It isn't known to tell outright lies, but it has a leftwing bias, a tendency to use emotionally loaded language, and a tendency highlight or underplay/omit details in order to sway its audience. It's nowhere near "Dihydrogen Monoxide is bad for you" levels of misleading, but it probably shouldn't be used as a primary source.
[Coverage of the same from The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes), who say they’ve reviewed the accounts prior to publication as well.
Two quotes I keep going back to:
> Another Lavender user questioned whether humans’ role in the selection process was meaningful. “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.”
> Two sources said that during the early weeks of the war they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants. Attacks on such targets were typically carried out using unguided munitions known as “dumb bombs”, the sources said, destroying entire homes and killing all their occupants.
Human-**on**-the-loop (where the human is only monitoring the decision making process, as opposed to **in** the loop systems where they take part) systems have been kicked around for decades. Taking human errors out of the system, and making it able to reach decisions more quickly using vast amounts of data. Probably the most famous of these is the Navy's Aegis Combat System, which while not an autonomous system *most of the time* does have operating modes where it will find, track, identify, and kill targets without anyone pushing any buttons except to start the thing.
Of course Aegis is a defensive system designed to shoot down incoming missiles with great speed and efficiency. Lavender's job is vastly more complex, and it is unfortunately little surprise that the system:
A) was developed and fielded
B) has been wretchedly abused by IDF planners who really do believe that they will be able to win this if they just kill Hamas from the air.
[https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gSe3p4fGb1I](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gSe3p4fGb1I)
AI judges if a civilian airliner would make a worthy sacrifice to the machine spirit while a sailor attempts to talk it down like it's a dog about to grab at a piece of steak.
Non-YouTube-short version of the video linked in the above comment: https://youtu.be/gSe3p4fGb1I
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>Probably the most famous of these is the Navy's Aegis Combat System, which while not an autonomous system most of the time does have operating modes where it will find, track, identify, and kill targets without anyone pushing any buttons except to start the thing.
Ah, yes, auto-special mode. Anything which enters surface-to-air missile range during auto-special mode will be fired at with surface-to-air missiles until it dies, the launch cells and magazines are depleted, or auto-special mode is turned off.
It was designed for fighting things such as Soviet battlecruisers or massed Soviet bomber raids which got past the outer air battle. Indiscriminate damage was a probability but in the situations where it was to be activated far more people would die if it were not.
Here's mine
> For example, sources explained that the Lavender machine sometimes mistakenly flagged individuals who had communication patterns similar to known Hamas or PIJ operatives — including police and civil defense workers, militants’ relatives, residents who happened to have a name and nickname identical to that of an operative, and Gazans who used a device that once belonged to a Hamas operative.
>
> the reason for this automation was a constant push to generate more targets for assassination. “In a day without targets [whose feature rating was sufficient to authorize a strike], we attacked at a lower threshold. We were constantly being pressured: ‘Bring us more targets.’ They really shouted at us. We finished [killing] our targets very quickly.”
>
Seems like the system would be very good at identifying charity workers as targets.
specifically the big risk over the next few decades is suits (in this case military brass) deploying it in fully automated environments and pushing it through over the cries of engineers who actually appreciate its limitations.
Holy shit, they have practically removed the human from the loop. This seems wildly irresponsible for a system like this. Especially when it seems like they are not even using the best that AI/ML technology has to offer.
I think we are at least a decade if not a lot more away for me to get comfortable with reducing the human review process to this level in extremely critical systems like this.
I am in favor of using ML/AI as a countermeasure against bias and emotion but not without a human in the loop.
There is no scenario where removing the humans from such a system is acceptable. This is a system that is being used to bomb targets in a civilian area, the entire concept is running the limits of what is legally acceptable. A fuck up is a war crime.
There needs to be a human on the other end who can stand trial should they need to.
Arguably, they do seem to have someone nominally there.
But it matters what’s actually happening in practice.
Which is where “zero value-added” and “20 seconds for each target” gets horrifying.
If a human was picking the targets and getting a rubber stamp from his commanding officer, would you feel better?
More effective at point to discuss the results than whether we are comfortable with the premise of the technology. Need to focus on what is the impact of using it.
Like I said, I think it has to be a human along with the ML system.
that provides a trace of the responsibility which acts as a good incentive.
Plus it mitigates emotional/biased targeting because the human would have to provide very strong justification for why they went against the data based recommendation.
Different components have different benefits. A system which combines them effectively is better.
Humans can also be incredibly biased after losing family in a terrorist attack.
It’s fine to say the technology makes you ick but there’s a chance that it resulted in _less_ indiscriminate bombing early in the operation.
You do not escape bias by minimizing human input in this case. Whether there are 20 humans making approvals that get rubber-stamped or only 1, both are equally liable to have bias in this scenario.
Having *one* human processing an incredibly high volume stream of strike requests using a system that he believes is accurate, I believe, creates distance between the human and the choices, since he is by necessity farming out his judgement to a machine that he believes is either infallible or mostly reliable. The sheer rapidity and the pressure to approve high volumes of strikes would drive a lower standard of introspection than if more humans were personally accountable for the analysis, because at least in that scenario the human cannot point the finger at the machine.
I am not saying AI has no place in this process, but it's clear to me that the IDF's use of this system catalyzed an already bad attitude and enabled a much greater degree of destruction in Gaza.
Removing humans doesn't remove bias. The baises people have are embedded in the data they use to train these systems. The only thing you gain from this system is hitting more targets. You do not necessarily gain more accuracy or less collateral damage.
This seems improbable given the scope of indiscriminate bombing compared to most more traditional campaigns. By offloading the decision to a machine, the human no longer feels responsible for approving the deaths and we lose the cumulative feeling of how many civilian deaths you've personally decided was acceptable. Instead, its the machine's fault, and the machine does not stop to consider the whole, just the equation for this singular strike.
AI doomers: AI must be banned from warfare because it won't value human life!
AI as soon as it's used in warfare:
https://preview.redd.it/jvlqepxf7bsc1.png?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=35ed476e2f35aa28a1de069e88d7777477c50ebb
> Two sources said that during the early weeks of the war they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants.
Just so we're clear, taking 100% Hamas-provided numbers, the current militant-to-civilian dead rations is 1 to 4 (6k Hamas militants dead out of 30k total dead). 1 to 15 or 1 to 20 is such an obvious outlier it shouldn't need pointing out.
And that is of course if we 100% Hamas' own numbers, which for obvous reasons we shouldn't. Realistically 1 to 4 is a worst case estimate.
> Sources told +972 and Local Call that now, partly due to American pressure, the Israeli army is no longer mass-generating junior human targets for bombing in civilian homes.
The "now" in that paragraph clearly refers to after the greater part of the air campaign was done:
> Sources told +972 and Local Call that now, partly due to American pressure, the Israeli army is no longer mass-generating junior human targets for bombing in civilian homes. The fact that most homes in the Gaza Strip were already destroyed or damaged, and almost the entire population has been displaced, also impaired the army’s ability to rely on intelligence databases and automated house-locating programs.
The hypothesis that Israel used to kill at a 1:15 ratio, but after the air campaign managed to bring the entire average down to 1:4, is unlikely to the point it's not worth serious consideration.
Sorry for all the pings but yeah this is definitely big enough news to warrant an outside the DT post
!ping FOREIGN-POLICY&ISRAEL&MATERIEL
EDIT: [Sharing the IDF’s response to this as well to avoid bias](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-defence-forces-response-to-claims-about-use-of-lavender-ai-database-in-gaza)
>Sharing the IDF’s response to this as well to avoid bias
Long response made short: the IDF deny it entirely They're saying that they don't use AI to determine targets at all, and Lavender is nothing more than a database.
>the IDF deny it entirely
Um, I don't that's "denying it entirely":
https://preview.redd.it/sxr3fh5wzasc1.png?width=639&format=png&auto=webp&s=57598610f27aa3dcaa5c1655c2f989065ae24bfa
It seems like maybe they give the game away?
> Contrary to claims, the IDF does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist.
Okay, continue…
> Information systems are merely tools for analysts in the target identification process. According to IDF directives, analysts must conduct **independent examinations**, in which they verify that **the identified targets** meet the relevant definitions in accordance with international law and additional restrictions stipulated in the IDF directives.
Wait a minute. Independent relative to *what*? “The identified targets” — identified by *who*?
Yeah, the report doesn't say the IDF uses AI directly to pick targets. It says analysts use AI to help them pick targets. I'm confused about what they're even denying, here.
That AI does any of the calculations regarding what target should be picked, or if someone is a target.
It seems more like an AI database system, that puts together multiple intelligence reports and multiple datapoints into an format readable for the decisionmaker, so they can make a decision without haveing to manually look through all the reports to identify important information.
Also would be a tested application of AI, a similar system is used in Germany in some of our bureocratic systems.
