Juan Cole
Informed Comment / August 5, 2024
Ann Arbor – On Sunday, the Los Angeles Times reports, “In Deir al Balah, Gaza, an Israeli strike hit a tent camp for thousands of displaced Palestinians in the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, killing four people and injuring others, Gaza’s Health Ministry said.”
In addition, the Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports, fighter jets of the Israeli Air Force fired rockets at two schools, Al-Nasr and Hassan Salamah, in Gaza City, killing 30 persons, 80 percent of them children. That would be 24 children and 6 adults blown to smithereens. Some 18 were, in addition, wounded. Thousands of people were gathered in these shelters.
No warning was given to the refugees.
The strikes brought the number of school shelters bombed by Israel in a 24 hour period Sunday to three, all of them in Gaza City.
The Israeli military justified the air strikes on schools functioning as shelters, a grave war crime, by saying that the schools were being used as “command and control centers” by operatives of Al-Qassam Brigades, the paramilitary of the Hamas Party. Arab 48 elaborated that the Israeli military “claimed that it targeted “saboteurs who operated in Hamas command and control complexes and who were hidden” inside the schools.”
Any allegation that the schools themselves were command and control centers is ludicrous, as it has been every time the Israeli government has trotted it out almost daily for the past nine months.
And why would Al-Qassam Brigades need to exercise command and control from a refugee school? Some 63 percent of buildings in Gaza are destroyed or damaged. There are lots of places to hide from aerial surveillance, and surely it is easy to move around at night.
And what kind of command and control could they exercise? They can’t possibly be using cell phones. You may as well just blow your own self up as use easily tracked electronic communications. Plus, could you even be heard over the wailing of babies and the running around of the children and the moans of the injured in a refugee center housing thousands of civilians?
Are the fighters sending out couriers? What vantage would they have from a refugee school? And with what information? That the Israelis are attacking?
So if these two schools functioning as refugee shelters were not in fact major “command and control centers” of Hamas, why did the Israeli Air Force shoot these particular fish in a barrel?
Israeli investigative reporter Abraham Yuval revealed in +972 Mag that the Israelis are using artificial intelligence programs with names such as “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy?” to systematically track down and kill the 30,000 members of Al-Qassam Brigades and the 7,000 members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other small guerrilla groups. I presume that by now the tracking is mainly being done by drones and facial recognition programs, since as I said, only morons would carry around a cell phone in Gaza if they were militants. I have suggested we call these AI programs “murderbots.”
Yuval Abraham reported on Sunday that American Big Tech firms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure are storing massive amounts of information about the Gaza war in the cloud for Israel. The Israelis have collected enormous databases of pictures and other information about each Palestinian.
So if we cut through the propaganda smokescreen, why did Israeli fighter jets fire on the al-Nasr and Hassan Salamah school shelters? It was because Lavender or Red Wolf or whatever AI program the Israelis are running to track Al-Qassam members by drone identified one them going into one shelter, and one of them going into the other. The AI program then ordered hits on the buildings, with minimal human involvement. The pilots got the cue and carried out the attacks. Bada bing bada boom.
Now, killing 24 children to get at a couple of alleged members of the Al-Qassam Brigades — who did not pose an immediate threat to an Israeli soldier — is a major war crime.
This damning character of the action is why the Israeli army says risible things like that these two schools were a command and control center, or that the two “saboteurs” were part of a command and control center, because then they can represent them as menacing and so more of a legitimate target. Likely, the Israelis are just continuing their routine gargantuan program of assassination.
Another problem is that the Lavender program, according to Yuval, yields a false positive in at least 10 percent of cases. My guess is that in conditions like Gaza, it is rather more.
So some quadcopter with a video attachment connected to an Amazon or Google database saw someone going into a school shelter that looked at least vaguely like one of the fighters in the massive Israeli database. So whether this individual was a fighter or not, the Israeli Air Force scrambled to strike the shelter, at a robot’s orders.
Maybe they killed a fighter. Maybe they didn’t. They did kill 24 children and some women. And that is all right with Tel Aviv, since their rules of engagement, the most monstrous of any military I know, allow the killing of 15 to 20 noncombatants for every militant killed, according to Yuval.
You just have to extrapolate out from, say, two possible militants possibly killed, one in each of the schools, and 28 others killed, and that would be 14 noncombatant deaths for each fighter, which is well within the Israeli ROE.
What the Israelis did on Sunday was a feature, not a bug. And it is these AI-guided procedures that are massacring Palestinian children and other civilians and inexorably producing the genocide.
This unconscionable carnage is being paid for by American taxpayers and the Israeli ammunition and weaponry stockpiles are being replenished by the Biden administration every day.
Bonus video:
Al-Jazeera English Video: “Dozens killed in Israeli strike on two schools in Gaza”
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of, among others, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
