Generating Targets: How AI Powers the Genocide in Gaza

posted on: Sep 23, 2026

By: Rami Balin / Arab America Contributing Writer

Recently, critical conversations around artificial intelligence (AI) have been centered around its possible role in the future demise of humanity as new AI models are becoming increasingly autonomous, which indeed could have catastrophic consequences. What is lost in this discourse is the fact that AI is not a distant threat of the future but a very real destructive force right now. It has already caused incredible damage to the environment and drastically accelerated climate change at the moment when we can’t afford it. It has also become the key element in military technology and mass surveillance. Israel has been developing these technologies and using them on Palestinians.

According to Anthony Loewenstein, Israel is one of the world’s top ten arms exporters, despite being a small country with a population of only four million. One of the reasons Israel has been so successful in securing its place as a lead developer and seller of military technologies is that these technologies are “battle tested.” While other companies at arms shows display their newest weapons along with a simulation of these weapons in action, Israeli companies provide actual footage of weapons’ use on Palestinians. Depicting war crimes and human rights violations, these videos serve as a unique selling point for customers worldwide.

Artificial intelligence has been a part of Israel’s newest military tech for years. The Israeli bombing of Gaza in 2021 was described as the first “AI war” by the Israeli military itself, with IDF officials boasting that AI was a “key component and power multiplier.” This tactic only accelerated as Israeli military and intelligence services have found a new data-driven solution to the “Palestinian problem.”

Palestinians are the unwanted populations whose very existence threatens the Zionist settler-colonial project, and therefore Israel has been attempting to expand control over them by means of surveillance technologies, using biometrics in tracking software and advanced weaponry as part of their genocidal assaults on Gaza, including the latest escalation after October 7, 2023. The corporations who provide language models and cloud space to the Israeli military have not been held accountable for the immeasurable harm their technologies have done to Palestinians, to their lives, culture, heritage, economic well-being and so much more.

AI-generated Hit List

For the Israeli military, one of the key uses of AI in Gaza is automating the process of choosing targets. It is facilitated by processing vast amounts of data, from satellite imagery to intercepted communications from the Gaza Strip. Triangulating cell tower data, IDF also traces whereabouts of all cell phones in Gaza. “Where’s Daddy?” is a software used to track individuals to specific locations that IDF deems suitable to carry out the airstrikes.

The program called Lavender, provided by Microsoft and developed by the Israeli military to identify every suspected “terrorist” is giving them a “suspicion score” that indicates likelihood of their involvement in militant activity. Tracks their location, including their homes, Lavender is carrying out decisions about life and death of entire Palestinian families, with bombings usually occurring at night. It generates a kill list and acts without being thoroughly checked by humans. Meanwhile, its only distinctive criterion for targeting individuals is that the suspect has to be male, without differentiating between adults and children. Operating with a 10% error margin, it often targets people who were never involved with Hamas or Islamic Jihad at all. Another software called The Gospel is using the same principles to identify whole buildings and structures where suspected militants might be located. In his investigative publications for +972 Magazine, Yuval Abraham aptly describes this system as a “mass assassination factory.”

AI Cloud Services and Collateral Damage

Functioning of various AI algorithms and programs is made possible by Azure, a cloud platform provided to the Israeli army by Microsoft in partnership with OpenAI. Microsoft supplies OpenAI’s GPT-4 models, the engine behind ChatGPT. According to the report by Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, both Google and OpenAI  abandoned their voluntary commitments not to develop AI for military use in 2024 and have been extensively involved in warfare technologies. Project Nimbus is another cloud service, provided to the Israeli military by Google and Amazon. It serves as vital tech infrastructure for the Israeli army and is used in the West Bank as well as the Gaza Strip.

Human Rights Watch has determined that these AI tools used by the Israeli military during their genocide in Gaza “use faulty data and inexact approximations to inform military actions.” Moreover, the general lack of consideration for Palestinian human life is embedded into the use and functions of AI, mirroring the settler-colonial racist logics that make up the Israeli genocidal apartheid system. Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s recent film “NAZA” grapples with the implications of AI in Gaza, scrutinizing these warfare practices. Naza is the term used by the Israeli military to refer to collateral damage. Testimonies in the film establish that in one of its operations IDF considered up to five hundred collateral deaths permissible to eliminate one person.

Boycotting AI

While Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are officially part of the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) campaign, it is important to also accent the role of OpenAI, and other companies and corporations in the mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza as well as for providing surveillance technologies that violate human rights and endanger lives in the West Bank. This list is not exhaustive, with entities like IBM, Palantir, Anduril and others also playing a huge part in advancing the automated apartheid and genocide. Boycotting them is an imperative. The use of ChatGPT (OpenAI), Gemini (Google), Copilot (Microsoft) and other AI chat bots helps train them and benefits the big tech corporations, entrenching our complicity in the Israeli oppression of Palestinians and the destruction of Gaza in particular.

According to BDS, boycotts against the Israeli tech sector have been successful in de-incentivizing foreign investments in Israeli companies, with shareholders concerned about the legal implications of their involvement in the genocide. Even tech giants can be responsive to public scrutiny and financial incentives, and there is no shortage of pressure points to use to advance the end of settler-colonial violence, for Palestinians and for Gaza.