+972 Magazine published an important report last week that details how the Israeli military is conducting the war in Gaza:
“Nothing happens by accident,” said another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed – that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home [bold mine-DL].”
According to the investigation, another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.” [bold mine-DL]
The Israeli military campaign is killing huge numbers of civilians not just because they have been bombing indiscriminately in a densely-populated area, but also because they are deliberately hitting targets where they know large numbers of civilians will be killed. This includes bombing “private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks” even though these are not military targets. The result has been the devastation of Gaza’s housing and infrastructure and the killing of more than 10,000 women and children.
This is how the Israeli military has been killing civilians at a faster rate than in any other recent conflict and how it has killed more children in two months than were killed in all the other wars in the world combined for the last year. According to Defense for Children International Palestine, more than 6,600 children have been killed since the start of the war with thousands more still missing in the rubble of destroyed buildings. The spokesman for UNICEF, James Elder, was entirely right when he said, “This is a war on children.”
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.