
The risk this poses to civilians has been highlighted by the disclosure that the Israeli military is now using an artificial intelligence system, Habsora or Gospel, to identify targets.The very name, with its biblical connotation, confirms the dangerous influences of religious fundamentalism now at play in the Israeli military, and the increasing assumption that Israel is engaged in a holy war against the Palestinians.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, traditionally seen as a secular figure, has adopted the language of the extremist settler right in calling Israel’s attack on Gaza a war against “Amalek” — a biblical enemy whose men, women and children the Israelites were commanded by God to exterminate.
The Targets Administrative Division that runs Gospel had been turned into a 'mass assassination factory'
Speaking of the military’s new reliance on Gospel, Aviv Kochavi, the former head of the Israeli military, told the Israeli Ynet website earlier this year: “In the past, we would produce 50 targets in Gaza per year. Now, this machine produces 100 targets a single day, with 50 per cent of them being attacked.”
The goal, he observed, was to address a “problem” in earlier bombing campaigns against Gaza that the Israeli military quickly ran out of Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets its human staff could identify.
A former intelligence officer told 972 that the Targets Administrative Division that runs Gospel had been turned into a “mass assassination factory”. Tens of thousands of people had been listed as “junior Hamas operatives” and were therefore treated as targets. The officer added that the “emphasis is on quantity and not on quality”.
A source who worked in the division added that most of Gospel’s recommendations were being nodded through without meaningful scrutiny: “We work quickly and there is no time to delve deep into the target. The view is that we are judged according to how many targets we manage to generate.”
Ethnic cleansing plan
The significance of these revelations—and what they disclose about Israel’s “war aims”—should not be underestimated.
Previously, the permanent siege on Gaza and Israel’s intermittent rampages based on the Dahiya doctrine were used as tools for managing the enclave.
They served as a constant reminder to Hamas of who is boss. The goal was to keep the group focused on administrative duties rather than armed resistance: repairing the destruction, devising ways to work around the siege, and restoring Hamas’ political legitimacy with a battle-weary wider public.
Now, Israel’s aim appears much more comprehensive - and final. According to a report in last week’s Financial Times, Israel is still in the early stages of a campaign that could last up to a year.
Despite the destruction of vast swaths of northern Gaza, and Israel’s current, intensified rampage in the south, an official familiar with the Israel’s war plans told the paper Israel still had a long way to go.
“This will be a very long war… We’re currently not near halfway to achieving our objectives.”
Most of Gaza’s population is being herded into the Rafah area, pressed up against the short border with Egypt. As has been explained in these pages before, Israel has had a long-term ethnic cleansing plan, seeking to pressure Cairo into rehousing Gaza’s population in Sinai.
The rapid onset of disease and starvation in the enclave from Israel’s intensified siege, denying the population food, water and power, is firmly aimed at forcing Egypt’s hand.
‘Thinning’ the population
According to Israel Hayom, an Israeli paper with historically close links to Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, officials in Washington have been presented with a scheme to weaken Egyptian opposition further.
The US would offer aid to other neighboring states conditioned on their accepting refugees from Gaza, thereby lifting some of the burden from Egypt.
Additionally, the paper’s Hebrew edition refers to a plan drafted at Netanyahu’s request by Ron Dermer, one of his senior ministers, to “ thin the population in Gaza to the barest minimum possible” through expulsions.The paper refers to this as a “strategic goal” for Netanyahu.
Netanyahu is reported to believe that, after the world has accepted millions of refugees displaced from Iraq, Syria and Ukraine: 'Why should Gaza be different?'
Netanyahu is reported to believe that, after the world has accepted millions of refugees displaced from Iraq, Syria and Ukraine, why should Gaza be different?
The plan envisions Palestinians leaving Gaza across the border with Egypt or fleeing by boat to Europe and Africa.
Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza, making it uninhabitable, is entirely consistent both with its leaders’ stated aims of treating Palestinians as “human animals” and with the whistleblowers’ revelations.
And yet Western politicians and media continue maintaining the fiction that Israel’s objectives are limited to “eliminating” Hamas - and that the only legitimate question is whether Israel is acting “proportionately”.
This wholesale failure to see the forest for the trees is not accidental. It is evidence that Western elites are wholly complicit in Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.
However strong the proof, even when insiders disclose Israel’s policies of genocide and mass ethnic cleansing, the West is determined to turn a blind eye.
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Where Are the Tears That Should Be Cried All Around?
Where is the empathy and compassion? Where is the outrage for not only the victims of October 7th, but also for the long-suffering of Palestinians?
Nov 06, 2023
When Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasts of “hellfire” being rained down on Gaza, he is correct. “Hellfire” has rained down on Gaza, creating one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent memory. But what Israel’s prime minister gets wrong is that this crisis dates back long before Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. Hell on earth has been the reality in Gaza since 2005, when the territory’s population of more than 2 million had its movement and freedom restricted as the Israelis began a blockade of the land that limited the amount of fuel, food, medicine, and water that the Gazans could access.
