On December 2, the Israeli military’s Arab spokesperson, Avichay Adraee, released a map of Gaza, divided into a grid of numbered blocks, with instructions for Palestinians living in certain areas to be evacuated to Rafah. Leaflets containing a QR code linking to the map available on the Israeli army website were also dropped on Gaza.
The move comes as Israeli warplanes bombard the southern Gaza Strip – previously designated a “safe zone” – killing hundreds of Palestinians in 24 hours. The Israeli army proudly announced that it had hit “400 targets”.
Meanwhile, media reports revealed that the Israeli military’s ability to intensify what it calls “precision” airstrikes has been boosted by an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that generates “targets.”
The maps, the leaflets, the tweets, the claims of “precision” military technology, all fuel the narrative that Israel’s “most moral army” is taking care to protect civilians in Gaza. But this is all nothing more than a propaganda ploy to cover up what is really happening on the ground: AI-assisted genocide.
A card game
During the past two months of brutal war, Israel has constantly resorted to “evacuation” cards and warnings posted on social media, calling on Palestinians to flee certain areas of Gaza.
Yet the growing death toll – nearly 16,000 people and thousands more missing and possibly dead – offers no evidence that Israel actually cares about the well-being of Palestinian civilians.
What worries him are growing condemnations abroad of what legal experts call genocide and growing pressure from the United States.
Just days ago, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Israel that it had weeks, not months, to complete its campaign in Gaza. His boss, President Joe Biden, is keenly aware of growing domestic discontent over his handling of the war, which could cost him votes in next year’s presidential election.
This “evacuation message” launched by the Israeli army is aimed more at the Western public, seeking to allay their fears regarding the number of civilian deaths, than at the Palestinians in Gaza. The fact that it is distributed primarily on social media platforms indicates that the intended audience is not residents of the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli military not only cut off electricity to Gaza, but also targeted and damaged its already temperamental mobile network, leaving most residents without access to the internet.
The leaflets launched this weekend are also not worth the paper they were printed on. The QR code on it is only useful if there is a working phone with a charged battery and Internet access.
Discrepancies between different maps shared by Israeli officials have also led to further confusion. The areas marked for targeting in orange didn’t even match the number of blocks authorities were asking people to evacuate from.
Therefore, the overall impact of the cards has been to create “fear, panic and confusion,” as Melanie Ward, CEO of Medical Aid for Palestinians, explained in a tweet.
Furthermore, the detailed mapping and dissection of Gaza is designed to create the illusion of precision and precaution, but the evacuation orders that underlie them demonstrate the opposite.
Gaza covers 360 square kilometers and has a population of 2.3 million. The average size of each of the 620 blocks on the map is 0.58 square kilometers, which means approximately 3,700 residents per block.
Asking dozens of blocks equivalent to tens of thousands of people to move is hardly “precision.” This is a massive move disguised as a parsimonious precaution.
Israel’s digital killing machine
In addition to using digital maps and QR codes to try to prove to its allies that its military is not reckless, Israel also boasts of its “precision” military technologies.
Among them is an AI weapons system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”) that can quickly and automatically identify targets, much faster than older methods.
If during previous bombing campaigns, the Israeli army manually selected 50 targets per day, today the new system offers 100.
According to a source cited by the magazine +972, this weapon has transformed the Israeli army into a “factory of mass assassinations”, favoring “quantity and not quality”.
The magazine reports that Israeli soldiers using the AI targeting system are aware of the number of civilians they will kill; it is displayed in the “collateral damage” category in the target file.
The Israeli military has categorized thresholds for civilian deaths, ranging from five to several hundred. The “collateral damage five” directive, for example, means that Israeli soldiers are allowed to kill a target that will also kill five civilians.
At the top of the scale, “Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians with the aim of assassinating a single senior Hamas military commander,” reports +972 magazine.
Given that Israel views the 30,000 Hamas members in Gaza as potential targets, this means that the “annihilation” of the movement would come at a heavy price in civilian deaths. If we take the lowest “five collateral damages,” the most conservative estimate is 150,000 civilians.
Of course, as slain Hamas leaders are inevitably replaced, hundreds more Palestinians will be murdered as the AI system generates more new targets. Since Hamas cannot be defeated militarily, the only logical outcome will be the perpetual killing or displacement of all Gaza residents.
Another disturbing element of AI is that it reproduces the biases on which it was trained. Historically, Israel has shown little respect for civilian life in its bombings. One has to wonder to what extent the covert AI has learned to associate any Palestinian with “Hamas terrorists” based on the past behavior of the Israeli military. This could explain why it is able to generate so many new “targets” for bombing.
Precision propaganda
Israel likes to boast of its morality and its high-tech, precision strike capabilities, ironically as a means of defending itself against allegations of indiscriminate attacks on civilians and allegations of war crimes.
This characterization of the technological sophistication of the Israeli military is also used by the United States to justify its support for Israel. Blinken, for example, said that “Israel has… one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world. It is capable of neutralizing the threat posed by Hamas while minimizing harm to innocent men, women and children. »
But the more the United States and Israel tout the narrative of their technological prowess, the more it creates an element of legal danger. As international law professor Michael Schmitt argues, “the greater the precision capabilities of an attacker, the more convincing it is to characterize an attack targeting civilians or civilian objects as reckless.”
In other words, a high-tech military has more of an obligation to try to “prove” that it is not reckless. The more Israel and the United States tout Israel’s technical prowess, the more people wonder why so many civilians are being killed.
The only answer is that Israel has precision weapons, but it continues to target the population indiscriminately. Thus, sophisticated technology, rather than serving its apparent purpose of precision and precaution, is instead transformed into a weapon of massacre and mass destruction. In other words, what we are witnessing in Gaza is an AI-assisted genocide.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.