Israel Uses AI to Determine Bombing Targets in Gaza

Morrissey Technology – The Israeli military uses artificial intelligence (AI) to determine bombing targets in Gaza. They used a system called Lavender which was developed after the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 2023. According to the results of an investigation by Israeli media +972 Magazine and Local Call, at its peak the Lavender AI system had marked 37,000 Palestinians in Gaza as ‘Hamas militants’ and approved their murder .

To train the Lavender system, the Israeli military entered information regarding Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad members into the dataset. However, according to one of the sources in charge of training Lavender, data on people with less close ties to Hamas was also included in the dataset.

“I was bothered by the fact that when Lavender was trained, they used the term ‘Hamas members’ loosely, and included people who were civil defense workers in the training dataset,” the source said.

Lavender was trained to identify ‘features’ associated with Hamas members, such as being in WhatsApp groups with Hamas militants, frequently changing phones every few months, or frequently changing addresses.

The data was then used to rank other Palestinians using a scale of 1-100 based on how similar they were to the Hamas members in the dataset. Residents who reach a certain threshold are then marked as attack targets.

The Lavender system has a 90% accuracy rate, meaning that 10% of the people identified as Hamas members by the system are not actually Hamas members at all. Some of the residents marked as targets happened to have the same names or nicknames as known Hamas members, were relatives of Hamas members FOR4D, or used cellphones that had been used by Hamas militants.

The Israeli military denies there is a list of targets for the bombing. Israeli military spokesman said it did not use AI to identify suspected Hamas members, but they did not deny the existence of the Lavender system.

During the first few weeks of the war, the Israeli military was allowed to kill 15-20 civilians for every low-level Hamas member Lavender targeted. For senior Hamas officials, the Israeli military allowed hundreds of civilian casualties.

Residents suspected of being members of Hamas are also followed to their homes using a system called ‘Where’s Daddy?’. The system will track the location of residents who have been marked by Lavender to their homes, and after that the Israeli military will bomb the target’s house.

Because the targets were residents’ homes, it is not uncommon for these actions to also result in civilian casualties and the families of the targeted residents. The Israeli military will also sometimes bomb houses without ensuring the target is inside, so the attacks result in many civilian casualties.

“I often attack a house, but the people are not even home. The result is that you kill a family for no reason,” said the source.