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Is Israeli ‘AI’ killing journalists in Gaza?
IF YOU ARE a journalist in Gaza, your chances of being killed by Israeli forces seem to be worse even than the odds for medics. In a few cases it is clear that our colleagues were targeted deliberately; in most we cannot yet know. An investigation by Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham for +972 magazine and its Hebrew-language sibling Local Call throws up the disturbing possibility that many may have been condemned to death by a machine-learning ("AI") system called "Lavender". This would be no less a breach of the laws of war: indeed, the military commanders and politicians who authorised it would very clearly be personally liable.
Colleagues mourn journalists Saeed Al-Taweel and Muhammad Sobh, killed in Gaza on 10 October
Abraham interviewed multiple sources in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and state intelligence services. He reveals for the first time a system that selects individuals to be targeted as "Hamas operatives". This system, called "Lavender", has, Abraham's sources say, been fed with - "trained on" - details of people declared Hamas fighters and now gives almost all residents of Gaza a score out of 100 that is supposed to indicate how likely they are to be Hamas fighters.
One of Abraham's sources reports that "the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets."
Being a journalist in a zone of war or conflict is inherently dangerous: you are obliged to be wherever it's kicking off. You are obliged to have a wide variety of contacts, many of them not angels. Any machine-learning system presented with data on your movements and communications is, from first principles, likely to spit out a verdict that you are a wrong'un.
The only detail of the data on which the machine-learning system was "trained" that Abraham gives is that one source lamented: "I was bothered by the fact that when Lavender was trained, they used the term 'Hamas operative' loosely, and included people who were civil defence workers in the training dataset." This itself is shockingly stupid or malicious - Gaza's civil defence workers include ambulance crews and firefighters, who are in any case further groups of people who are obliged to be wherever it's kicking off. That therefore increases the chance of Lavender condemning a journalist - we do follow ambulances.
What may have condemned many Gazan journalists to death, though, is a bureaucratic move for propaganda purposes six years ago. in July 2018 Israel's then defence minister, Avigdor Liberman, designated Al-Quds TV as a terrorist organisation. Since then, as a matter of government policy everyone who works for the station has been a "Hamas operative". To Lavender, then, being a journalist - reporting for any outlet - is a strong sign of being one.
‘Unimportant people’
This analysis of what is happening is supported by the fact that most of the journalists killed by the IDF in Gaza have died when their homes were bombed. Many others lost most or all of their families when their homes were attacked while they were away.
Several of Abraham's sources report that "as opposed to numerous cases of Hamas operatives engaging in military activity from civilian areas, in the case of systematic assassination strikes, the army routinely made the active choice to bomb suspected militants when inside civilian households from which no military activity took place.". Israeli policy has been to drop "dumb" bombs on the homes of those reported by Lavender to have a low rank in Hamas, reserving guided munitions for those reported to be commanders. "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]," an intelligence officer told Abraham.
Once Lavender has labelled someone as Hamas, another system tries to discover when they are at home. This is actually called "Where's Daddy". It is unreliable: "It happened to me many times that we attacked a house, but the person wasn't even home," one source told Abraham. "The result is that you killed a family for no reason."
Responsibility
Civilian deaths are a breach of the law of war when they are more than is "proportionate" to the military goal of an attack. Other considerations include effective distinction between combatants and non-combatants and precautions taken to safeguard non-combatants.
In a statement to +972 and Local Call an IDF spokesperson denied using artificial intelligence tools to incriminate targets, saying these are merely "auxiliary tools that assist officers in the process of incrimination... an independent examination by an analyst is required, which verifies that the identified targets are legitimate targets for attack, in accordance with the conditions set forth in IDF directives and international law."
But one of Abraham's sources reports that "a human being had to [verify the target] for just a few seconds... At first, we did checks to ensure that the machine didn't get confused. But at some point we relied on the automatic system, and we only checked that [the target] was a man - that was enough. It doesn't take a long time to tell if someone has a male or a female voice."
At various times such people rubber-stamping Lavender's "incrimination" of targets were told that they could authorise bombing of "low-value" targets if 15 or 20 uninvolved people were likely to be killed at the same time. For commanders, the "collateral kill" figure was 100 or higher.
An international law expert at the US State Department told the Guardian that 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."
There would seem to be clear grounds for including the use of Lavender and Where's Daddy in war crimes prosecutions, such as that proceeding at the International Court of Justice and anything that follows from today's United Nations Human Rights Council resolution. In cases such as the current controversial proceedings over killings in Afghanistan, the military authorities will want to push responsibility as far down the chain of command as they can. In this instance, responsibility would seem to start at the top and stay there.
Direct targeting and obfuscation
The likelihood that some of the journalists killed by the IDF were victims of Lavender does not mean that none were wilfully targeted. There are for example disturbing reports of journalists receiving threatening communications before they or their families were killed - as in the case of Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif. Several investigations into the killing of journalists in southern Lebanon have found that they were deliberately targeted, starting with one by Reporters Without Borders.
If anything, Lavender serves the function - useful and familiar to the state of Israel - of obfuscating who is responsible for what, and of making it All Very Complicated to discuss that.
In any case, the state of Israel knows the phone number of every journalist - if not every resident - in Gaza. Had it wished, it could have ordered that attacks on journalists' homes be automatically cancelled. We have the tragic proof that it did not.
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