The IDF uses genocidal AI

Personnel claim they’re only a “rubber stamp” for ‘Lavender’

by jackson rennebohm, contributor

On April 3, +972 Magazine (+972), published by a registered non-profit founded by both Israeli and Palestinian journalists, released an article titled “‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza.” This article detailed an AI tool known as ‘Lavender,’ developed and used by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF).

Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist detailed the magazine’s correspondence with six sources in the IDF. The magazine’s six sources, all purported IDF intelligence officers, shared information both on the program itself and their use of it.

Lavender, according to +972’s sources, is an AI tool that’s played a part in choosing Israel’s targets.

Lavender works alongside a ‘Wolf Pack’ system, which, according to +972 and Amnesty International, generates and stores profiles for every Palestinian in the West Bank. The existence of the ‘Wolf Pack’ system relies on the IDF’s mass surveillance of Palestinians.

A former IDF solider claimed that the military have been relying on the ‘Wolf Pack’ system for facial recognition programs used at their checkpoints and on their soldiers’ smartphones. The two systems are called ‘Red Wolf’ and ‘Blue Wolf’ respectively.

The Washington Post corroborates this, stating that “to build the database used by Blue Wolf, [in 2020] soldiers competed… in photographing Palestinians, including children and the elderly, with prizes for the most pictures collected by each unit.”

The IDF have been actively growing their surveillance operations, and with them, their ‘Wolf Pack’ database which, according to Amnesty International, includes names, photos, home addresses, family members, associates, and social media accounts of Palestinians.

‘Pegasus,’ an Israeli-made and sold spyware can be implanted into both Android and Apple phones to tap calls, record device activity, and track locations.

+972’s sources state that the AI is programmed to detect potential “enemy militants” in the Wolf Pack database. Lavender pulls names from the database and assigns a rating for the person (from 1 to 100) based on level of confidence that the person is a militant.

The IDF then chooses a rating threshold, and anyone in the database with a higher rating than said threshold is, with almost no further IDF investigation, confirmed as an enemy militant and put on an assassination list.

One of +972’s sources claimed that intelligence officers serve as “rubber stamp[s]” for the AI’s results, and were told to treat said results “as if it were a human decision,” allocating only “20 seconds” to investigating each alleged enemy militant, using that time to confirm that the target was male before permitting their assassination.

The six intelligence officers go on to contend that, earlier in the war, the IDF’s mode of assassinating Lavender’s chosen targets was by employing another automated system of their creation with the name “Where’s Daddy?”

As soon as a target on Lavender’s list entered his place of residence, the “Where’s Daddy?” system automatically alerted the IDF that a target was now home and marked said home for an airstrike.

Claims from +972’s sources go on to state that “for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians.” For senior Hamas officials “the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.”

The fact that, according to +972, Lavender is accurate only 90 per cent of the time did not discourage its usage.

The rating threshold to be marked as target by Lavender was frequently lowered to generate an increased number of targets for bombing. When the threshold was lowered, a source says, “the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defense personnel [and] police officers.”

Another of the sources also claims some civilians were in the dataset used to train the AI to identify Hamas and PIJ militants. Children and youth were not exempt from Lavender’s lists, according to +972’s source.

Furthermore, most of the bombs used by the IDF to eliminate junior militants were unguided “dumb” bombs, less expensive than “smart” bombs, and known for causing large amounts of collateral damage. Potential civilian collateral damage was also calculated by an automated system. The IDF sources admitted to attacking “almost without considering collateral damage” during the week following Oct 7.

Claims made by the IDF to +972 deny and contradict many of the six sources’ claims. Regardless, the United Nations estimates that nearly the entire population of Gaza, 1.9 million, have been displaced from their homes by the IDF. That number is nearly double the population of the province of Saskatchewan.

The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, a Swiss non-profit organization, estimates that “at least 131,200 housing units in the Gaza strip have been completely destroyed, and another 281,000 units have been partially destroyed.”

The total number of units destroyed, 412,200, quadruples the number of private dwellings in the city of Regina. The Human Rights Monitor also estimates the IDF have unleashed 70,000 tons of their American-provided explosives upon the Gaza Strip, nearly 6 times the amount of explosives dropped on London during the entire second world war.

Gaza’s Ministry of Health confirmed numbers that have since been reported by the UN and the Save the Children Foundation. The statistics report that over 14,000 Palestinian children have been killed by the IDF, with 21,000 more missing “estimated to be lost, disappeared, detained, buried under the rubble or in mass graves.”

We have no reason to believe that +972’s sources are anything other than legitimate, and while part of the blame rests on genocidal AI programs, AI did not kill 35,000 innocent children by itself, the IDF did.

This leaves us asking: are civilians being killed simply for alleged association with people who AI programs allege are militants, or is their only crime being born Palestinian?

Works Cited