The First AI War: How Israel Moved Fast and Broke Things in Gaza

A new investigative report in +972 Magazine reveals how and why the Israeli army has used sophisticated software to target tens of thousands for bombing, including civilians.

If, after October 7th, Israel has the right to defend itself and to go after Hamas in Gaza, why has it done so in a way that is so manifestly disproportionate and destructive to civilian life and infrastructure? The answer is not, as Israel’s defenders keep saying, simply because Hamas has hidden itself in miles of underground tunnels that are hard to destroy. The answer is also because this is the first AI war, and we are seeing in real-time what happens when a well-equipped army chooses to loosen its own rules of engagement and rely on inherently fast but also inherently flawed technology to decide who and where to bomb.

That’s the upshot of a new and incredibly important investigative report in +972 Magazine (in collaboration with Local Call) by Yuval Abraham. In meticulous detail, he explains how Israel’s army has relied on an AI program called Lavender, developed to track human targets that it supposedly has identified as being affiliated with Hamas or other militant groups in Gaza. Abraham reports that it was used extensively in the first six weeks of the war, especially after a determination that it had achieved 90 percent accuracy in identifying individual targets, resulting in half of the more than 30,000 Gazans killed to date.

In the past, Abraham relates, Israel only targeted top military operatives for this kind of targeted assassination, and kill decisions that also involved collateral murders of civilians were only made after extensive human oversight, “to maintain the principle of proportionality under international law.” After October 7, Israel’s war planners chose to allow the targeting of junior operatives—producing a list of 37,000 targets. They also chose to allow targeting them in their homes, using a second AI system obscenely called “Where’s Daddy” that signaled to the army when these men supposedly entered their homes. And they chose to use non-precision “dumb” bombs to go after them, since they are cheaper and more plentiful, and also because the army decided to allow the death of up to 15 to 20 civilians for every junior Hamas operative so targeted. Humans made these choices, but the same software that is “eating the world” enabled them to do so at massive and rapid scale. Or, shall I say, this is how Israel Blitzscaled Gaza?

As Abraham notes, “Evidence of this policy is also clear from the data: during the first month of the war, more than half of the fatalities — 6,120 people — belonged to 1,340 families, many of which were completely wiped out while inside their homes, according to UN figures. The proportion of entire families bombed in their houses in the current war is much higher than in the 2014 Israeli operation in Gaza, further suggesting the prominence of this policy.”

I don’t like to use Nazi analogies because they are so potent, but the Germans who ran Hitler’s killing machinery and used IBM computers to track every Jew and manage other logistical challenges associated with the Final Solution would be impressed by what Israel has done here. So would Robert McNamara and his people at the Pentagon, who took the quantification of war-fighting to new levels, even if all that did is enable American war-planners to claim that they were winning far longer than the actual situation on the ground indicated. “No expert on Vietnamese culture sat at the conference table,” Richard Goodwin, a speechwriter for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson later wrote. “Intoxicated by charts and computers, the Pentagon and war games, we have been publicly relying on and calculating the incalculable.” (See Alexis Madrigal’s “The Computer that Predicted the US Would Win the Vietnam War” for more.)

Six unnamed Israeli intelligence operatives, all of whom served in the current war and had first-hand involvement in this program, are Abraham’s sources. One, who he calls “B.”, said “We didn’t know who the junior operatives were, because Israel didn’t track them routinely [before the war]. They wanted to allow us to attack [the junior operatives] automatically. That’s the Holy Grail. Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy. At 5 a.m., [the air force] would come and bomb all the houses that we had marked. We took out thousands of people. We didn’t go through them one by one — we put everything into automated systems, and as soon as one of [the marked individuals] was at home, he immediately became a target. We bombed him and his house.”

Like other fancy computer programs designed by companies like Palantir that work with local police agencies to use machine learning to score individuals on the basis of a combination of hidden surveillance and open source information like social media posts to determine their threat level, the Lavender software gives people as score of 1 to 100 expressing how likely it is they are a militant. Abraham writes, “Lavender learns to identify characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] operatives, whose information was fed to the machine as training data, and then to locate these same characteristics — also called “features” — among the general population, the sources explained. An individual found to have several different incriminating features will reach a high rating, and thus automatically becomes a potential target for assassination. 

Everything we know about such systems tells us they are rife with errors. Facial recognition programs misidentify darker-skinned people at a much higher rate than lighter-skinned people. Social media posts often contain nuances that no sentiment analysis program can perfectly read. And in the middle of a war, there is no way to be sure how many people are sheltering in a particular home or if a family has moved.

The Israeli army, Abraham reports, decided that a 10% error rate was fine. Even if an individual was mistakenly flagged because they worked in civil defense, or were related to a Hamas militant, or they happened to have an identical name, or used a device that once belonged to a Hamas operative, that was enough. The only human supervision inserted to prevent false positives before someone’s house was marked for bombing was to make sure the target was male, since no women serve in the military wings of Hamas or the PIJ.

Abraham notes that the IDF’s decision to rely on big data algorithms and machine learning pattern matching programs like Lavender didn’t happen solely because these systems make the job of figuring out who and where to target exponentially faster and bigger. The October 7th attack by Hamas, which staggered the IDF and suggested that it was deeply incompetent, also drove military planners in the other direction. “There was hysteria in the professional ranks,” another one of Abraham’s intelligence sources told him. “They had no idea how to react at all. The only thing they knew to do was to just start bombing like madmen to try to dismantle Hamas’ capabilities.” He added, “as soon as every target connected to Hamas becomes legitimate, and with almost any collateral damage being approved, it is clear to you that thousands of people are going to be killed. Even if officially every target is connected to Hamas, when the policy is so permissive, it loses all meaning.” (See also Abraham’s report from late November on how Israel was using a different AI program, called The Gospel, to rapidly choose thousands of buildings for bombing.)

