Two Israeli media outlets accuse Israel of using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and strike targets in Gaza, causing a very large number of civilian casualties, accusations which provoked a strong reaction on Friday from the UN Secretary General.
“I am deeply disturbed by reports that the Israeli military’s bombing campaign includes artificial intelligence as a tool to identify targets, particularly in densely populated residential areas, leading to a high number of civilian casualties,” he said. declared Antonio Guterres to the press.
“No portion of life or death decisions that impact entire families should be delegated to the cold calculation of algorithms. »
The investigation published by Israeli media outlets +972 Magazine and Local Call describes an Israeli army program called “Lavender,” which uses AI to identify targets in Gaza, with a certain margin of error.
According to these independent media, which rely on six “Israeli intelligence officers”, the program “played a central role” during the first weeks of Israeli bombings on the Gaza Strip. The military, according to them, “treated the output of the artificial intelligence machine ‘as if it were a human decision’”.
According to two of the sources cited, the army also decided that for each “junior” member of Hamas detected by “Lavender”, it was “allowed” to kill, as collateral victims, 15 to 20 civilians. The ratio rose to 100 civilians for one commander of the Palestinian Islamist movement.
“Contrary to accusations, the Israeli army does not use an artificial intelligence system to identify terrorist operators or try to predict which person is a terrorist,” the Israeli army responded to questions from AFP on Friday, admitting simply the existence of a “database”.
Israel has been carrying out a vast military operation in the Gaza Strip since the October 7 attack, carried out by Hamas commandos, which resulted in the death of 1,170 people on the Israeli side, the majority civilians, according to an AFP count. made from official Israeli figures.
According to a latest report Friday from the Hamas Ministry of Health, the intense bombing campaign on Gaza, followed by a ground offensive by the Israeli army, left 33,091 dead, mostly civilians.
“Apocalyptic”
“AI should be used as a force for good, for the benefit of the world, and not contribute to war at an industrial level, blurring accountability,” insisted Antonio Guterres.
Israel makes no secret of working on AI tools in its army. The army claims to have waged the “first AI war” for eleven days in May 2021 in Gaza. The chief of staff at the time, Aviv Kochavi, declared last year to the Israeli news site Ynet that AI had made it possible to generate “100 new targets every day”, compared to “50” per year in the Gaza Strip “in the past”.
According to a blog on the Israeli army website, more than 12,000 targets were then identified in 27 days, using a technology called Gospel. According to an official cited anonymously, this tool selected targets “for precise attacks on infrastructure associated with Hamas, inflicting significant damage on the enemy, while causing as little harm as possible to those not involved.”
But a former Israeli intelligence officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, told +972 Magazine in November that this technology was transforming into “a factory for mass assassinations.”
Questioned by AFP, Alessandro Accorsi, expert for the conflict resolution organization Crisis Group, considered the information “very worrying”.
“It’s apocalyptic. It is clear that the system can hallucinate, that the degree of human control is low,” he noted. “There are thousands of questions around this obviously, how moral it is to use it, but it’s not surprising. »
For Johann Soufi, international lawyer and former director of the legal office of UNRWA (the UN agency for Palestinian refugees) in Gaza, these methods “violate all the cardinal principles of international humanitarian law”, including the distinction between combatants and civilians, precaution and proportionality.
They “indisputably constitute war crimes”, he denounced on a desire to attack the Gazan civilian population in a systematic and widespread manner.”