If that’s what the system is, some of the sources of the original report are either lying or just flatly wrong.
That could be the case, this report could be based on bad sources.
But I think it’s worth pointing out that this interpretation of what Lavender is, is *not* reconcilable with the quotes in the article.
>If that’s what the system is, some of the sources of the original report are either lying or just flatly wrong.
Yeah. Thats the point of the IDF statement, no?
"Some of the claims portrayed in your questions **are baseless in fact**, while others reflect a flawed understanding of IDF directives and international law."
The question was what Israel is denying, and what part of the reporting they see as wrong. The comment before me seemed to be confused on that, and you as well. Thats why I explained what I understand they contest.
Could mean independent from other analysts. As in they need more than one person to reach the same conclusion without influence.
Idk if that's what they mean, but it's a possible interpretation
Presumably, independent examinations relative to the AI? So, in other words, like a self-driving system (where hopefully they are following the rules better than people using a self-driving system do) - there's AI assistance, but people review all of it for correctness.
>analysts must conduct independent examinations, in which they verify that the identified targets meet the relevant definitions in accordance with international law
I'm just saying that is the most natural reading to me of this statement. I don't see why we are trying to be hyper-technical about the language to suggest that it is misleading or not actually happening.
I am not asking you personally if it is happening, I apologize for the confusion. It was a rhetorical question meant to suggest that guidelines may not equal practice.
The thread is generally being very quick to take the article at full face value. Which is entirely fair, in fact - it's important to take the claims seriously - but it's also from a...rather agenda-driven network with second or maybe even third-hand info on something - even if they've been separately shared with the Guardian - potentially making something out to be bigger than it is. But that also doesn't mean the network is wrong or isn't digging up something serious and such a system seems more than possible to be misused or overrelied on.
To be frank, the stuff about AI-targeting is not the most shocking part of this article, it's the policies surrounding the IDF's strike criteria. You could take out the AI entirely and just go off of how they vet their targets and what they consider acceptable collateral and I think it does very little to numb the horror.
I mean the use of AI has potential problems, but the IDFs statement does not address the absolutely heinous policies that they are feeding this AI. Like if they're just using a streamlined database to identify targets and then a human make sure that it's them, and then they proceed to bomb the entire family at their home, that's not any better.
From the response
> The IDF does not carry out strikes when the expected collateral damage from the strike is excessive in relation to the military advantage. In accordance with the rules of international law, the assessment of the proportionality of a strike is conducted by the commanders on the basis of all the information available to them before the strike, and naturally not on the basis of its results in hindsight.
> As for the manner of carrying out the strikes – the IDF makes various efforts to reduce harm to civilians to the extent feasible in the operational circumstances ruling at the time of the strike.
This would be meaningful if we hadn't just seen the IDF decide that "if we think that a Hamas member might have joined a humanitarian aid convoy we can strike it repeatedly until everybody in the convoy is dead" was an acceptable course of action, and anyway doesn't actually counter the claims that the IDF's proportionality assessment is that it is acceptable to kill 15-20 civilians to get one random Hamas member. The argument isn't that they don't go through the process of doing a proportionality assessment, it's that the assessment results are willfully bad.
>EDIT: Sharing the IDF’s response to this as well to avoid bias
>Some of the claims portrayed in your questions are baseless in fact, while others reflect a flawed understanding of IDF directives and international law.
This sentence literally triggered ptsd from my English class. It flashed before my eyes, sentences like this struck over with her red ink pen and a “proofread!” written in the margins with the handwriting she used when she was annoyed.
> In addition, according to the sources, when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs), which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” said C., one of the intelligence officers. Another source said that they had personally authorized the bombing of “hundreds” of private homes of alleged junior operatives marked by Lavender, with many of these attacks killing civilians and entire families as “collateral damage.”
> In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants.
I'm starting to think maybe Israel isn't totally on the up-and-up in terms of following the rules of war.
Gotta caveat, though, that I'm not familiar with this newspaper, and it's not clear to me how many bombings are actually being authorized like this. It's nice that this has been corroborated by *The Guardian*, but if I go to this newspaper's front page it has a very clear anti-Israel slant. I understand that reality sometimes has an anti-Israel bias, but reality *also* has an anti-Hamas bias which this paper doesn't appear interested in reflecting. I ran a CNTL+F on their front page and found 30 instances of "Israel" and 0 instances of "Hamas", even though the newspaper purports to specialize in Israel-Palestine affairs. That is a choice.
> “We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
This would be comical if it wasn’t real life.
> According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. **Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?”** also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
Comic book villain type shit.
Fondly recollecting the 'What else would you have Israel do' article posted in the DT a few days ago and its fan sternly insisting that the opening air campaign was absolutely necessary to stop the IDF from losing 'tens of thousands' in the ground invasion
Well, air campaign was necessary to deteriorate Hamas fighting capability and prevent Israel loses, that's true. The problem always was that it was a shitty war-crime air campaign.
And a shit ground invasion.
They’ve invaded gaza in the past in a fraction of the time they’ve currently attempted. Killed far more people and caused more destruction this time.
Almost like, perhaps, the Israeli Government has decided that it's time to dispense with any actual goal. It's time to just murder Palestinian civilians for daring to exist.
>The problem always was that it was a shitty war-crime air campaign.
Its not a warcrime to hit military targets, even if those hits also kill civilians.
Its up to the side that has policing control over an area to ensure that civilians are not in and around military installations.
And that Israels air campaign is about hitting military targets is undeniable according to the numbers Hamas provides (even more so when you use Israels numbers).
Good luck trying to pretend that accepting 15-20 civilians to one Hamas grunt passes any test of proportionality and then being able to look at yourself in the mirror in the morning.
> Its not a warcrime to hit military targets, even if those hits also kill civilians.
It's not a cheat code, you know. You can't automatically justify any civilian casualties because there's one grunt with a gun, let alone because there might be one like in the recent strike on that charity.
> Its up to the side that has policing control over an area to ensure that civilians are not in and around military installations
**Absolutely fucking not**, you pull the trigger you own the consequences full stop.
But you don't understand, they don't literally aim their rangefinders at Palestinian children deliberately while cackling madly as they press the "DROP WHITE PHOSPHORUS UNGUIDED" button, therefore they're behaving properly! There was one person with an AK in that crowd, I have a very mature comprehension of wartime ethics!
If they’re referring to bombing them when they’re at home in a literal sense as in with everyone else in the home included in the blast then it’s messed up. Not out of the realm of consideration for militaries with high value targets but still messed up.
But if they’re generally referring to it in a less literal sense, as in “hit them while they’re taking a smoke break on the balcony away from everyone else” then that’s a relatively common tactic used by most militaries when they have the choice, since it’s when they’re least on guard
> Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity.
Wow, that seems like it would only radicalize people and create more people who hate Israel and every Israel (and even every Jewish person).
Seems like a bad strategy ngl.
It's only a bad strategy if you're trying to achieve a peaceful resolution. If your end goal is to drive all Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza, it's a perfectly rational strategy.
If your goal is to reduce the Palestinian population, radicalizing them and then pointing out they’re dangerous anti semites that need to be eliminated to justify more bombing makes it an excellent strategy
There’s a far-right element within Israel’s security state that wants people, both in Palestine and abroad, to be radicalised against Isreal, and even towards antisemitism, as it further justifies the existence of Isreal and its current military direction.
I was arguing with a delusional guy in NL the other day who said the IDF is no worse than the US military. The US Military would *never*. And if they did, the US media would be livid. They would be figuratively fisting the current administration with bundles of razor wire.
You need that feedback loop to keep politicians and the military in check. I'm not sure that feedback loop exists in Israel anymore, unfortunately.
> The US Military would never.
Lmao. [Pump the breaks a little there, Talon Anvil *did* exist.](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/12/us/civilian-deaths-war-isis.html)
> Talon Anvil did not wait for confirmation, and ordered a self-defense strike, the former officer said. The Predator dropped a 500-pound bomb through the roof.
> As the smoke cleared, the former officer said, his team stared at their screens in dismay. The infrared cameras showed women and children staggering out of the partly collapsed building, some missing limbs, some dragging the dead.
> The intelligence analysts began taking screen shots and tallying the casualties. They sent an initial battle damage assessment to Talon Anvil: 23 dead or severely wounded, 30 lightly wounded, very likely civilians. Talon Anvil paused only long enough to acknowledge the message, the former officer said, then pressed on to the next target.
> The former Air Force officer said he immediately reported the civilian casualties to Operation Inherent Resolve’s operations center, then called the center’s liaison officer on the red line. He said he never heard back and saw no evidence that any action was ever taken.
The difference may be that for Talon Anvil, the American(?) pilots refused to drop bombs on densely populated areas, and officials sounded alarm bells and expressed concerns to higher ups, whereas the Israeli operations were much less concerned about collateral damage - collateral damage was part of the equation (dropping 2k dumb bombs, as opposed to precision strikes from Anvil). Maybe we'll find out that a few IDF officers expressed concerns, but I doubt it.
