Artificial intelligence in Gaza warfare: Many more targets - many more victims?

Artificial intelligence is used in warfare in the Gaza Strip. With its help, the Israeli armed forces can determine attack targets much faster. But what are the consequences?

Israeli forces carry out daily attacks in the Gaza Strip. The declared goal is the destruction of the terrorist organization Hamas.

The result is: mass destruction. According to the United Nations, more than 60 percent of housing units in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed or severely damaged. Also, almost 19.000 people were killed, of which 70 percent were women and minors.

That data comes from the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip, which is under the administration of Hamas, and the governments of many countries consider the data to be credible. Thousands of people are under the rubble of collapsed buildings and are missing.

"Indiscriminately" – or with great precision?

US President Joseph Biden accused Israel of "indiscriminate bombing". But research into how the war in the Gaza Strip is being waged comes to a different conclusion.

The Israeli armed forces claim that they carry out attacks with great precision, and as they themselves state, more than 22.000 targets have been attacked so far. This was made possible by the use of the latest technology and artificial intelligence, says Liran Antebi from the Institute for National Security, who had already researched the topic even before the war in Gaza.

"There is a relatively high degree of autonomy, which means that the devices analyze the environment and make very fast calculations. And the artificial intelligence system can do it better than humans, because it can calculate everything much faster and implement the decision much faster," says Antebi.

Goals are defined faster

The key to this way of warfare lies in quickly defining attack targets based on a large amount of data. Since 2019, the Israeli Armed Forces have the so-called "Target Center" in which, according to former Chief of General Staff Aviv Kočavi, hundreds of soldiers were engaged. As recently as 2021, Israel used AI-based targeting systems during the escalation in the Gaza Strip:

"The Israeli army announced that three artificial intelligence systems were used in that operation," says Kočavi.

This allowed her to create 200 high-quality goals from various sources of information within twelve days. Previously, it took the military 360 days to reach that many targets. One of the systems is called "Habsora" (Gospel).

Less and less time for checks

Juval Abraham also researched the topic and published the results in the English-language magazine "+972 Magazine". He spoke to people in the Israeli security apparatus who expressed concern: "The sources I've spoken to have raised serious questions about the military quality of some of those targets. If you're setting up hundreds or even thousands of targets every day, they feel that then the ability to people monitor it, to ensure that the information is solid."

Then, according to Abraham's sources, there is a great temptation to give recommendations for goals that have been reached on the basis of quickly prepared data, that is, a large amount of data, and all this without major checks.

More targeted killings?

The consequence of the introduction of new technology is a different way of waging war - even if the goal in the Gaza Strip is now to kill members of Hamas, Abraham points out.

"If you use artificial intelligence, if you can process almost infinite amounts of data, which was not possible before when humans did it, then you can target not only the key leaders of Hamas, but also thousands of others who belong to Hamas' military wing, but who they don't consider it particularly important."

There are an estimated 30.000 to 40.000 Hamas fighters in the Gaza Strip. After the terrorist attack on October 7, Israeli officials announced that they would kill about 3.000 terrorists who participated in the terrorist attack.

Killing all Hamas fighters in the Gaza Strip may not be the goal of Israel's war, as footage showing dozens of captives suggests.

But the targets in that war are not only people, but also public buildings, infrastructure and solitaires. The aim of destroying these, as they say in Israel, "powerful targets", is to crush the civilian population.

And the civilians?

Juval Abraham says that such destruction and targeted killings in this war sometimes result in the death of tens, sometimes hundreds of civilian victims. Automated and significantly faster recommendations to mark something as a target enable a type of multi-target warfare in a short amount of time.

The Israeli army points out that it does a lot to protect the civilian population and points out that Hamas uses the population in the Gaza Strip as human shields. However, many countries, humanitarian organizations and the United Nations are calling for much more to be done on the matter.

For Israel, the use of state-of-the-art technology means that significantly more attacks on targets are possible in this war than in the past, but this obviously leads to more civilian casualties and more destruction – and thus more suffering in the Gaza Strip.