Israel has been using an artificial intelligence system called “Lavender” to create a “kill list” of at least 37,000 people in Gaza, according to a new report from Israel’s National Security Agency. +972 The magazine confirmed guardian. Lavender is the second artificial intelligence system to be revealed, after the Israelite Gospels were first reported last yearbut the goal of Gospel is buildings, while the goal of Lavender is people.
New report quotes six unnamed Israeli intelligence officials +972 How the country’s military relied “almost entirely” on Lavender in the early weeks of the war, despite the fact that he was known to mistake potential targets for terrorists. According to +972, the humans involved in the loop (named to ensure it was a human rather than a machine making targeting decisions) essentially acted as a “rubber stamp,” with the Israeli officer spending about 20 seconds on each decision. .
The Lavender AI system reportedly works by analyzing information collected from nearly all of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million Palestinians “through a mass surveillance system” and assessing the likelihood that any given person belongs to Hamas in an opaque ranking system. Each Palestinian is assigned a ranking from 1 to 100, which is said to determine their likelihood of becoming a member of a radical terrorist group.
From +972:
Lavender learns to identify signatures of known Hamas [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] The source explains that the operator’s information is fed into the machine as training data, and those same characteristics (also called “signatures”) are then located in the general population. Individuals who are found to have a variety of different criminal characteristics will achieve a high rating and thus automatically become potential assassination targets.
According to +972, the Israeli military gave “full approval” for officers to use Lavender for targeting in Gaza, but did not require a thorough examination of “why the machines made the choices they made, or an examination of the raw intelligence data on which they were based.” is based on. ” According to “internal checks,” the people who checked Lavender’s targeting decisions mostly just checked to make sure the targets were men, although at least 10 percent of the targets had no possible connection to Hamas. It’s unclear how these internal checks were conducted , and it’s unclear whether the proportion is much higher.
According to +972, most of the targets were bombed in their homes. Another automated system used in conjunction with Lavender, called “Where’s Daddy?” has been used to attack targets in their homes.
“We are not interested in killing [Hamas] Only when agents are in military buildings or engaged in military activities,” said an Israeli intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity. tell +972. “Instead, the IDF bombed their home without hesitation, which was the first option. It was much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system was built to find them in these situations.”
The new report also claims that the targets identified by Lavender were only junior militants, which means that the Israeli military prefers to use unguided munitions or “dumb bombs” to avoid wasting expensive bombs on relatively inconsequential targets. According to +972, the result was that entire families were wiped out.
Israel has also loosened the threshold for the number of civilians it can kill as “collateral damage,” a report consistent with previous leaks Published in Haaretz Regarding the new rules of engagement after October 7th.
From +972:
The army also made the unprecedented decision to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians for every junior Hamas operative Lavender flagged during the first weeks of the war, according to two sources; in the past, The military would not authorize any “collateral damage” when assassinating low-level militants. The source added that the military has repeatedly authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a commander if the target is a senior Hamas official at the battalion or brigade commander level.
A terrorist attack on October 7, 2023 killed approximately 1,200 Israelis, Hamas kidnapped approximately 240 people, and Israel launched a war in Gaza. According to the organization, more than 32,600 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the war began. United Nations, the majority of whom were identified as women and children. Thousands more people are estimated to be buried under rubble in the destroyed areas, not yet counted.Israel reports 255 troops killed since the beginning of the war.
According to +972, before October 7, lavender was only used as an “auxiliary tool,” but after the terrorist attacks, entire kill lists containing tens of thousands of people were adopted on a large scale.
“5 o’clock in the morning, [the air force] will come and bomb all the houses we marked,” an anonymous Israeli source told +972. “We rescued thousands of people.We don’t check them one by one – we put everything into the automated system as long as one [the marked individuals] Once he returned home, he immediately became a target. We bombed him and his house. “
Israel issued a lengthy statement to the Guardian about the Lavender AI system WednesdayInsisting that Hamas uses Palestinians in Gaza as “human shields” while Israel respects international law.
“Contrary to claims, the IDF does not use artificial intelligence systems to identify terrorists or attempt to predict whether a person is a terrorist. Information systems are merely tools for analysts in the target identification process,” the Israeli statement read.
The statement continued: “In accordance with the IDF Directive, analysts are required to conduct independent checks to verify whether the identified targets comply with the relevant definitions of international law and additional restrictions set out in the IDF Directive.”
Although +972’s new report acknowledges that the use of lavender has declined significantly since the war began, in part because the Israeli military has no civilian homes left to target, as “most homes in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed.” Has been destroyed or damaged. “