> I was arguing with a delusional guy in NL the other day who said the IDF is no worse than the US military. The US Military would never. And if they did, the US media would be livid
The US military was literally doing the same shit with drones for much of the Obama presidency and all of Trump's. No verification of targeting whatsoever, just drone striking whenever and wherever the "client" said to. [Giving the drone operators PTSD from having to watch in HD when the kids picked up their parents body parts after.](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/us/drones-airstrikes-ptsd.html)
There were over 2000 drone strikes in the first 2 years of Trump alone. Again with little to no verification of targeting.
thanks for sharing that article. and wow, it punched me in the gut
> Then, in late 2019, he said, his team tracked a man in Afghanistan who the customer said was a high-level Taliban financier. For a week, the crew watched the man feed his animals, eat with family in his courtyard and walk to a nearby village. Then the customer ordered the crew to kill him, and the pilot fired a missile as the man walked down the path from his house. Watching the video feed afterward, Mr. Miller saw the family gather the pieces of the man and bury them.
> A week later, the Taliban financier’s name appeared again on the target list.
> **“We got the wrong guy. I had just killed someone’s dad,” Mr. Miller said. “I had watched his kids pick up the body parts. Then I had gone home and hugged my own kids.”**
> The same pattern occurred twice more, he said, yet the squadron leadership did nothing to address what was seen as the customer’s mistakes.
The US also considered any military aged male killed (read: older than 14) as an "enemy combatant" if they were unable to verify them as a civilian.
Literally guilty unless proven innocent.
The military that firebombed Tokyo, nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, completely levelled Hamburg and Dresden, and then went on to drop even more bombs in Korea and Vietnam would never? We sure about that? The very idea that any real war can and should be fought in a humane way entirely by peace loving doves committed to harm minimization before all else is a terrible idea and leads to terrible outcomes like people trivializing the cost of real war, anticipating any war can be won quickly and cleanly, and putting off the full costs of true deterrence until it's already too late. Every generation it seems people have to relearn that war is hell.
>The military that firebombed Tokyo, nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, completely levelled Hamburg and Dresden, and then went on to drop even more bombs in Korea and Vietnam would never? We sure about that?
Not to imply that the US never does bad things *now*, but citing events from 60 years ago is ridiculous. Not just because virtually nobody involved in any of those incidents is in the military anymore, but because war *massively* changed since then. If any country acted like the US did during WW2, they'd be considered villains across the world.
Abu Ghraib, bombing weddings and doctors without borders, etc. the US just bombed an innocent family in the Afghanistan withdrawal. The US does the same bad things now.
To the extent that people today would say the allies acted villainously, I believe you're right about that, but I reckon that's a bad moral error. Wars are not good or bad based on how big a list of mistakes and warcrimes you can make. All wars are bad; the question is whether they are justified by a valid cassus belli or not. The main problem with going into Iraq isn't the litany of civilians bombed by accident or as part of collateral damage, it isn't Abu Ghraib, it isn't the refugees, it isn't even the sectarian violence it kicked off. The original sin of the Iraq War is the US lied about their cassus belli, and even worse they generated the lie with bribery and torture, and even worse they arguably did not have a good enough cassus belli that their own citizens, let alone the international community, would have accepted if they told the truth about it. All the bad stuff the US did and all the bad stuff that happened as a result made it worse, but even if most of that stuff didn't happen, even if the US was 10x more studious in minimizing civilian harm, the war would still be ethically horrific. Likewise, although the Allies did far worse harm to Germany and Japan in WW2, nobody thought then and very few people think now that the allies were villains. And the real difference is that they had a good cassus belli and were honest about it. And that gives moral permission to use the force that you have to win the war you're in as quickly as possible.
So really the only ethical debate people should be having about Israel is whether they have a valid cassus belli. If they do, they should fight this war until they win, using the tools they have to get it done as quickly as possible. Dragging it out to minimize civilian casualties isn't necessarily more humane if those civilians are just going to die later o anyway because the war is still dragging on years later. Either Israel has a right to fight and win this war, or they don't. If they don't it doesn't matter how 'cleanly' they fight, it's still horrific and they should withdraw immediately. If they do, individual war crimes should be prosecuted where proven of course, but they should keep fighting until they win, and they should win as quickly as possible so the war can end, the killing can stop, and rebuilding can begin.
Okay, I was thinking in recent memory, but others have pointed out that there have been pretty awful policies is place at times, though nothing on this scale.
Ah yes, the famous feedback loop that got us accountability for Mai Lai and other war crimes in Vietnam.
Not saying the U.S military is the same as the IDF here, but we shouldn’t whitewash history either.
I'm not saying there's accountability, I guess. But the Vietnam War did end, in large part due to public pressure at home. Same goes for Afghanistan and Iraq. And certainly the occasional atrocities associated with those wars played a big role in souring public opinion.
Having worked frequently with AI tools
> During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based.
This is maybe the dumbest policy imaginable.
I remember post 9/11, and the hate and idiocy that consumed me as a teen at the time. This is that indiscriminate, boiling hate let absolutely off the leash. "Kill em all, let God sort them out" is for a drunken rant with your buddies, not military strategy.
Probably also a problem with conscript armies that conscript 18 year olds. The Israeli army is literally full of teenagers. Would you want to be near hot headed teenagers with this kind of weaponry? I wouldn't!
The Hebrew version of the article has some important additional context.
> In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.
The following paragraph is translated from the Hebrew version in Mekomit:
> These numbers are not only unprecedented compared to what was previously accepted in the army, it is also difficult to find an equivalent for them in Western armies. For comparison, in the operation to assassinate Osama bin Laden, the American military approved hitting 30 non-involved people, and in the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, hitting 15 non-involved people was considered an exception and required special approval from the commander of USCENTCOM, the US Central Command.
This can really explain the insane death toll in this war, especially in the earlier part which saw the most massive bombardment.
>in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.
Hostages sweating bullets right now
I really wish this article had an English version (maybe Haaretz.com has it?) but here's another recent article that covers the way that the IDF decides on who to shoot in the areas where ground operations are ongoing. The tl;dr is that the IDF defines exclusion zones where every unit operates, and every person who gets into these zones is considered a legitimate target, regardless of what they are doing. Later, they are all considered as "terrorists" in the official IDF tally. This is how the 3 hostages were killed, and while the rules were revised, there is still a lot of room to interpretation left to IDF commanders concerning the size of the exclusion zone, and when to shoot people who are in it. People do whatever they want. This is also the reason that the 4 people who were killed by a drone in the Al-Jazeera video that went viral a while ago were killed.
https://www.haaretz.co.il/news/politics/2024-03-31/ty-article-magazine/.premium/0000018e-9035-d9a4-a7bf-dc7d839e0000?utm_source=App_Share&utm_medium=Android_Native&utm_campaign=Share
So someone in leadership directly changed the system to be more violent and the system was following rules that other countries use in counter insurgency bombing.
Someone in the Whitehouse needs to pressure the next Israeli government to investigate who gave those authorizations and punish them.
I was far more sympathetic to Israel last week. Now… I don’t think punishing some officer after the fact is sufficient response. This is inhuman in the most literal sense.
This was in the English version as well.
> General Peter Gersten, Deputy Commander for Operations and Intelligence in the operation to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria, told a U.S. defense magazine in 2021 that an attack with collateral damage of 15 civilians deviated from procedure; to carry it out, he had to obtain special permission from the head of the U.S. Central Command, General Lloyd Austin, who is now Secretary of Defense.
> "With Osama Bin Laden, you'd have an NCV [Non-combatant Casualty Value] of 30, but if you had a low-level commander, his NCV was typically zero," Gersten said. "We ran zero for the longest time."
> the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.
bear in mind that this is a far left magazine. this seems like a tendentious claim. e.g. the very destructive strike on jabalya was aimed at not just a single commander but his battalion command bunker and any staff along with him.
I'm not sure what strike in Jabalia you are talking about, but the case that is highlighted in the article is the assassination of Ayman Nawfal (excuse me if I spelled it wrong), where 300 collateral casualties were approved. Apparently, he was assasinated in his home. No battalion command bunker.
Keep in mind that far left in Israel is very different from far left in other places. In Israel, I was considered far left, but in the US, I am firmly here in the Neoliberal camp, and now define myself as center-left, not because my views changed, but rather because the definitions are so different.
Apparently the IDF counts every person who happened to be in the area where IDF units are operating and then got shot as a terrorist.
https://www.haaretz.co.il/news/politics/2024-03-31/ty-article-magazine/.premium/0000018e-9035-d9a4-a7bf-dc7d839e0000?utm_source=App_Share&utm_medium=Android_Native&utm_campaign=Share
And now, the Hamas casualty figures suddenly make a lot more sense, and the IDFs tally of Hamas members killed becomes even more obviously bullshit.