Apparently now, partly due to American pressure, the Israeli army “is no longer mass-generating junior human targets for bombing in civilian homes.” Well, score one for US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. (Note to sentiment analysis software, this is sarcasm, not high praise.) Abraham drily notes, “The fact that most homes in the Gaza Strip were already destroyed or damaged, and almost the entire population has been displaced, also impaired the army’s ability to rely on intelligence databases and automated house-locating programs.”

Today, the world is expressing justified outrage at Israel’s killing of seven humanitarian aid workers with World Central Kitchen while they were on a Gaza road trying to deliver vital aid. Individual stories like theirs, where the line of culpability is absolutely clear, will always get more attention. But to my mind, Yuval Abraham’s exposure of the IDF’s adoption of death by algorithm is worse. The mass killing of so many civilians in Gaza along with the destruction of so much infrastructure will create a new generation of militancy. Some Gazans may indeed be quietly expressing anger at Hamas for having set all of this in motion, as Amira Hass reports in Ha’aretz this week (gift link). But there’s no reason right now to expect that the people who come up in its stead will be any less angry.

The only way to defeat an ideology like the Islamic Resistance Movement (what the word Hamas stands for) is with a better ideology—like a path to peace, security and coexistence for all. On that front Israel and its American allies in the US government and the so-called pro-Israel camp that keep insuring the bombs flow are offering nothing.

Meanwhile, Back in the USA

Yesterday, my wife and I voted in the New York Democratic presidential primary. At 6pm at our local polling place, we were voters number 11 and 12, according to the machine I slipped my ballot into. I don’t think many people even knew there was a primary. (Just 300,000 Democrats voted, compared to 1.9 million in 2016; the 2020 primary was canceled due to Covid.) While national polls show the 2024 rematch of President Joe Biden vs former President Donald Trump at a dead heat (some put Trump ahead by 2 or 3 points, some put Biden ahead by a similar margin), there’s an enthusiasm gap that does not bode well for the Democrat. According to the latest AP-NORC poll, just 40% of Democrats are “extremely or very excited” about re-electing Biden, while 54% of Republicans feel that way about a second Trump term. Is there a connection between Biden’s support for Israel and this lack of enthusiasm? While the AP-NORC poll doesn’t break out its findings by demographic group, it’s obvious that Americans under the age of 40 are far less happy about how much he is favoring Israel, as this recent Pew Research Center poll from mid-February shows.

As I wrote last week, Biden may finally be ready to punish Bibi for how he is prosecuting the war by suspending offensive military aid. Whether that actually gets Israel to shift course or helps set in motion the toppling of the current Israeli government, Biden needs to act soon to shore up his own political base. (I suppose the White House may be putting unwarranted hope on the current rising tide of anti-government demonstrations in Israel, which are heartening but still unlikely to cause the government to collapse.)

Meanwhile, every day it become clear that Trump is consolidating a full-blown fascist movement behind him. The New York Times Michael Bender, who is on the Trump beat, had a report yesterday about how the Orange Cheeto’s rallies are getting more infused with religiousity, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to use the correct F word to describe what he was seeing from “Trump fans.” Here’s his video report. I’ve grabbed two images from it below—one from 2022 showing people holding a single finger up to the sky, a reference to “where we go one we go all” mantra of the QAnon movement, though itself an appropriation of an older gesture commonly seen at evangelical political events showing that people are voting with God. The second image is Bender’s interpretation of Trump’s cult of personality—a classic aspect of all fascist movements—with something seemingly more benign, “the Church of Trump.”

Bender goes on to describe what Trump is doing in fomenting that kind of leader-worship in functional terms, as just something making his job of getting these people to turn out to vote a lot easier to do. As if Hitler’s attacks on the Jews or Communists were just so he could get more Nazis to vote more cheaply.

Seriously folks, this kind of reporting doesn’t help people understand what is actually taking place in our country. This letter from the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Chris Quinn, addressing readers who complain that his paper isn’t covering Trump fairly and arguing that Biden is just as bad, shows that mainstream news doesn’t have to do what the Times keeps choosing to do. Here’s a key excerpt:

The north star here is truth. We tell the truth, even when it offends some of the people who pay us for information.

The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.

This is not subjective. We all saw it. Plenty of leaders today try to convince the masses we did not see what we saw, but our eyes don’t deceive. (If leaders began a yearslong campaign today to convince us that the Baltimore bridge did not collapse Tuesday morning, would you ever believe them?) Trust your eyes. Trump on Jan. 6 launched the most serious threat to our system of government since the Civil War. You know that. You saw it.

The facts involving Trump are crystal clear, and as news people, we cannot pretend otherwise, as unpopular as that might be with a segment of our readers. There aren’t two sides to facts. People who say the earth is flat don’t get space on our platforms. If that offends them, so be it.

As for those who equate Trump and Joe Biden, that’s false equivalency. Biden has done nothing remotely close to the egregious, anti-American acts of Trump. We can debate the success and mindset of our current president, as we have about most presidents in our lifetimes, but Biden was never a threat to our democracy. Trump is. He is unique among all American presidents for his efforts to keep power at any cost.