Tag: israel

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In memory of Hind Rajab and Sidra Hassouna

On April 3 the Israeli magazine +972 published an explosive article by Yuval Abraham based on interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers, all of whom have served in the army during the current war on Gaza. Its subject was the use of AI software named “Lavender” to generate targets for bombing. Abraham suggests that much of the death toll from the Israeli assault (which has now passed 33,000) is a result of the IDF treating the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”

Personally, I wouldn’t blame the killing on the software. The great fear about AI has always been of its escaping human control and taking over, as in the Matrix films. This is wrong. What the obliteration of Gaza has shown is that the greater danger comes when the awesome capabilities of AI are put at the disposal of human beings.

The Lavender software analyzes information collected on most of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip through a system of mass surveillance, then assesses and ranks the likelihood that each particular person is active in the military wing of Hamas or PIJ …

Lavender learns to identify characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ operatives, whose information was fed to the machine as training data, and then to locate these same characteristics … among the general population … An individual found to have several different incriminating features will reach a high rating, and thus automatically becomes a potential target for assassination. 

The Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets … during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants—and their homes—for possible air strikes.

One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing—just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male.

The Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes—usually at night while their whole families were present—rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. 

Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” … were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.

When it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs), which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants 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., one of the intelligence officers. 

Another source said that they had personally authorized the bombing of “hundreds” of private homes of alleged junior operatives marked by Lavender, with many of these attacks killing civilians and entire families as “collateral damage.”

The following was posted on X (formerly Twitter) by Husam Zomlot, Palestinian ambassador to the UK, on February 14, accompanying several photos of Sidra Hassouna and her family:

This is 7 year old Sidra, the cousin of my wife. The impact of the Israeli missile was so powerful it flung her out, leaving her mutilated body dangling from the ruins of the destroyed building in Rafah 48 hours ago. My wife’s aunt Suzan, her husband Fouzy Hassouna, two of their sons, Muhammad and Karam, Karam’s wife Amouna and her three children (7-year-old twins Sidra and Suzan, and 15-month-old Malik) were all killed. The family had been displaced from the north of Gaza and took shelter in Rafah. We will be relentless until those responsible brought to justice.

All texts, except the last, are quotations from Yuval Abraham’s article “‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza.” You can read more about Hind Rajab and Sidra Hassouna here and here. 

I took the photographs at Notre Dame de Sénanque abbey in Provence in July 2002.

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Medic carrying a wounded Palestinian child in Gaza. Photo courtesy Fars Media Corporation/Wikimedia Commons.

As I explained in a previous post, I don’t usually write on current political events outside of Facebook and Twitter posts, but there are limits. I will not keep my head down and my mouth shut in the face of what 15 out of 17 judges at the International Court of Justice have ruled is plausibly a GENOCIDE being committed by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza, until very recently with the unqualified support of the governments and major opposition parties of the two countries, Canada and the United Kingdom, of which I am a citizen. 

Since January, I have posted a number of pieces on the conflict in Gaza (and its implications for civil liberties in North America and Europe) on my Substack, some of which I have subsequently revised and published in the online magazine Canadian Dimension.

The fullest statement of my position (briefly, that “while I unreservedly condemn Hamas’s actions against civilians on October 7, I can see no moral standpoint from which I could do so that would not oblige me equally to condemn Israel’s retaliatory violence—and vice versa”) can be found in the long article “Eyeless in Gaza.”

My most recent Substack/Canadian Dimension articles are:

A moral crossroads for the West: Is Benjamin Netanyahu about to cross his Rubicon? Substack, 14 March and Canadian Dimension, 14 March

The threshold of intent: Closing in on a Final Solution in Gaza? Substack, 25 March and Canadian Dimension, 25 March

Details and links to the earlier articles can be found in my earlier post Silence is complicity.

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an unpublished letter to the Guardian newspaper

I sent this letter to the Guardian on January 26 in response to their call for comments on an article on the ICJ ruling on South Africa’s charge of genocide against Israel. I think it is safe to assume they are not intending to publish it. The only thing I would add is that to describe the ruling as “a win for the rule of law” is overly hopeful. The actions of Israel, the US, the UK, Germany, Canada, and most other so-called western democracies since, including the disgusting defunding of UNRWA on the basis of completely unsubstantiated allegations by Israel, demonstrate the exact contrary. 

I have written more on this extremely clarifying moment in Canadian Dimension.

Dear Guardian,

Kenneth Roth is right to stress that the ICJ ruling on Israel’s actions toward Palestinians in Gaza is a “win for the rule of law” (“The ICJ ruling is a repudiation of Israel and its western backers,” Jan. 26).

It is also a vindication of the millions whose protests have been denounced as “hate marches, chanting for the erasure of Israel from the map” (Suella Braverman); of US congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who was censured by her House of Representatives colleagues for “promoting false narratives regarding the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel”; of Liz Magill and Claudine Gay, who were hounded out of office as presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard respectively for their alleged failure to deal with campus antisemitism; of Mehdi Hasan, whose popular news show was pulled by MSNBC; of Ai Weiwei and Candace Breitz, who had long-planned exhibitions cancelled at prestigious art galleries; of Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli, whose Frankfurt Book Fair award ceremony for the 2023 LiBeraturpreis for her novel Minor Detail was cancelled; of editors Michael Essen at eLife and David Velasco at Artforum, who were fired for supporting pro-Palestinian speech; of journalist Masha Gessen, who forfeited the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s sponsorship for her Hannah Arendt Prize because she dared compare Gaza with a Nazi ghetto; of actress Melissa Barrera, who lost her lead role in the next “Scream” film for describing Israel as “colonial”; of footballers Yousef Atal and Anwar El Ghazi, who were dropped at Nice and Mainz FC for pro-Palestinian posts on social media; and for a legion of others in the US, UK, Germany, Canada and elsewhere who have been vilified as “antisemites” and persecuted for daring to criticize Israel and/or support the Palestinian cause.

Derek Sayer