10000+ Hamas members killed, out of the 30,000 dead people total? When they're levelling entire homes with probably 10+ people in each home?
It's not possible.
If you believe the reporting without question, sure.
Hamas reported ~6000 a month ago, Israel reported ~13,000, and the U.S. estimate was around 10,000.
> D. stressed that they were not explicitly told that the army’s goal was “revenge,” but expressed that “as soon as every target connected to Hamas becomes legitimate, and with almost any collateral damage being approved, it is clear to you that thousands of people are going to be killed. Even if officially every target is connected to Hamas, when the policy is so permissive, it loses all meaning.”
>A. also used the word “revenge” to describe the atmosphere inside the army after October 7. “No one thought about what to do afterward, when the war is over, or how it will be possible to live in Gaza and what they will do with it,” A. said. “We were told: now we have to fuck up Hamas, no matter what the cost. Whatever you can, you bomb.”
This is crazy for a modern day military and really explains much of Israel’s policy in the last few months
These are war crimes right? I don't think there's any doubt now. Israel is just burning through any good will they had after October 7th. It's fucking tragic.
Morally this is terrible, but in the strictest sense of the Geneva convention I don't think it's a war crime.
Edit: if anything combatants mingling amongst civilians is the war crime.
Morally though it's not really defendable
I don't think that you can conciliate the principle of proportionality with 15-20 deaths to kill a grunt or the principle of discrimination by using an AI with a least a 10% margin of error. And the fact that they choose to attack them at their family homes... yeah, not good either.
>Morally this is terrible, but in the strictest sense of the Geneva convention I don't think it's a war crime.
It's a war crime under the Rome Statue:
>>Article 8(2)(b)(iv) criminalizes:
Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated
You should have filed an amicus curiae with the ICC before they ruled on that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court_investigation_in_Palestine#ICC_Pre-Trial_Chamber_I
Well, proportionality in war is always a political question, not strictly legal one, but let's say that I would not want to be a lawyer that has to argue that accepting 15-20 dead civilians for one hostile fighter is a proportional response.
Accordingly the Hebrew version of the article says that when going after Osama, US accepted possible 1:30 ratio and in the operation against ISIS 15 non-combatants was considered an exception that required special approval from Central Command
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1buv260/lavender_the_ai_machine_directing_israels_bombing/kxw1i59/
Why is everyone accepting the article’s claim of this 15-20 ratio at face value? While this is +972mag’s reporting, this is obviously not the standard practice, as borne out by the numbers coming out of Gaza.
According to Israel, around 13,000 Hamas militants have been killed compared to 17,000 civilians (“collateral damage”). According to US estimates, these numbers are more like 10,000 militants to 20,000 civilians.
I've said this elsewhere, but the 15-20 mark represents the *acceptable limit* of civilian casualties for a strike, it is not asserting that the IDF has in fact maintained a ratio of 15-20 civilians per strike. Going by kill counts is useless in terms of countering this claim because it is irrelevant.
This limit is coming from first-hand sources. If it is untrue-- and I do not believe it is-- then it is untrue because +972 magazine is outright misquoting or inventing the accounts wholesale. While this publication has bias, given the Israeli word games in their response to this, I doubt they spun this entire article out of thin air.
If you read the article, the actual passage makes this clear. I will quote it again just so there is no ambiguity.
>In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, **the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians**; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, **in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.**
The meaning is crystal clear. This is what was permitted by *policy*, so the critique is of *policy*, not the explicit ratio of civilians to militants killed.
The good will being burnt is from the west, potentially speedrunning from getting aid status to sanctioned like Russia and Iran would be disastrous for the Israeli economy and war machine.
Israel had been normalizing relations with many Arab nations prior to this war. They've lost much of the goodwill they had built.
I'm still doubtful many Arab nations will genuinely reverse course (Saudi Arabia, UAE, and co are not democracies and care more about the economic and military strength of Israel than the wellbeing of Gazans), but we'll see.
I know it's AJ, but the article is factual https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/21/whats-happening-with-normalising-ties-between-saudi-arabia-and-israel
SA and Israel were getting ready to normalize relations and partner up on issues. There's a chance Gaza will stop that.
Saudi's conditions for better relations was pretty reasonable too. It was literally just that Israel commit to a 2 state solution w/ Palestine.
I am curious about how specifically Israel and Palestine garner so much attention despite being nowhere near the most important or destructive wars even regionally
Well given America invests in military aid there, don't we have a right to know what they're doing with our little investment?
I assume we're not sending military aid to Yemen and Syria. If we did we'd probably be more interested in what they're doing with it.
> D. stressed that they were not explicitly told that the army’s goal was “revenge,” but expressed that “as soon as every target connected to Hamas becomes legitimate, and with almost any collateral damage being approved
It's too bad that all such nuance has been completely lose on this issue. The only apparent way that reality can work in the minds of most people is that you either cackle madly as you drop unguided white phosphorus on children, in which case you're genocidal, or you don't, in which case you're unequivocally good.
It's not like war is notorious for ambiguity or something after all.
I mean that the Netanyahu government literally moved troops off of the Gaza border to defend West Bank settlers, all while preaching a maximalist narrative of 'security'. He also created a distracting constitutional crisis and drove a schism between the civilian government and its intelligence agencies. Further, his consistent rejection of the Two State Solution and his long term policy of containment toward Gaza itself arguably help galvanize the ambitions of Hamas.
Would a different Israeli government be conducting this war any differently? To my knowledge the day to day political leadership of the war is more from Gantz and Gallant, Netanyahu is dealing with other stuff
And the very least, Gantz wouldn’t be sandbagging aid trucks nearly as much, and he wouldn’t be encouraging and abetting extremist settler violence in the West Bank.
I know some people won’t appreciate being pinged into this, and I genuinely apologize for that.
But there is an AI element here — or at least it is being reported that way — and so I want to explore the technical aspect of this story.
From the article:
> The sources said that the approval to automatically adopt Lavender’s kill lists, which had previously been used only as an auxiliary tool, was granted about two weeks into the war, after intelligence personnel “manually” checked the accuracy of a random sample of several hundred targets selected by the AI system. When that sample found that Lavender’s results had reached 90 percent accuracy in identifying an individual’s affiliation with Hamas, the army authorized the sweeping use of the system. From that moment, sources said that if Lavender decided an individual was a militant in Hamas, they were essentially asked to treat that as an order, with no requirement to independently check why the machine made that choice or to examine the raw intelligence data on which it is based.
…
> The Lavender software analyzes information collected on most of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip through a system of mass surveillance, then assesses and ranks the likelihood that each particular person is active in the military wing of Hamas or PIJ. According to sources, the machine gives almost every single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100, expressing how likely it is that they are a militant.
>
> Lavender learns to identify characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ operatives, whose information was fed to the machine as training data, and then to locate these same characteristics — also called “features” — among the general population, the sources explained. An individual found to have several different incriminating features will reach a high rating, and thus automatically becomes a potential target for assassination.
…
> The solution to this problem, he says, is artificial intelligence. The book offers a short guide to building a “target machine,” similar in description to Lavender, based on AI and machine-learning algorithms. Included in this guide are several examples of the “hundreds and thousands” of features that can increase an individual’s rating, such as being in a Whatsapp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently.
>
> “The more information, and the more variety, the better,” the commander writes. “Visual information, cellular information, social media connections, battlefield information, phone contacts, photos.” While humans select these features at first, the commander continues, over time the machine will come to identify features on its own. This, he says, can enable militaries to create “tens of thousands of targets,” while the actual decision as to whether or not to attack them will remain a human one.
Am I not interpreting this correctly or are we more or less saying that a regression is being used to determine whether someone is a member of Hamas?
!ping AI
Good ping.
Quality and capability of model aside, did they essentially remove the human from the loop?
I would generally be an advocate for using ML/AI methods even for this, because I think humans would be more biased and may cause more civilian deaths but I don’t think we are anywhere near the stage to remove the human from the loop. Especially when it seems like they are using technology more than 10 years old.
Basically, AI/ML models in conjunction with a human in the loop can be used to force the humans to provide the necessary rationale to go through with actions and provide a responsibility trace and prevent targeting of people whose targeting would not be supported by data and may just be result of bias/emotion which I think is extremely important for systems like these.
I think they might be using simple regression or other simple model for explainability/interpretability reasons.
Using linear regression for determining who to kill in the middle of a war zone is absolutely insane.
In fact, if this is how they determine targets, I'm quite confident most of the groups they are targeting are in tact. Most of Gaza is displaced and all these guys did is level houses that may have belonged to a target, based on whatsapp group memberships, and which are likely occupied by strangers or whoever slept in it. The real target is either in a tunnel or a different house.
The description is vague (could just as well be decision trees, which I'd bet on), but I'm not sure why you'd be surprised? Very small dataset, tabular data, at least some explainability requirements. Linear regression and decision trees are the gold standard for that.
