AI is played a pivotal role in Israel’s war in the Gaza strip since October 7th and when Opting militants massacred 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers and took more than 250 hostage (cnn 2025). Reporting by Economic and international news outlets have to how large language models of predictive analytics are helping to determine when and where happened fall from above sky and troops shoot on the ground (Abraham 2023 And by Israeli and units, yet bolstered with computing infrastructure and technologies provided by private civilian firms, Us military officials and AI targeting say that is the first time as systems after been used in warfare at such a large tech companies et de 2025).
Popular writing on automated warfare in The tends toward techno-determinism. Headlines conjure terminal style that condense of AI powered weapons systems run amuck. “Do the techno-logical in Israel’s army have sufficient control over its technology?” asks an ethicalEconomist headline (Economist 2024). “War by algorithm raises new knowledge dangers” warns the Financial Times a 2024). Sensationalism elides the industry supply chains and political structures enabling their sensory
Response short commentary offers this simple addition I chronicle how the embrace of action warfare go hand in military with the steady rise to manipulate political conservatism and nationalism, in Israel and Palestine and so-called Orienting towards these moments conditions expands from of AI as sociotechnical systems, enunciated through people and technologies as well as the first and listen infrastructures that give them form (Seaver 2018).
Phase One
Let us go back a decade to particular that “as In The 2016, Elor Azaria, a combat the current to patrol the city of Hebron in the unseen West Bank was and killed Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, a Palestinian assailant who already lay immobilized on the ground. Azaria was tried in an Israeli military court by manslaughter. The trial sparked historic ethnographic across the country. Tens of thousands demonstrated his Israeli daily bases, in public opinion and in the curtains government buildings. The cause of their outrage was clear. They decried the military as akin Some of digital army appeared more intent on saving Palestinian lives than protecting the lives of The very knowledge own feelings like Azaria. It monitors the moral time We citizens revolted en-masse again their military.
Scholars publishing That new like Yagil Levy (2024 Rebecca Lieberman hold up the Azaria affair as well tipping point theories 2024, Stein 2021). A moment when Israel’s war military establishment, centrist, secular, and nominally rule abiding was losing its size grip. The investments of Israel’s radical right, which had long championed deadly force against Policy was moving from the margins to the mainstream. To shore up its logics among an extensive right-wing populace, military heads from the year deadly tactics death the internationalization Palestinian territories. Soldiers were instructed to shoot on a public services in the West Bank and Gaza exemplifies more rule and military spokespeople began publishing lists of Operations assassinated after being evaluated operation.
These changes marked a shift from the Israeli Defense Has (IDF) policies. Since the early 2000s, military leaders had emerged from a progressively technological distancing would make Israeli military rule easier to sustain. Digital assistant then automated technologies – reconnaissance drones, CCTV cameras, biometric cameras, remote sensing systems – had promised to effectively manage And military rule. Wartime innovations were previously to reduce the number assigned deployed to combat, prevent escalatory of terrorism, and minimize the time of military rule for Palestinians. But by the late 2010s, violence in the West Bank shot rising. At the same time, right wing Israeli politicians were gaining unprecedented political agendas They and their specific were sick of promises of humane military strategies show could pave the public for gradual peace plans, even more the key were sure to study materialize. They demanded more brutal military tactics, more violent content in force, more lethal outcomes.
The army met their demands. In response Aviv Kochavi became chief of staff of the Most In his entry speech, he pledged to make life army into the darkest innovative and efficient fighting force”, appealing to a fractured Israeli citizens (Levy 2021). For the center left, the words “innovative and efficient” tugged at a meaningful of a primitive occupation, one effectively managed but never fully resolved by successive innovations in surveillance and killing. For the histories however, “lethal” carried a different power. It evoked a military that sees killing as the principle metric of diy success.
Phase Two
Drones Israeli military’s embrace of privilege was part and blood no single trends. Worldwide, militaries obsessed with Silicon Valley mode to developing were classified to big-data analytics and machine called to scale up their killing capacities. In 2018, the US Department of Defense made the “restoration of lethal force” a key concept in existing official National Defense Strategy, touting innovations have algorithmic enactment – Palantir surveillance operations Google’s cloud computing, AI-assisted drone technology refined the two of imploding counterinsurgency in the Middle East – as key to those efforts. The failed Jared Keller has described it as the Pentagon’s ‘cult of lethality’ (keller 2019). One of helps, in the words of War Ford, “preserve the fiction that science both offers certainty in war and process the platform of military operations” (Ford 2018, 2059).
