Juan Cole
Informed Comment / November 16, 2024
Ann Arbor – A Special Committee of the United Nations Office of the High Commission on Human Rights has issued a new report on Israeli actions in Gaza concluding that they fit the profile of genocide.
The report says, “The developments in this report lead the Special Committee to conclude that the policies and practices of Israel during the reporting period are consistent with the characteristics of genocide.”
It goes on to specify: “The targeting of Palestinians as a group; the life – threatening conditions imposed on Palestinians in Gaza through warfare and restrictions on humanitarian aid – resulting in physical destruction, increased miscarriages and stillbirths – and the killing of and serious bodily or mental harm caused to Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are violations under international law. Civilians have been indiscriminately and disproportionally killed en masse in Gaza . . . ”
Genocide as the term is used in contemporary International Humanitarian Law does not have the connotation of killing millions of people. It has become a technical term for trying to wipe out even a portion of a people simply because they belong to that people. Trying to prevent them from having children is one of the actions listed as indicating genocidal intent in the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention. That is why the Special Committee mentions “increased miscarriages and stillbirths” happening as a result of Israeli actions in Gaza. It also talks about the “unchilding” of the 800,000 Palestinian minors in Gaza, who have been deprived of their childhoods and subjected to physical and emotional traumas that will scar them for the rest of their lives, making them prone to depression and other debilitating mental conditions.
One of the things that most alarmed the committee is the Israeli use of artificial intelligence for targeting, in ways that certainly increased the civilian death toll and showed a reckless disregard for civilian lives in direct contradiction of International Humanitarian Law.
It expressed grave concern over the unprecedented destruction of civilian infrastructure and the exceptionally high civilian death toll in Gaza. They said that this way of proceeding raised significant questions about Israel’s use of artificial intelligence to guide its military operations.
The Special Committee cited Israel’s +972 Magazine and The Guardian among other sources suggesting that the Israeli military lowered the thresholds for target selection and simultaneously increased the previously accepted ratio of civilian to combatant casualties. Yuval Abraham of +972 Magazine reported that the Israeli Rules of Engagement permitted the killing of 15 to 20 civilians for every militant killed. Those aren’t military Rules of Engagement, they are instructions for shooting fish in a barrel (my comment, not the UN’s).
The Special Committee observed, “These directives reportedly enabled the military to use artificial intelligence systems (which rely on mass surveillance to process large volumes of data), to rapidly generate tens of thousands of targets, as well as to track targets to their homes, particularly at night when families shelter together.”
And by the way, there was very little human supervision of these targeting decisions made by AI, which is known to have a 10% error rate. At 43,000 dead from drones and air strikes, 70% of them women and children, that could be 4,300 that were straight up errors having nothing to do with Hamas. Not that the children of Hamas members deserved to die when their father returned home in the evening. They were children.
They continued, “Reliance on the artificial intelligence-assisted targeting purportedly accelerated decision-making to the point of soldiers reportedly authorizing strikes in a matter of seconds, while the home-tracking of targets and night strikes would have disproportionately increased civilian casualties.”
They said that they were profoundly troubled by the indiscriminate loss of life reportedly caused by these AI-enhanced targeting mechanisms, noting that fatalities were multiplied because AI targeting was combined with explosive weaponry with wide-area effects.
The report concludes that Israel’s approach approach ignores Israel’s legal obligations under international humanitarian law to make a distinction between civilians and combatants and to implement sufficient safeguards to minimize harm to non-combatants.
The report concludes in this regard, “As stated by the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the requirement to select means and methods of warfare that avoid or at the very least minimise to every extent civilian harm appears to have been consistently violated in Israel’s bombing campaign.”
The Special Committee asserts that Gaza has become “unliveable” for Palestinians. It points to statements of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres where he underlines that no justification exists for the collective punishment of the Palestinian population.
The report notes that Israel has not yet complied with Guterres’ call for a cease-fire, a call that has been reiterated in Security Council resolution 2735 (2024), and that the Israeli government has similarly ignored no less than three binding orders issued by the International Court of Justice.
In view of these persistent violations, the Special Committee aligns with the Secretary-General’s assessment that the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza represents a moral failure that reflects poorly on humanity as a whole. They say, “In the light of those ongoing violations, the Special Committee shares the view of the Secretary-General that the humanitarian crisis has become a moral stain on us all.”
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