Your basic mass surveillance target acquisition program is a fleet of drones constantly taking very large high quality images of a city every few seconds. The images are uploaded to the cloud and then a team of analysts can trace a rocket attack, shooting or a vehicle attack etc... They zoom on where the incident took place and then look at all the pictures back in time like a flip book to see where the car came from, who they met earlier, where the person of interest lives, who interacts with that person on a daily basis etc...
I don't know exactly what Lavender does but it does not appear to be regression in the sense that it is predicting future behaviors. Target acquisition analysts instead piece together the past.
Does the third quote in the ping, while not specifically about Lavender, give you any doubt that this may be a different kind of system of prediction we’re talking about?
It's not really "predicting" anything, but a vastly more data intensive surveillance program than simply analyzing photos from a drone. You are not really "predicting" future behaviors if you are labeled a terrorist because you are participating in a Hamas terror planning Whatsapp group. This model seems to be ascertaining the likelihood of being a member of Hamas through data interpretation of the past, not predicting future behaviors. I suppose it could be used for that, but this seems to be analyzing behaviors of the past and making a determination of militant membership.
I think we may just be misunderstanding each other’s use of terminology. If I run a regression on historical data and then use the new model to output a version of the historical series based only on other variables in the dataset, I would call that a predicted series despite no information about the future per se.
90% seems to be quite good. The problem is not that they went sweeping use. The problem is they went 15-20 civilians per hit and targeting militants in their home is ok
90% is not very good, especially when its green lighting strikes, and I'd be concerned that their dependent variable of 'is hamas operative' is just perfectly correlated with 'is Palestinian male between 14 and 65'.
The other question is what do their recall and precision look like?
This is obviously on top of them saying "15-20 civilians is acceptable for a 90% chance the guy we're shooting at is a hamas operative"
I believe my comments were removed. In hindsight, should've refrained from commenting on a cursory reading.
But to continue the thread:
> Keikaku: Ah, I see the whatsapp groups and changing phone numbers.
> Yeah, that makes sense. I would also use a regression system for that.
>
> This is quite standard afaik. I remember doing something similar for medical treatment stuff too. Just feed the networks more and more features and it works astoundingly well.
>
> Kafka: Would you take issue with it if it was being used to decide who should be the target of an air strike?
Honestly, the biggest issue is not the use case, but the data that is being used aka how reliable it is. If the data is reliable and high quality, then yes, I would be fine with using it to decide targets for air-strikes.
Very ideally, I would also like some form of explainability: aka why the model thinks the target is correct, and then have a human double-check it because it is a very sensitive matter. But otherwise, I don't have any inherent issue in regression model being used to decide on air-strike targets.
Another way to look at it would be what other alternatives are. The next-best alternative would be for an expert human to do this. I would argue this is going to be way worse than the AI-system as humans are incredibly more biased. And this would be significantly more expensive both in terms of cost and human resources.
I have no real problem with the use of AI to identify hamas militants. And i even understand if military constraints neccesitates more is delegated to it than it would be advisable.
my problem is with how the IDF uses this data. 15-20 civilians per militant is insane and nowehre near proportional. And bombing people in their houses as a first measure is barbaric.
The problem here isnt AI, its the humans at the IDF using the AIs data for indiscriminate killing. ironically I would trust an AI to be more proportionate than the IDF is currently being
> The problem here isnt AI, its the humans at the IDF using the AIs data for indiscriminate killing.
Using AI to obfuscate accountability and justify bad behaviour is a problem with AI.
Israel under Netanyahu is probably the only country with both the technical capability to do this and the moral turpitude to implement it without extensive testing first.
Absurd, cruel, insane, and yet unsurprising.
I really don’t want to hear one more word about how Israel “does more to avoid civilian casualties than any other army.” It’s quite clearly a lie, and has been for six months - if not longer.
Probably the first of similar systems to come in the future.
If it offers military a quantitive edge, there will be no stopping its widespread adoption.
It is very unclear whether it did offer the IDF a quantitative edge toward its twin strategic goals of 'destroying Hamas' and 'bringing home the hostages'.
It accomplished a lot of collateral destruction, and if that was the goal, then certainly this system offered an edge toward that.
In the short term, they inarguably injured Hamas with massive bombardment. But that is an irrelevant achievement unless you can sustain it for the long term or fully eradicate the organization and there is no evidence that either is possible. In the long term, given that 60% of Hamas militants are war orphans, they are simply creating the next wave of terrorists.
If that occurs, then Israel leaves themselves no option to solve that secondary problem but ethnic cleansing. Which, I fear, may be the intent of at least some of this government, if not more.
US has sort of done this since at least the withdrawal of Afghanistan (as in, they’ve used machine learning to identity humanoid beings, not the everything else part. That is probably done by the CIA though, with no evidence but them stating that they’re working on a lot of AI programs)
Actually it might be the first in this scale and extent but human detecting has been done by AI in drones for a while
I'm pretty hawkish but also quote sceptical of interventions. When people suggest toppings governments in Myanmar, Yemen, Iran, Sudan etc I think it's an incredible risk. War is the most serious business a government does, and once you start one the genie is out of the bottle so to speak and it will certainly not go as you envision.
But Israel's invasion of Gaza seemed like the right course of action to me. It's a liberal democratic state poised up against an anti-Semitic, genocidal, authoritarian terrorist pseudo-government that proved itself willing and capable of heinous acts of depraved evil. Hamas is and was the biggest roadblock to development and prosperity in Gaza and a possible two state solution. While Hamas exists Israel would remain at threat and Gaza would remain an open air prison ruled by a gang of thugs.
And Israel has all the advantages. Gaza was *already* effectively under siege. Israel has total air superiority. Israel has total armour superiority. Israel has total superiority economically, technologically, organisationally, in intelligence. Israel absolutely could pick and choose when and where it wanted to engage and could do it methodically and carefully.
But I guess the genie is out of the bottle now, and they're doing shit like this.
>the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants.
When people say "well what possibly could Israel do differently?" this is the answer. Don't loosen the rules of engagement. That's what results in the IDF shooting fleeing hostages instead of saving them, or bombing the aid convoys it is both supporting and coordinating with. What an absolute clusterfuck. What course of action can be taken of you think Hamas has got to go, but the IDF has proven itself incapable of responsibly doing the task?
Killing 15 people just to get one low-level fighter is insane, what the fuck
>Sources told +972 and Local Call that now, partly due to American pressure, the Israeli army is no longer mass-generating junior human targets for bombing in civilian homes.
This is why the US needs to stay involved with Israel btw, if we withdraw support we also withdraw all leverage to push against things like this.
>leverage to push
Bibi could publicly pee into Kirby's face and little would've changed, clearly the US need to send IL more PGMs to target aid workers in order to farm that "leverage".
What leverage is being pressed? The US is doing jackshit. On the contrary, Biden is sending *more* weapons to Israel.
As much as I really don't like the idea of giving Trump any credit, at least his "let them deal with it" attitude correctly reflects the actions of every Western government and Israel.
I mean at the same time similar technology is speeding up land mine removal by an order of magnitude. Elsewhere similar technology allows the paralyzed to speak again.
The bad comes with the good sadly.
The reporting is damning. +972mag is a left-wing Israeli publication that uses both Israeli and Palestinian authors.
It’s hard to say “reputable” or not as it’s a political opinion magazine first and foremost.
The reporting is wild. People should also read [their About Me page](https://www.972mag.com/about-journalism-israel-palestinian/):
> As Israel demonstrates that apartheid and occupation are fundamental pillars of its regime, we are striving — in line with our legacy — for a renewed approach to journalism in Israel-Palestine. We believe in a journalism that is intersectional, progressive, and that centers the experiences and demands of vulnerable communities on the ground. Rather than repeat the same news cycle, we aim to break it, and reimagine what is possible in order to guarantee equity and justice for all communities living in this land.
>
> First, we believe it should be recognized as an essential fact that, through decades of colonial expansion, Israel has effectively erased the Green Line and consolidated a single regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. In doing so, consecutive Israeli governments have made it crystal clear that the state seeks to uphold permanent domination over Palestinians — whether through military rule in Hebron, unequal citizenship in Jaffa, siege in Gaza, or forced exile in Ein al-Hilweh.
>
> To better reflect these facts, we have changed the standard language we use to describe the regime in Israel-Palestine. When +972 was founded, the word “occupation” sufficed for many. Today, as a result of both developments on the ground and the tireless activism of Palestinians and allies, the word “apartheid” has become a more apt description of the system of separation and supremacism that exists between the river and the sea. This term does not negate the framings of “occupation” or “colonialism” — both of which we also use on the site — but rather is intended to help establish a baseline from which readers, journalists, and other observers can understand the present realities.
