#civilians
Along with the records, Khan’s reporting is based on five years of on the ground investigations. She concludes: “On the ground, I found a pattern of life that was very different from the one that the military described in its credibility assessments, and documented death rates that vastly exceeded U.S. Central Command’s own numbers. I also came away with a grim understanding of how America’s new high-tech air war looks to civilians who live beneath it — people in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan trying to raise families, earn a living and stay away from the fighting as best they can” (ibid.).
The truths on the ground of data-driven warfighting have become abundantly clear with the reported application of ML to targeting by the IDF. Journalist Yuval Abraham (2023, 2024) has given us detailed accounts of two of the IDF’s current systems, named respectively Habsora or ‘the Gospel’ and ‘Lavender.’[1] The first report, published in November of 2023, draws on sources within the Israeli intelligence community who confirm that IDF operations in the Gaza strip combine more permissive authorization for the bombing of non-military targets with a loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties. This policy enables the bombing of built structures in densely populated civilian areas, including high-rise residential and public buildings designated as so called ‘power targets’. Official legal guidelines require that selected buildings must house a legitimate military target and be empty at the time of their destruction; the latter has resulted in the IDF’s issuance of a constant and changing succession of unfeasible evacuation orders to those trapped in diminishingly small areas of Gaza. A direct corollary of this operational strategy is the need for an unbroken stream of candidate targets. To meet this requirement, the Habsora software is designed to accelerate the generation of targets from surveillance data, creating what one former intelligence officer (quoted in the story’s headline) describes as a ‘mass assassination factory.’
Forensic Architecture has conducted an extensive investigation of ten exhibits introduced as evidence by the Israeli defense team at the International Court of Justice, providing systematic counterevidence for misrepresentation in each, in this case the claim of Hamas’ use of ‘human shields’ by basing their operations in civilian infrastructure. Forensic Architecture’s analysis of this exhibit showed that the building labeled ‘Hospital’ is in fact a residential building outside of the grounds of the hospital complex that was subsequently bombed. We could of course also question the designation ‘terrorist,’ part of the wider erasure of any reciprocity regarding who has a right to self-defense, as well as the question of proportionality in Israel’s massive and ongoing attacks on residential buildings, hospitals, and schools in Gaza, all of which are now also refugee camps and so further prohibited as targets under the laws of war.