How AI is intensifying Israel’s bombardments of Gaza
An Israeli drone hovers during a demonstration along the border between Israel and the Gaza strip, east of Gaza city on July 27, 2018.
Sophia Goodfriend writes in +972:
“The skies above Gaza are filled with Israeli bombs,” Anas Baba told me when we spoke over WhatsApp a few weeks ago, just after the Israeli army and Islamic Jihad had reached a tenuous ceasefire in the wake of Israel’s latest offensive on the blockaded strip, which killed 33 and wounded dozens more. While the drone strikes had ceased, the incessant hum of UAVs had not. Their sound was a reminder — as Baba, a Gaza-based journalist, put it — that war was now an annual event.
So many Palestinian families have lost their homes in the repeated bombardments of the strip over the 16 years since the siege began that reconstruction is never-ending, made even more difficult by the involvement of numerous organizations and governments offering limited humanitarian assistance. And because of the vast number of people and the amount of funding required to rebuild, Baba explained, families could find themselves on waiting lists for years.
Israeli bombardments on Gaza are becoming more frequent, thanks to innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) and a military that bends to the dictates of increasingly right-wing governments. The army boasts that intelligence units can now pinpoint targets — a process that used to take years — in just a month. Even as the death tolls across the occupied territories climb, visions of this humanitarian crisis rarely puncture the Jewish-Israeli public sphere, fortified by military censors, missile defense systems, and plain indifference. Instead, regional violence is parsed through the redemptive parlance of technological innovation.
In the Israeli press, these wars unfold in a familiar pattern. New military offensives on Gaza are announced like the release of a much anticipated Call of Duty game. The army saturates social media feeds with epic graphics of gunslinging soldiers, while Biblical names evoke military might of mythological proportions. Then missiles rain over Gaza, blasting away Palestinian infrastructure, homes, and lives, while rocket sirens send Israelis across the south scampering into fortified shelters.