Israel’s armed drones are heralding an era of automated killing
Palestinians inspect the remains of a house targeted in a drone strike by the Israeli army in the West Bank city of Jenin, 4 September 2023
Sebastian Ben Daniel (John Brown) writes in +972:
On September 4, the Israeli army launched a raid into the Jenin refugee camp for the first time since its large-scale invasion two months ago, as part of an operation to arrest several Hamas members. During an exchange of gunfire, the army deployed a Rafael SPIKE FireFly loitering munition — known as a “suicide” or “kamikaze” drone — to strike Palestinian militants in the area. The attack marked the latest use of combat drones in Jenin, signaling the machines’ increased presence in Israeli operations in the occupied West Bank.
The Israeli army has been using armed drones for decades to carry out, among other things, extrajudicial executions. But until last year, it was officially forbidden to publish this basic fact in the Israeli media; only on July 20, 2022, did the Israeli military censor change its policy. The longstanding media ban helped to stifle an informed public debate in Israel on the morality of these drones, even as such lively discussions were happening elsewhere in the world, especially around their use by the U.S. military.
A +972 and Local Call investigation reveals three cases — one of them during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, and two during Operation Guardian of the Walls in 2021 — in which nine Palestinian non-combatants, including five children, were killed as a result of missiles fired from drones. In one case, a criminal investigation was opened, but no one was prosecuted. In the other two cases, officers were reprimanded, but the army did not open an investigation.
An open secret
The Israeli army began using drones in the early 1980s in Lebanon before they were called “unmanned aerial vehicles” (UAVs), a name intended to imply a humane method of killing. In more recent years, the army has used these weapons to carry out thousands of attacks in the Gaza Strip, and most recently in Jenin.
For decades, these weapons were an “open secret,” with the whole world — and certainly Palestinians — knowing full well about the use of these weapons. Yet all the while, it was still technically prohibited to report on it to the Israeli public, even though they, too, knew that these weapons existed.