According to an investigation published Wednesday April 3 by Israeli media, artificial intelligence (AI) software was used by the Israeli army to designate “up to 37,000” people as Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters or militants, among the 2.3 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. The majority of them and their families were then targeted by aerial bombardments during the first weeks of the war, which began on October 7, 2023 after the terrorist attacks carried out on Israeli territory.
“The Israeli army has developed a program based on artificial intelligence, known as Lavender (…)to generate targets for assassination »say the magazine +972 and the information site Local Call. This software “played a central role in the unprecedented bombardment of Palestinians”estimates the author of the investigation, the Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham, who was behind the first revelations in November 2023 on the use of AI by the Israeli army.
According to this investigation, Lavender was designed to identify any Hamas or Islamic Jihad fighter or activist, regardless of their importance in the military chain, by dealing with “massive quantities” of data : “Visual information, cellular information, social media connections, battlefield information, phone contacts, photos. » Until now, this identification was carried out humanly but was limited, due to lack of resources, to high-ranking commanders.
Several witnesses interviewed claim that Lavender is only 90% reliable. In other words, up to 10% of people identified by the software – and therefore likely to be bombarded – could have been bombed by mistake. “In war, we don’t have time to incriminate every target. We are therefore ready to take the margin of error in the use of AI, to risk collateral damage and the death of civilians. (…) and to come to terms with it”says a source within the Israeli intelligence services, cited by the journalist.
A number of collateral victims admitted
Even more disturbing, the Jewish state uses another software, called – cynically – Where’s Daddy? (“where’s daddy?”, in English), to locate the targets identified by Lavender. Through this program, the army could determine when these suspected Palestinian fighters are in their homes and thus bomb them while they sleep, in order to maximize the chances of killing them. “You enter hundreds [de cibles] in the system and you wait to see who you can kill”explains a source cited in the investigation, speaking of “offshore hunting”.
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