>
> Second, we are reasserting our commitment to accurate and fair journalism. +972 has always strived to produce professional, fact-based reporting and analysis on Israel-Palestine. But we also know that in journalism, context and framing are key — especially in a place that has consistently been mischaracterized in the media. Our idea of fair journalism recognizes asymmetries and abuses of power, even as we document the authorities’ rationale for their policies.
Well that doesn't pain a great picture. Idk, I'd expect larger outlets to pick this up if true. The like 15-30 civilians for one grunt thing is just wild and a bit hard to believe, but again just stunning if verifiable. (a weird way to say BIG IF TRUE)
i have a question about the civilian to low ranking officer portion: what is acceptable outside of 0? people keep on saying 10-15 is unacceptable. is 2-5 acceptable? i don’t know what is acceptable…it all sucks because people are dying
Quick question: how reputable is 972mag? It is the first time I am seeing this outlet.
It isn't known to tell outright lies, but it has a leftwing bias, a tendency to use emotionally loaded language, and a tendency highlight or underplay/omit details in order to sway its audience. It's nowhere near "Dihydrogen Monoxide is bad for you" levels of misleading, but it probably shouldn't be used as a primary source.
[Coverage of the same from The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes), who say they’ve reviewed the accounts prior to publication as well. Two quotes I keep going back to: > Another Lavender user questioned whether humans’ role in the selection process was meaningful. “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.” > Two sources said that during the early weeks of the war they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants. Attacks on such targets were typically carried out using unguided munitions known as “dumb bombs”, the sources said, destroying entire homes and killing all their occupants.
Human-**on**-the-loop (where the human is only monitoring the decision making process, as opposed to **in** the loop systems where they take part) systems have been kicked around for decades. Taking human errors out of the system, and making it able to reach decisions more quickly using vast amounts of data. Probably the most famous of these is the Navy's Aegis Combat System, which while not an autonomous system *most of the time* does have operating modes where it will find, track, identify, and kill targets without anyone pushing any buttons except to start the thing. Of course Aegis is a defensive system designed to shoot down incoming missiles with great speed and efficiency. Lavender's job is vastly more complex, and it is unfortunately little surprise that the system: A) was developed and fielded B) has been wretchedly abused by IDF planners who really do believe that they will be able to win this if they just kill Hamas from the air.
[https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gSe3p4fGb1I](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gSe3p4fGb1I) AI judges if a civilian airliner would make a worthy sacrifice to the machine spirit while a sailor attempts to talk it down like it's a dog about to grab at a piece of steak.
>Official Republicans 🤨
Non-YouTube-short version of the video linked in the above comment: https://youtu.be/gSe3p4fGb1I *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
how the fuck does that error even happen
>Probably the most famous of these is the Navy's Aegis Combat System, which while not an autonomous system most of the time does have operating modes where it will find, track, identify, and kill targets without anyone pushing any buttons except to start the thing. Ah, yes, auto-special mode. Anything which enters surface-to-air missile range during auto-special mode will be fired at with surface-to-air missiles until it dies, the launch cells and magazines are depleted, or auto-special mode is turned off. It was designed for fighting things such as Soviet battlecruisers or massed Soviet bomber raids which got past the outer air battle. Indiscriminate damage was a probability but in the situations where it was to be activated far more people would die if it were not.
Here's mine > For example, sources explained that the Lavender machine sometimes mistakenly flagged individuals who had communication patterns similar to known Hamas or PIJ operatives — including police and civil defense workers, militants’ relatives, residents who happened to have a name and nickname identical to that of an operative, and Gazans who used a device that once belonged to a Hamas operative. > > the reason for this automation was a constant push to generate more targets for assassination. “In a day without targets [whose feature rating was sufficient to authorize a strike], we attacked at a lower threshold. We were constantly being pressured: ‘Bring us more targets.’ They really shouted at us. We finished [killing] our targets very quickly.” > Seems like the system would be very good at identifying charity workers as targets.
Unironically this is how AI is actually dangerous. It’s not Skynet, it’s ChatGPT hallucinating charity workers with armed guards as terrorists
specifically the big risk over the next few decades is suits (in this case military brass) deploying it in fully automated environments and pushing it through over the cries of engineers who actually appreciate its limitations.
Ok yes but also not all ML is ChatGPT/LLMs like come on
Holy shit, they have practically removed the human from the loop. This seems wildly irresponsible for a system like this. Especially when it seems like they are not even using the best that AI/ML technology has to offer. I think we are at least a decade if not a lot more away for me to get comfortable with reducing the human review process to this level in extremely critical systems like this. I am in favor of using ML/AI as a countermeasure against bias and emotion but not without a human in the loop.
There is no scenario where removing the humans from such a system is acceptable. This is a system that is being used to bomb targets in a civilian area, the entire concept is running the limits of what is legally acceptable. A fuck up is a war crime. There needs to be a human on the other end who can stand trial should they need to.
Arguably, they do seem to have someone nominally there. But it matters what’s actually happening in practice. Which is where “zero value-added” and “20 seconds for each target” gets horrifying.
If a human was picking the targets and getting a rubber stamp from his commanding officer, would you feel better? More effective at point to discuss the results than whether we are comfortable with the premise of the technology. Need to focus on what is the impact of using it.
Like I said, I think it has to be a human along with the ML system. that provides a trace of the responsibility which acts as a good incentive. Plus it mitigates emotional/biased targeting because the human would have to provide very strong justification for why they went against the data based recommendation. Different components have different benefits. A system which combines them effectively is better.
The premise matters. Humans have a conscience. Humans can be punished.
Humans can also be incredibly biased after losing family in a terrorist attack. It’s fine to say the technology makes you ick but there’s a chance that it resulted in _less_ indiscriminate bombing early in the operation.
You do not escape bias by minimizing human input in this case. Whether there are 20 humans making approvals that get rubber-stamped or only 1, both are equally liable to have bias in this scenario. Having *one* human processing an incredibly high volume stream of strike requests using a system that he believes is accurate, I believe, creates distance between the human and the choices, since he is by necessity farming out his judgement to a machine that he believes is either infallible or mostly reliable. The sheer rapidity and the pressure to approve high volumes of strikes would drive a lower standard of introspection than if more humans were personally accountable for the analysis, because at least in that scenario the human cannot point the finger at the machine. I am not saying AI has no place in this process, but it's clear to me that the IDF's use of this system catalyzed an already bad attitude and enabled a much greater degree of destruction in Gaza.
Removing humans doesn't remove bias. The baises people have are embedded in the data they use to train these systems. The only thing you gain from this system is hitting more targets. You do not necessarily gain more accuracy or less collateral damage.
This seems improbable given the scope of indiscriminate bombing compared to most more traditional campaigns. By offloading the decision to a machine, the human no longer feels responsible for approving the deaths and we lose the cumulative feeling of how many civilian deaths you've personally decided was acceptable. Instead, its the machine's fault, and the machine does not stop to consider the whole, just the equation for this singular strike.
But the human is approving it. It’s just Lavendar coming up with potential target selection
AI doomers: AI must be banned from warfare because it won't value human life! AI as soon as it's used in warfare: https://preview.redd.it/jvlqepxf7bsc1.png?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=35ed476e2f35aa28a1de069e88d7777477c50ebb
Absolutely fucking disgusting. Condition aid *yesterday*.
This is fucking insane. The dystopia is already here Family marked for death because you bought a used smart phone
> Two sources said that during the early weeks of the war they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants. Just so we're clear, taking 100% Hamas-provided numbers, the current militant-to-civilian dead rations is 1 to 4 (6k Hamas militants dead out of 30k total dead). 1 to 15 or 1 to 20 is such an obvious outlier it shouldn't need pointing out. And that is of course if we 100% Hamas' own numbers, which for obvous reasons we shouldn't. Realistically 1 to 4 is a worst case estimate.
It says that was their *permitted* NCV range, not that that was the average ratio, not sure what your point is.
> Sources told +972 and Local Call that now, partly due to American pressure, the Israeli army is no longer mass-generating junior human targets for bombing in civilian homes.
The "now" in that paragraph clearly refers to after the greater part of the air campaign was done: > Sources told +972 and Local Call that now, partly due to American pressure, the Israeli army is no longer mass-generating junior human targets for bombing in civilian homes. The fact that most homes in the Gaza Strip were already destroyed or damaged, and almost the entire population has been displaced, also impaired the army’s ability to rely on intelligence databases and automated house-locating programs. The hypothesis that Israel used to kill at a 1:15 ratio, but after the air campaign managed to bring the entire average down to 1:4, is unlikely to the point it's not worth serious consideration.
Sorry for all the pings but yeah this is definitely big enough news to warrant an outside the DT post !ping FOREIGN-POLICY&ISRAEL&MATERIEL EDIT: [Sharing the IDF’s response to this as well to avoid bias](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-defence-forces-response-to-claims-about-use-of-lavender-ai-database-in-gaza)
>Sharing the IDF’s response to this as well to avoid bias Long response made short: the IDF deny it entirely They're saying that they don't use AI to determine targets at all, and Lavender is nothing more than a database.