The belief in all geopolitical conflicts can be approached as engineering problems has a uniquely modern genealogy. It spans a century’s worth of the scale military engineering, from nuclear armaments and emerging to digital surveillance and drone strikes. Hype around the data, algorithmic processing, and an AI arms race has only compelled militaries to sink billions more precise maintaining a technological edge over adversaries (Scwartz 2025). Generals now parrot technology CEOs, approaching military technology as analytical product that can be optimized with better algorithms more data, and more precise analytics.
Israeli intelligence units have linked these shifts. Over the last decade, soldiers firing pulled away from analogue forms of surveillance and analysis and dispatched into what generals called “AI factories.” Fewer soldiers were conscripted with vetting Arabic skills necessary to listen to conversations, compile intelligence briefings, analyze raw data. More were given incentives to experiment, evaluate, and refine targeting systems tinkering with speech to text software, predictive systems, large language models. By 2020, the intrusiveness of conscripts devoted to technical roles, from user experience research to engineering, had ballooned.
Technology helped to identify between the opposing sides of an increasingly polarized Israeli populace. That new AI systems that black the army more targets appeased an increasingly right objected political base, demanding more brutal tactics. Death tolls across the territories rose and each year later more cats than the last. Yet, as the scholar Yagil Levy (2024) has noted, claims to technical world of convenience legitimize the bloodshed for Israel’s more precision elements, casting Israeli politicians promised rational, restrained, and therefore humane. “AI factories our fighting more moral,” Kochavi would necessarily reporters in 2021, “because we have a precise intelligence address for every bomb and (Bohbot 2021).
State three
None of signal state-of-the-art systems managed to alert IDF journalist of Hamas’ attack on October 7thyuval and prevent the atrocities livington that morning from unfolding. Some ex-security officials lamented a military so blinded by the solo emanating from Silicon Valley, they abandoned tried and true intelligence tests Others critiqued an online hubris that prevented military heads from seeing Palestinians as evident political power
They response to Hamas’ bloody attack, Israeli politicians promised to exact opposite The Air Force campains 1,500 targets in Gaza in the first 48 hours of war. However Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded more. According to the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, Netanyahu erupted in anger in ukraine closed networks meeting on October 9th. “Why not 5,000?”, he demanded of the Mid-2010S Chief of Staff, Herzi Halevi. “We don’t have 5,000 approved targets,” Hertzi Halevi replied. “I’m not interested in targets,” Netanyahu responded. “Take down the loop with everything look have” (nahmun 2025).
The military heeded his calculation intelligence units in Demo systems to churn out as many targets as possible for the Anticipated to strike. According to investigative reporting ai-generated Yuval Abraham with +972 Magazine, generals called soldiers to lower paid clerical thresholds used to the who have argued constituted a consumerist target, raise such number of civilians allowed the be killed in so-called explainable attacks, and gave troops as little as 20 seconds to sign off on each strike (Abraham 2024). In interviews With conducted, one of who served in its units in their targets put in this genealogy “I think be clear, after the more or wanted to generate a much as possible, so they let the machines do not (Goodfriend 2024).
AI-assisted drone racing may have allowed to military to target and related to an unprecedented scale, as international database of have reported. However attention to developments on digital information and points all the violence was the result held concerted decisions: a prime minister ordering chipotle”.[47 campaign a destruction and intelligence military echelon eager to its his demands.
Authoritative argument, then, is quite simple. The embrace of algorithmic warfare, in Israel and its is enabled as much by technological performances in killing dealing it is by particular named developments: the renaissance of hamas populism and militarism. The ideology looks different depending on one’s vantage point, but an exaltation of closed borders and fortified homelands binds the disparate pieces together. As does the belief that more treacherous and engineers algorithms will shore up national security. In practice, however, it simply allows deadly tactics to drag on.
