Israeli ‘AI Targeting System’ Has Caused Huge Civilian Casualty Count In Gaza: Report

An artificial-intelligence-fueled targeting system known as “Lavender” has been used for months by the Israeli military in Gaza to select bombing targets with minimal human oversight, according to a new report published Wednesday.

According to the report , which was published by the Israeli-Palestinian outlet +972 along with the website Local Call, military personnel approved the AI-selected targets with what one source said was often just a “rubber stamp,” taking only around “20 seconds” to review each target before approving a bombing.

The report, which was based on unnamed sources and documents, said such review was done simply to confirm a target was male — despite a study of a random sample identifying a 10% error rate in the program’s designations when it targeted people who were not militants. Despite that error rate, according to the report, sources said they received approval around two weeks into the current war to automatically adopt Lavender’s kill lists. What’s more, the military reportedly pursued targeted individuals at home, often with family present — the work of another program ominously called “Where’s Daddy?”

Sometimes, because of a lag in the “Where’s Daddy?” program, families were reportedly killed at home even when the main target was not present, the report said. It wasn’t clear from the report the extent to which the programs are still in use, though it said they were especially active in the early weeks of the war.

“At 5 a.m., [the air force] would come and bomb all the houses that we had marked,” one unnamed senior officer, referred to in the story as “B,” said. “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