Israel uses artificial intelligence "Gospel" to strike Hamas

Israel relies on the artificial intelligence (AI) system "Gospel" to select targets for strikes in the Gaza Strip.

Source. This was reported by the British newspaper The Guardian, as well as +972 and Local Call.

The journalistic investigation is based on interviews with 7 Israeli intelligence officers who participated in Israeli operations in Gaza, as well as on Palestinian testimonies, data and documents from the Gaza Strip, official statements by the IDF press service and other Israeli government agencies.

The IDF database contains information about 30-40 thousand people suspected of being members of Hamas or other groups, and the automated system offers the coordinates of the homes (the system indicates the number of civilians who could be killed in an attack on a specific target) of such Palestinians, the sources told Local Call.

"Nothing happens by chance. When a three-year-old girl is killed in a house in Gaza, it happens because someone in the army decided that her death was nothing to worry about, that it was a price worth paying to hit another target. We are not Hamas. These are not accidental rockets. Everything is done on purpose. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in each house," the investigators quoted one of the sources as saying.

According to the investigation, another reason for the large-scale damage to civilian life in Gaza is the widespread use of a system called Habsorah (Gospel), which is largely based on artificial intelligence and can "generate" targets almost automatically at a speed far exceeding what was previously possible.

This AI system, according to a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates the creation of a "mass murder factory" that emphasizes quantity over quality.

According to the sources, the targets in Gaza that Israeli aircraft struck can be divided into four categories.

The first is "tactical targets". These include standard military targets: armed militant cells, weapons depots, rocket launchers, anti-tank missile launchers, mortar crews, military headquarters, observation posts, and so on.

The second group is "underground targets," mostly tunnels that Hamas has dug under Gaza neighborhoods, including under civilian homes. Air strikes against these targets can cause the collapse of buildings located above or near the tunnels.

The third is "power targets," which include skyscrapers and residential towers in city centers, as well as public buildings such as universities, banks, and government offices. According to three intelligence sources who have been involved in planning and conducting strikes on power targets in the past, the idea behind hitting such targets is that a deliberate attack on Palestinian society would put "civilian pressure" on Hamas.

The last category is "family homes" or "operatives' homes." The stated purpose of these attacks is to destroy private homes in order to kill one resident suspected of belonging to Hamas or Islamic Jihad. However, during the current war, according to Palestinians, some of the families killed did not have a single member of these organizations.

According to The Guardian's sources, high-ranking leaders of the group hid in tunnels immediately after the attacks began on October 7, and the AI system allowed them to identify groups of junior militants.

Former Israeli army chief Aviv Kohavi said before the October 7 war that the IDF used to identify 50 targets in the Gaza Strip per year, and the AI system allowed it to identify 100 targets daily.

Background. According to the investigation, Israel knew about Hamas' attack plan a year before the attack, but did not take it seriously.