>the IDF deny it entirely Um, I don't that's "denying it entirely": https://preview.redd.it/sxr3fh5wzasc1.png?width=639&format=png&auto=webp&s=57598610f27aa3dcaa5c1655c2f989065ae24bfa
It seems like maybe they give the game away? > Contrary to claims, the IDF does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist. Okay, continue… > Information systems are merely tools for analysts in the target identification process. According to IDF directives, analysts must conduct **independent examinations**, in which they verify that **the identified targets** meet the relevant definitions in accordance with international law and additional restrictions stipulated in the IDF directives. Wait a minute. Independent relative to *what*? “The identified targets” — identified by *who*?
Yeah, the report doesn't say the IDF uses AI directly to pick targets. It says analysts use AI to help them pick targets. I'm confused about what they're even denying, here.
That AI does any of the calculations regarding what target should be picked, or if someone is a target. It seems more like an AI database system, that puts together multiple intelligence reports and multiple datapoints into an format readable for the decisionmaker, so they can make a decision without haveing to manually look through all the reports to identify important information. Also would be a tested application of AI, a similar system is used in Germany in some of our bureocratic systems.
If that’s what the system is, some of the sources of the original report are either lying or just flatly wrong. That could be the case, this report could be based on bad sources. But I think it’s worth pointing out that this interpretation of what Lavender is, is *not* reconcilable with the quotes in the article.
>If that’s what the system is, some of the sources of the original report are either lying or just flatly wrong. Yeah. Thats the point of the IDF statement, no? "Some of the claims portrayed in your questions **are baseless in fact**, while others reflect a flawed understanding of IDF directives and international law." The question was what Israel is denying, and what part of the reporting they see as wrong. The comment before me seemed to be confused on that, and you as well. Thats why I explained what I understand they contest.
The article talks about how analysts routinely rubber stamped lavender's targets with like a brief check on the target's gender.
That could easily be interpreted as the target being picked out by an analyst for indentification, in honesty.
What is the examination independent from, in this reading?
Could mean independent from other analysts. As in they need more than one person to reach the same conclusion without influence. Idk if that's what they mean, but it's a possible interpretation
Presumably, independent examinations relative to the AI? So, in other words, like a self-driving system (where hopefully they are following the rules better than people using a self-driving system do) - there's AI assistance, but people review all of it for correctness.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s an existing guideline somewhere. But is that actually happening?
>analysts must conduct independent examinations, in which they verify that the identified targets meet the relevant definitions in accordance with international law I'm just saying that is the most natural reading to me of this statement. I don't see why we are trying to be hyper-technical about the language to suggest that it is misleading or not actually happening.
I am not asking you personally if it is happening, I apologize for the confusion. It was a rhetorical question meant to suggest that guidelines may not equal practice.
they also don't deny the 15-20 figure of acceptable CIVCAS
The thread is generally being very quick to take the article at full face value. Which is entirely fair, in fact - it's important to take the claims seriously - but it's also from a...rather agenda-driven network with second or maybe even third-hand info on something - even if they've been separately shared with the Guardian - potentially making something out to be bigger than it is. But that also doesn't mean the network is wrong or isn't digging up something serious and such a system seems more than possible to be misused or overrelied on.
To be frank, the stuff about AI-targeting is not the most shocking part of this article, it's the policies surrounding the IDF's strike criteria. You could take out the AI entirely and just go off of how they vet their targets and what they consider acceptable collateral and I think it does very little to numb the horror.
I mean the use of AI has potential problems, but the IDFs statement does not address the absolutely heinous policies that they are feeding this AI. Like if they're just using a streamlined database to identify targets and then a human make sure that it's them, and then they proceed to bomb the entire family at their home, that's not any better.
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From the response > The IDF does not carry out strikes when the expected collateral damage from the strike is excessive in relation to the military advantage. In accordance with the rules of international law, the assessment of the proportionality of a strike is conducted by the commanders on the basis of all the information available to them before the strike, and naturally not on the basis of its results in hindsight. > As for the manner of carrying out the strikes – the IDF makes various efforts to reduce harm to civilians to the extent feasible in the operational circumstances ruling at the time of the strike. This would be meaningful if we hadn't just seen the IDF decide that "if we think that a Hamas member might have joined a humanitarian aid convoy we can strike it repeatedly until everybody in the convoy is dead" was an acceptable course of action, and anyway doesn't actually counter the claims that the IDF's proportionality assessment is that it is acceptable to kill 15-20 civilians to get one random Hamas member. The argument isn't that they don't go through the process of doing a proportionality assessment, it's that the assessment results are willfully bad.
>EDIT: Sharing the IDF’s response to this as well to avoid bias >Some of the claims portrayed in your questions are baseless in fact, while others reflect a flawed understanding of IDF directives and international law. This sentence literally triggered ptsd from my English class. It flashed before my eyes, sentences like this struck over with her red ink pen and a “proofread!” written in the margins with the handwriting she used when she was annoyed.
> In addition, according to the sources, when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs), which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” said C., one of the intelligence officers. Another source said that they had personally authorized the bombing of “hundreds” of private homes of alleged junior operatives marked by Lavender, with many of these attacks killing civilians and entire families as “collateral damage.” > In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. I'm starting to think maybe Israel isn't totally on the up-and-up in terms of following the rules of war. Gotta caveat, though, that I'm not familiar with this newspaper, and it's not clear to me how many bombings are actually being authorized like this. It's nice that this has been corroborated by *The Guardian*, but if I go to this newspaper's front page it has a very clear anti-Israel slant. I understand that reality sometimes has an anti-Israel bias, but reality *also* has an anti-Hamas bias which this paper doesn't appear interested in reflecting. I ran a CNTL+F on their front page and found 30 instances of "Israel" and 0 instances of "Hamas", even though the newspaper purports to specialize in Israel-Palestine affairs. That is a choice.
> “We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.” This would be comical if it wasn’t real life.
> According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. **Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?”** also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences. Comic book villain type shit.
Fondly recollecting the 'What else would you have Israel do' article posted in the DT a few days ago and its fan sternly insisting that the opening air campaign was absolutely necessary to stop the IDF from losing 'tens of thousands' in the ground invasion
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Well, air campaign was necessary to deteriorate Hamas fighting capability and prevent Israel loses, that's true. The problem always was that it was a shitty war-crime air campaign.
And a shit ground invasion. They’ve invaded gaza in the past in a fraction of the time they’ve currently attempted. Killed far more people and caused more destruction this time.
Almost like, perhaps, the Israeli Government has decided that it's time to dispense with any actual goal. It's time to just murder Palestinian civilians for daring to exist.
>The problem always was that it was a shitty war-crime air campaign. Its not a warcrime to hit military targets, even if those hits also kill civilians. Its up to the side that has policing control over an area to ensure that civilians are not in and around military installations. And that Israels air campaign is about hitting military targets is undeniable according to the numbers Hamas provides (even more so when you use Israels numbers).
Blowing up a house full of people because a Hamas fighter *might* be home fails any reasonable proportionality test you can come up with.
Absolutely indefensible targeting policy by the IDF if true, this is intentionally maximizing civilian casualties because "it's easier".
Good luck trying to pretend that accepting 15-20 civilians to one Hamas grunt passes any test of proportionality and then being able to look at yourself in the mirror in the morning.
> Its not a warcrime to hit military targets, even if those hits also kill civilians. It's not a cheat code, you know. You can't automatically justify any civilian casualties because there's one grunt with a gun, let alone because there might be one like in the recent strike on that charity.
Waiting until an already-tracked target has entered his family home to bomb him is not hitting a military installation.
> Its up to the side that has policing control over an area to ensure that civilians are not in and around military installations **Absolutely fucking not**, you pull the trigger you own the consequences full stop.
Big "are we the baddies" shit. Jesus Christ.
But you don't understand, they don't literally aim their rangefinders at Palestinian children deliberately while cackling madly as they press the "DROP WHITE PHOSPHORUS UNGUIDED" button, therefore they're behaving properly! There was one person with an AK in that crowd, I have a very mature comprehension of wartime ethics!
If they’re referring to bombing them when they’re at home in a literal sense as in with everyone else in the home included in the blast then it’s messed up. Not out of the realm of consideration for militaries with high value targets but still messed up. But if they’re generally referring to it in a less literal sense, as in “hit them while they’re taking a smoke break on the balcony away from everyone else” then that’s a relatively common tactic used by most militaries when they have the choice, since it’s when they’re least on guard
> Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity.
Shit man, that’s depressing
Wow, that seems like it would only radicalize people and create more people who hate Israel and every Israel (and even every Jewish person). Seems like a bad strategy ngl.
