AI for War: Big Tech Empowering Israel’s Crimes and Occupation by Marwa Fatafta

Alarmingly, these AI-driven systems internalize the genocidal logic of their operators. They are trained to treat civilians as “terrorists,” building on the genocidal logic of Israeli officials who declared that “there are no innocent civilians in Gaza.” As part of efforts to automate lethal targeting, military commanders reportedly instructed soldiers to identify and feed as many targets as possible into the system. This effectively lowers the threshold for designating individuals as “Hamas militants,” casting a wide net of algorithmically flagged subjects. Despite its high error rate, the only criterion Israeli soldiers applied to Lavender’s kill list was the target’s gender, effectively rendering all Palestinian males—children and adults alike—legitimate targets. In practice, AI technology has enabled the Israeli regime’s genocidal logic to be executed with ruthless, machine-driven efficiency, reducing Palestinians, their families, and their homes to what the military chillingly refers to as “garbage targets.