‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets
Israeli
intelligence sources reveal use of ‘Lavender’ system in Gaza war and
claim permission given to kill civilians in pursuit of low-ranking
militants
Wed 3 Apr 2024 09.53 EDTLast modified on Wed 3 Apr 2024 13.50 EDT
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.”
Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
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. All six said that Lavender had played a central role in the
war, processing masses of data to rapidly identify potential “junior”
operatives to target. Four of the sources said that, at one stage early
in the war, Lavender listed as many as 37,000 Palestinian men who had
been linked by the AI system to Hamas or PIJ.
Lavender
was developed by the Israel Defense Forces’ elite intelligence
division, Unit 8200, which is comparable to the US’s National Security
Agency or GCHQ in the UK.
Several of the
sources described how, for certain categories of targets, the IDF
applied pre-authorised allowances for the estimated number of civilians
who could be killed before a strike was authorised.
Two
sources said that during the early weeks of the war they were permitted
to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants.
Attacks on such targets were typically carried out using unguided
munitions known as “dumb bombs”, the sources said, destroying entire
homes and killing all their occupants.
“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],” one
intelligence officer said. Another said the principal question they were
faced with was whether the “collateral damage” to civilians allowed for
an attack.
“Because we usually carried out the
attacks with dumb bombs, and that meant literally dropping the whole
house on its occupants. But even if an attack is averted, you don’t care
– you immediately move on to the next target. Because of the system,
the targets never end. You have another 36,000 waiting.”
According
to conflict experts, if Israel has been using dumb bombs to flatten the
homes of thousands of Palestinians who were linked, with the assistance
of AI, to militant groups in Gaza, that could help explain the shockingly high death toll in the war.
The
health ministry in the Hamas-run territory says 33,000 Palestinians
have been killed in the conflict in the past six months. UN data
shows that in the first month of the war alone, 1,340 families suffered
multiple losses, with 312 families losing more than 10 members.
Israeli soldiers stand on the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border surveying the Palestinian territory on 30 March. Photograph: Amir Cohen/Reuters
Responding to the publication of the testimonies in +972 and Local Call, the IDF said in a statement
that its operations were carried out in accordance with the rules of
proportionality under international law. It said dumb bombs are
“standard weaponry” that are used by IDF pilots in a manner that ensures
“a high level of precision”.
The statement
described Lavender as a database used “to cross-reference intelligence
sources, in order to produce up-to-date layers of information on the
military operatives of terrorist organisations. This is not a list of
confirmed military operatives eligible to attack.
“The
IDF does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies
terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a
terrorist,” it added. “Information systems are merely tools for analysts
in the target identification process.”
Lavender created a database of tens of thousands of individuals
In
earlier military operations conducted by the IDF, producing human
targets was often a more labour-intensive process. Multiple sources who
described target development in previous wars to the Guardian, said the
decision to “incriminate” an individual, or identify them as a
legitimate target, would be discussed and then signed off by a legal
adviser.
In
the weeks and months after 7 October, this model for approving strikes
on human targets was dramatically accelerated, according to the sources.
As the IDF’s bombardment of Gaza intensified, they said, commanders
demanded a continuous pipeline of targets.
“We
were constantly being pressured: ‘Bring us more targets.’ They really
shouted at us,” said one intelligence officer. “We were told: now we
have to fuck up Hamas, no matter what the cost. Whatever you can, you
bomb.”
To meet this demand, the IDF came to
rely heavily on Lavender to generate a database of individuals judged to
have the characteristics of a PIJ or Hamas militant.
Details
about the specific kinds of data used to train Lavender’s algorithm, or
how the programme reached its conclusions, are not included in the
accounts published by +972 or Local Call. However, the sources said that
during the first few weeks of the war, Unit 8200 refined Lavender’s
algorithm and tweaked its search parameters.
After
randomly sampling and cross-checking its predictions, the unit
concluded Lavender had achieved a 90% accuracy rate, the sources said,
leading the IDF to approve its sweeping use as a target recommendation
tool.
Lavender created a database of tens of
thousands of individuals who were marked as predominantly low-ranking
members of Hamas’s military wing, they added. This was used alongside
another AI-based decision support system, called the Gospel, which recommended buildings and structures as targets rather than individuals.
Two Israeli air force F15 fighter jets near the city of Gedera, southern Israel, on 27 March. Photograph: Abir Sultan/EPA
The
accounts include first-hand testimony of how intelligence officers
worked with Lavender and how the reach of its dragnet could be adjusted.
“At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential
human targets,” one of the sources said. “But the numbers changed all
the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas
operative is.”
They added: “There were times
when a Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then the machine
started bringing us all kinds of civil defence personnel, police
officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs. They help the
Hamas government, but they don’t really endanger soldiers.”
Before the war, US and Israeli estimated membership of Hamas’s military wing at approximately 25-30,000 people.