The result has been that for nearly two decades, Gaza has become what many now refer to as the largest open-air prison in the world. The depth of the crisis cannot even be imagined by those not living in Gaza; even more perverse is the way so much of the world refuses to even try to understand the historical reality or contemplate the true scope of this crisis. They prefer instead to treat the events since October 7 as the start of a conflict rather than the latest installment in a decades-long struggle for Palestinian survival against one of the world’s most powerful nations.
According to a UN Conference on Trade and Development, or UNCTaD, report from 2022, two-thirds of Gaza’s population was living in poverty, while its unemployment rate of 45% was one of the highest in the world. Living standards—as measured by gross domestic product per capita—were 27% lower than they were in 2006. An Amnesty International report in 2017 stated that 90-95% of Gaza’s water supply is contaminated and unfit for human consumption.
This is not to dismiss Hamas’ horrendous slaughter of civilians on October 7. We grieve and mourn the loss of 32-year-old Hayim Katsman, gardener, scholar, and anti-occupation activist killed in Kibbutz Holit on Oct. 7. We grieve all deaths. We grieve for 12-year-old Ayham Mohammad Talal Al-Shafi, shot and killed by an Israeli soldier firing live ammunition on Nov. 2 in the West Bank town of Al-Bireh. We grieve and mourn the almost 4,000 Palestinian children killed by U.S.-made Israeli bombs, pulled out from under the rubble of fallen buildings, their hair white from the dust of fallen concrete, their bodies limp from death.
We also grieve with lamentations, all the tears that were not shed, the outrage that was not felt or expressed for the many Palestinian lives in lost in the years and decades before Oct. 7. Is our humanity as people, nations, the world lost?
The colossal proportions of this catastrophe that is Gaza both before and after Oct. 7th can only be addressed when the world community grapples with the humanity of Palestinian people, and begins to understand the length, breadth, and dimensions of the damage done to Gazans since 2005, and overall, against Palestinians for 75 years. That would require a profound act of imagination that much of the world seems incapable of making.
It would require putting ourselves in the experiences of a person living in Gaza for just a second, and try to imagine what the blockage of food, medicine, water, and fuel would feel like.
Imagine how it would feel if the basic necessities of life—healthcare, clean water, education, sanitation–were denied your family and community, not because of any fault of your own, but imposed by the bullying of a powerful and connected neighbor. I am sure that the situation would be defined as abusive and threatening to your very existence.
Imagine that you were one of the 70 cancer patients getting treatment at the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital—the only hospital offering cancer treatment in the Gaza Strip—which has just been closed due to lack of fuel. Or perhaps your child was one of the nearly 400 children denied permits to go to the West Bank in the first six months of 2023 for critical healthcare. Approximately two children every day over that time were unable to access to life-saving surgery or urgent medication.
Imagine someone having control over the flow of water into your home, and able to cut it off at their whim.
Imagine what it means to scrounge for food to feed your family.
The movement of Gazans has been restricted and control on land, sea, and air beyond its borders. The media, politicians, and other leaders rarely describe this experience or this history in ways that would help the world understand and enable others to feel the absolute inhumanity of this predicament.
Instead, political leaders in the U.S. and Israel are seeking to camouflage the history and damage of the blockade, and the carnage that Israeli missiles and bombs are raining down on civilian populations. How else can we explain the Israeli government’s attempts to shut down Al Jazeera’s office in Israel or Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken’s request to the prime minister of Qatar to tone down Al Jazeera’s rhetoric on the war in Gaza? When the current situation is billed as Israel against Hamas, or the Hamas War, it avoids the real facts of the dimensions of death, destruction, and displacement that Gazans are really experiencing on the ground. But this is only the latest version of the deadly collective punishment that has been inflicted by Israel since the start of its blockade and imprisonment.
To date, there have been more than 8,000 deaths in Gaza. Women and children make up more than 62% of the fatalities. The numbers of civilians killed in Gaza grows radically higher every day. Yet, Netanyahu and his government respond: “This is war!” President Joe Biden, with a cavalier wave of the hand, says he has “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.” He continues, “…I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.” War does not excuse ethics or morality when children and civilians are bombed and killed. Israel, funded by the U.S., callously brushes off the accusations of its war crimes and the grave humanitarian crisis that their continuing tactics have created.
Is this President Joe Biden morally apathetic to the death, dying, and suffering where one group is more important, noteworthy, or “strategically valuable” than the deaths of another group of people? Where is the empathy and compassion? Where are the tears that should be cried all around? Where is the outrage for not only the victims of October 7th, but also for the long-suffering of Palestinians? Where have the voices of moral outage been for 75 years of malignant Israeli apartheid, or the years of containment faced by Gazans.
We implore the President, political leaders in the U.S., world leaders, and all people not just to value the lives of people killed in Israel, but also the innocent Palestinians killed by Israeli policy since 1948 and continues at this very moment in Gaza.
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