The Guardian (“‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets“):
The Israeli military’s bombing campaign in Gaza used a previously undisclosed AI-powered database that at one stage identified 37,000 potential targets based on their apparent links to Hamas, according to intelligence sources involved in the war.
In addition to talking about their use of the AI system, called Lavender, the intelligence sources claim that Israeli military officials permitted large numbers of Palestinian civilians to be killed, particularly during the early weeks and months of the conflict.
Their unusually candid testimony provides a rare glimpse into the first-hand experiences of Israeli intelligence officials who have been using machine-learning systems to help identify targets during the six-month war.
Israel’s use of powerful AI systems in its war on Hamas has entered uncharted territory for advanced warfare, raising a host of legal and moral questions, and transforming the relationship between military personnel and machines.
“This is unparalleled, in my memory,” said one intelligence officer who used Lavender, adding that they had more faith in a “statistical mechanism” than a grieving soldier. “Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”
Another Lavender user questioned whether humans’ role in the selection process was meaningful. “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.”
The testimony from the six intelligence officers, all who have been involved in using AI systems to identify Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) targets in the war, was given to the journalist Yuval Abraham for a report published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call.
Their accounts were shared exclusively with the Guardian in advance of publication.
I had never heard of +972 Magazine (which takes its name from the Israel-Palestine telephone exchange) before this morning but it has been in existence since 2010, founded by four young Israeli journalists who had solo blogs of their own. It’s avowedly leftist and written in English to spread a specific view of the Israel-Palestinian conflict to an international audience.
It’s rather clear to me that they have an agenda. Indeed, a scan of their front page shows an almost laughable anti-Israel bias, with headlines like “Hebrew University’s Faculty of Repressive Science,” “The spiraling absurdity of Germany’s pro-Israel fanaticism,” and “Why do Israelis feel so threatened by a ceasefire?” At the same time, I have no reason to believe that they intentionally publish lies, which would damage their credibility.
The report, “‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza,” is written by Yuval Abraham, a journalist and activist turned documentary filmmaker best known for “No Other Land,” which won the Best Documentary Film award in February at the Berlin International Film Festival. So, again, he has an obvious agenda but I have no reason to believe he’s intentionally lying to his readers.
The report begins,
In 2021, a book titled “The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World” was released in English under the pen name “Brigadier General Y.S.” In it, the author — a man who we confirmed to be the current commander of the elite Israeli intelligence unit 8200 — makes the case for designing a special machine that could rapidly process massive amounts of data to generate thousands of potential “targets” for military strikes in the heat of a war. Such technology, he writes, would resolve what he described as a “human bottleneck for both locating the new targets and decision-making to approve the targets.”
This idea is not new. The US military is, along with our adversaries, working to do the same thing and has been for at least a decade. We’ve been wrestling with the implications of the concept for even longer. Short story long: it’s complicated if only one side of a conflict has the capability; if both sides have it, moral considerations essentially go out the window because human decisionmakers can’t keep up with machines.
Such a machine, it turns out, actually exists. A new investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals that the Israeli army has developed an artificial intelligence-based program known as “Lavender,” unveiled here for the first time. According to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have all served in the army during the current war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand involvement with the use of AI to generate targets for assassination, Lavender has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the sources, its influence on the military’s operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”
Formally, 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. The sources told +972 and Local Call that, 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.
On the surface, I see no problem with using AI to keep up with moving targets. I’m considerably more squeamish about targeting the homes—presumably thus including the families—of low-level militants.
The laws of war were, alas, written with conventional force-on-force warfare in mind. In the nearly quarter-century since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has not infrequently targeted the homes of high-level terrorist leaders. How far down the chain of command one must go before that’s unacceptable is not by any means clear.
For that matter, I’ve long assumed that American service members who operated UAVs from domestic bases that killed militants abroad were legitimate military targets even though they weren’t in a combat zone. It’s not a huge stretch to say that remains true when they go home at night.
During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. 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. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.
Honestly, a 90 percent success rate in correctly identifying militants is wildly higher than I would have guessed. My strong sense is that American forces targeting militants in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and elsewhere got it wrong considerably more often than that, simply because our intelligence was spotty. The Israelis, though, have the advantage of a much closer relationship with Hamas than we did with our GWOT enemies.
Moreover, 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?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
Again—assuming this is true—I’m squeamish about this if it was routine and applied to low-level trigger pullers. Much less so high-level operatives, who are more central to the war effort.
The result, as the sources testified, is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions.
“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
So, let’s take AI out of this. It’s really a distraction, in that the IDF would have made exactly the same calculation with low-level human operatives making the decisions rather than machines. The implication here is that Hamas fighters are only legitimate targets while they are actively engaged in military operations and somehow transform into noncombatants when they go home. Meanwhile, IDF soldiers are legitimate targets 24/7, because they go “home” to a military compound of some sort. That’s frankly an absurd notion.
I find the sheer level of killing in this war appalling. But I don’t know how one fights a war in an area roughly the size of Detroit with some 2 million people living there without massive casualties. Especially when the enemy intentionally hides among said people and is given sanctuary there.
And, again, the notion that the only time one may target a terrorist is while they are in the act of killing is simply absurd. It flies in the face of any reason.
The Lavender machine joins another AI system, “The Gospel,” about which information was revealed in a previous investigation by +972 and Local Call in November 2023, as well as in the Israeli military’s own publications. A fundamental difference between the two systems is in the definition of the target: whereas The Gospel marks buildings and structures that the army claims militants operate from, Lavender marks people — and puts them on a kill list.
This is quite likely the future of war. As we move further away from traditional force-on-force fights, with key nodes outside what we traditionally think of as a combat zone, traditional notions of “combat zones,” “forward areas,” and the like will go away. Hell, that was becoming a reality when I was a cadet forty years ago, integrated in our AirLand Battle doctrine—which, incidentally, was based on lessons learned from the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Obviously, technology has improved vastly since.
In addition, according to the sources, 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.”
So, again, awful if true. And not, as I understand it, the American practice anymore. But it was as recently as Vietnam. And it’s not surprising that Israel, which doesn’t have a trillion-dollar defense budget, can’t afford a near-infinite supply of precision weapons.
In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.
This would be outrageous in a conventional conflict. The IDF is not, however, fighting a conventional conflict. I don’t know what the acceptable ratios should be for those whose primary mode of operation is to use human shields in contravention of the laws of war.
The rest of the report is very long, going into methodologies and such. I commend it to those interested.
Again, though, the more I think about this the big reveal—the use of various AI programs for targeting—is really a distraction. The key decisions—targeting Hamas militants in their homes, the acceptance of rather high collateral damage figures, and the like—were all made by humans and, presumably, rather high-ranking ones at that. Indeed, I’d be shocked if they weren’t approved by the Chief of Defense, the Minister of Defense, and the Prime Minister. That low-level operatives are using a tool that makes carrying out the strategy within those rules of engagement more efficient is largely beside the point.