In
the weeks after the Hamas-led 7 October assault on southern Israel, in
which Palestinian militants killed nearly 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped
about 240 people, the sources said there was a decision to treat
Palestinian men linked to Hamas’s military wing as potential targets,
regardless of their rank or importance.
The
IDF’s targeting processes in the most intensive phase of the bombardment
were also relaxed, they said. “There was a completely permissive policy
regarding the casualties of [bombing] operations,” one source said. “A
policy so permissive that in my opinion it had an element of revenge.”
Another
source, who justified the use of Lavender to help identify low-ranking
targets, said that “when it comes to a junior militant, you don’t want
to invest manpower and time in it”. They said that in wartime there was
insufficient time to carefully “incriminate every target”.
“So
you’re willing to take the margin of error of using artificial
intelligence, risking collateral damage and civilians dying, and risking
attacking by mistake, and to live with it,” they added.
‘It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home’
The
testimonies published by +972 and Local Call may explain how such a
western military with such advanced capabilities, with weapons that can
conduct highly surgical strikes, has conducted a war with such a vast
human toll.
When it came to targeting
low-ranking Hamas and PIJ suspects, they said, the preference was to
attack when they were believed to be at home. “We were not interested in
killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building
or engaged in a military activity,” one said. “It’s much easier to bomb a
family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these
situations.”
Relatives outside the morgue of the al-Najjar hospital in Rafah mourn Palestinians killed in Israeli bombings on 1 February. Photograph: Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images
Such
a strategy risked higher numbers of civilian casualties, and the
sources said the IDF imposed pre-authorised limits on the number of
civilians it deemed acceptable to kill in a strike aimed at a single
Hamas militant. The ratio was said to have changed over time, and varied
according to the seniority of the target.
According
to +972 and Local Call, the IDF judged it permissible to kill more than
100 civilians in attacks on a top-ranking Hamas officials. “We had a
calculation for how many [civilians could be killed] for the brigade
commander, how many [civilians] for a battalion commander, and so on,”
one source said.
“There were regulations, but
they were just very lenient,” another added. “We’ve killed people with
collateral damage in the high double digits, if not low triple digits.
These are things that haven’t happened before.” There appears to have
been significant fluctuations in the figure that military commanders
would tolerate at different stages of the war.
One
source said that the limit on permitted civilian casualties “went up
and down” over time, and at one point was as low as five. During the
first week of the conflict, the source said, permission was given to
kill 15 non-combatants to take out junior militants in Gaza. However,
they said estimates of civilian casualties were imprecise, as it was not
possible to know definitively how many people were in a building.
Another
intelligence officer said that more recently in the conflict, the rate
of permitted collateral damage was brought down again. But at one stage
earlier in the war they were authorised to kill up to “20 uninvolved
civilians” for a single operative, regardless of their rank, military
importance, or age.
“It’s not just that you can
kill any person who is a Hamas soldier, which is clearly permitted and
legitimate in terms of international law,” they said. “But they directly
tell you: ‘You are allowed to kill them along with many civilians.’ …
In practice, the proportionality criterion did not exist.”
The
IDF statement said its procedures “require conducting an individual
assessment of the anticipated military advantage and collateral damage
expected … The IDF does not carry out strikes when the expected
collateral damage from the strike is excessive in relation to the
military advantage.” It added: “The IDF outright rejects the claim
regarding any policy to kill tens of thousands of people in their
homes.”
Experts in international humanitarian
law who spoke to the Guardian expressed alarm at accounts of the IDF
accepting and pre-authorising collateral damage ratios as high as 20
civilians, particularly for lower-ranking militants. They said
militaries must assess proportionality for each individual strike.
Smoke rises over the Gaza Strip, as seen from from the Israeli side of the border on 21 January. Photograph: Amir Levy/Getty Images
An
international law expert at the US state department said they had
“never remotely heard of a one to 15 ratio being deemed acceptable,
especially for lower-level combatants. There’s a lot of leeway, but that
strikes me as extreme”.
Sarah Harrison, a
former lawyer at the US Department of Defense, now an analyst at Crisis
Group, said: “While there may be certain occasions where 15 collateral
civilian deaths could be proportionate, there are other times where it
definitely wouldn’t be. You can’t just set a tolerable number for a
category of targets and say that it’ll be lawfully proportionate in each
case.”
Whatever the legal or moral
justification for Israel’s bombing strategy, some of its intelligence
officers appear now to be questioning the approach set by their
commanders. “No one thought about what to do afterward, when the war is
over, or how it will be possible to live in Gaza,” one said.
Another
said that after the 7 October attacks by Hamas, the atmosphere in the
IDF was “painful and vindictive”. “There was a dissonance: on the one
hand, people here were frustrated that we were not attacking enough. On
the other hand, you see at the end of the day that another thousand
Gazans have died, most of them civilians.”