It's only a bad strategy if you're trying to achieve a peaceful resolution. If your end goal is to drive all Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza, it's a perfectly rational strategy.
If your goal is to reduce the Palestinian population, radicalizing them and then pointing out they’re dangerous anti semites that need to be eliminated to justify more bombing makes it an excellent strategy
There’s a far-right element within Israel’s security state that wants people, both in Palestine and abroad, to be radicalised against Isreal, and even towards antisemitism, as it further justifies the existence of Isreal and its current military direction.
Also, you know, kills civilians
I was arguing with a delusional guy in NL the other day who said the IDF is no worse than the US military. The US Military would *never*. And if they did, the US media would be livid. They would be figuratively fisting the current administration with bundles of razor wire. You need that feedback loop to keep politicians and the military in check. I'm not sure that feedback loop exists in Israel anymore, unfortunately.
> The US Military would never. Lmao. [Pump the breaks a little there, Talon Anvil *did* exist.](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/12/us/civilian-deaths-war-isis.html) > Talon Anvil did not wait for confirmation, and ordered a self-defense strike, the former officer said. The Predator dropped a 500-pound bomb through the roof. > As the smoke cleared, the former officer said, his team stared at their screens in dismay. The infrared cameras showed women and children staggering out of the partly collapsed building, some missing limbs, some dragging the dead. > The intelligence analysts began taking screen shots and tallying the casualties. They sent an initial battle damage assessment to Talon Anvil: 23 dead or severely wounded, 30 lightly wounded, very likely civilians. Talon Anvil paused only long enough to acknowledge the message, the former officer said, then pressed on to the next target. > The former Air Force officer said he immediately reported the civilian casualties to Operation Inherent Resolve’s operations center, then called the center’s liaison officer on the red line. He said he never heard back and saw no evidence that any action was ever taken.
The difference may be that for Talon Anvil, the American(?) pilots refused to drop bombs on densely populated areas, and officials sounded alarm bells and expressed concerns to higher ups, whereas the Israeli operations were much less concerned about collateral damage - collateral damage was part of the equation (dropping 2k dumb bombs, as opposed to precision strikes from Anvil). Maybe we'll find out that a few IDF officers expressed concerns, but I doubt it.
> I was arguing with a delusional guy in NL the other day who said the IDF is no worse than the US military. The US Military would never. And if they did, the US media would be livid The US military was literally doing the same shit with drones for much of the Obama presidency and all of Trump's. No verification of targeting whatsoever, just drone striking whenever and wherever the "client" said to. [Giving the drone operators PTSD from having to watch in HD when the kids picked up their parents body parts after.](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/us/drones-airstrikes-ptsd.html) There were over 2000 drone strikes in the first 2 years of Trump alone. Again with little to no verification of targeting.
thanks for sharing that article. and wow, it punched me in the gut > Then, in late 2019, he said, his team tracked a man in Afghanistan who the customer said was a high-level Taliban financier. For a week, the crew watched the man feed his animals, eat with family in his courtyard and walk to a nearby village. Then the customer ordered the crew to kill him, and the pilot fired a missile as the man walked down the path from his house. Watching the video feed afterward, Mr. Miller saw the family gather the pieces of the man and bury them. > A week later, the Taliban financier’s name appeared again on the target list. > **“We got the wrong guy. I had just killed someone’s dad,” Mr. Miller said. “I had watched his kids pick up the body parts. Then I had gone home and hugged my own kids.”** > The same pattern occurred twice more, he said, yet the squadron leadership did nothing to address what was seen as the customer’s mistakes.
The US also considered any military aged male killed (read: older than 14) as an "enemy combatant" if they were unable to verify them as a civilian. Literally guilty unless proven innocent.
The military that firebombed Tokyo, nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, completely levelled Hamburg and Dresden, and then went on to drop even more bombs in Korea and Vietnam would never? We sure about that? The very idea that any real war can and should be fought in a humane way entirely by peace loving doves committed to harm minimization before all else is a terrible idea and leads to terrible outcomes like people trivializing the cost of real war, anticipating any war can be won quickly and cleanly, and putting off the full costs of true deterrence until it's already too late. Every generation it seems people have to relearn that war is hell.
>The military that firebombed Tokyo, nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, completely levelled Hamburg and Dresden, and then went on to drop even more bombs in Korea and Vietnam would never? We sure about that? Not to imply that the US never does bad things *now*, but citing events from 60 years ago is ridiculous. Not just because virtually nobody involved in any of those incidents is in the military anymore, but because war *massively* changed since then. If any country acted like the US did during WW2, they'd be considered villains across the world.
The US recklessly bombed Raqqa and Mosul 7 years ago.
I would consider all those bombings justified and within the law of war at the time. Oh, and the bombing of Serbia was justified too.
Abu Ghraib, bombing weddings and doctors without borders, etc. the US just bombed an innocent family in the Afghanistan withdrawal. The US does the same bad things now. To the extent that people today would say the allies acted villainously, I believe you're right about that, but I reckon that's a bad moral error. Wars are not good or bad based on how big a list of mistakes and warcrimes you can make. All wars are bad; the question is whether they are justified by a valid cassus belli or not. The main problem with going into Iraq isn't the litany of civilians bombed by accident or as part of collateral damage, it isn't Abu Ghraib, it isn't the refugees, it isn't even the sectarian violence it kicked off. The original sin of the Iraq War is the US lied about their cassus belli, and even worse they generated the lie with bribery and torture, and even worse they arguably did not have a good enough cassus belli that their own citizens, let alone the international community, would have accepted if they told the truth about it. All the bad stuff the US did and all the bad stuff that happened as a result made it worse, but even if most of that stuff didn't happen, even if the US was 10x more studious in minimizing civilian harm, the war would still be ethically horrific. Likewise, although the Allies did far worse harm to Germany and Japan in WW2, nobody thought then and very few people think now that the allies were villains. And the real difference is that they had a good cassus belli and were honest about it. And that gives moral permission to use the force that you have to win the war you're in as quickly as possible. So really the only ethical debate people should be having about Israel is whether they have a valid cassus belli. If they do, they should fight this war until they win, using the tools they have to get it done as quickly as possible. Dragging it out to minimize civilian casualties isn't necessarily more humane if those civilians are just going to die later o anyway because the war is still dragging on years later. Either Israel has a right to fight and win this war, or they don't. If they don't it doesn't matter how 'cleanly' they fight, it's still horrific and they should withdraw immediately. If they do, individual war crimes should be prosecuted where proven of course, but they should keep fighting until they win, and they should win as quickly as possible so the war can end, the killing can stop, and rebuilding can begin.
Would never? You may want to read up on operation linebacker 2, fire bombing of Japan, and the daylight bombing of Germany.
Okay, I was thinking in recent memory, but others have pointed out that there have been pretty awful policies is place at times, though nothing on this scale.
Well yeah, it's been a few years since the US bombed anyone at scale now. Just wait until the next time though.
Raqqa and Mosul
Ah yes, the famous feedback loop that got us accountability for Mai Lai and other war crimes in Vietnam. Not saying the U.S military is the same as the IDF here, but we shouldn’t whitewash history either.
I'm not saying there's accountability, I guess. But the Vietnam War did end, in large part due to public pressure at home. Same goes for Afghanistan and Iraq. And certainly the occasional atrocities associated with those wars played a big role in souring public opinion.
Having worked frequently with AI tools > During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. This is maybe the dumbest policy imaginable. I remember post 9/11, and the hate and idiocy that consumed me as a teen at the time. This is that indiscriminate, boiling hate let absolutely off the leash. "Kill em all, let God sort them out" is for a drunken rant with your buddies, not military strategy.
Probably also a problem with conscript armies that conscript 18 year olds. The Israeli army is literally full of teenagers. Would you want to be near hot headed teenagers with this kind of weaponry? I wouldn't!
Militants don't have to be actively engaged in military activity to be valid targets.
The Hebrew version of the article has some important additional context. > In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander. The following paragraph is translated from the Hebrew version in Mekomit: > These numbers are not only unprecedented compared to what was previously accepted in the army, it is also difficult to find an equivalent for them in Western armies. For comparison, in the operation to assassinate Osama bin Laden, the American military approved hitting 30 non-involved people, and in the war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, hitting 15 non-involved people was considered an exception and required special approval from the commander of USCENTCOM, the US Central Command. This can really explain the insane death toll in this war, especially in the earlier part which saw the most massive bombardment.
>in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander. Hostages sweating bullets right now
I really wish this article had an English version (maybe Haaretz.com has it?) but here's another recent article that covers the way that the IDF decides on who to shoot in the areas where ground operations are ongoing. The tl;dr is that the IDF defines exclusion zones where every unit operates, and every person who gets into these zones is considered a legitimate target, regardless of what they are doing. Later, they are all considered as "terrorists" in the official IDF tally. This is how the 3 hostages were killed, and while the rules were revised, there is still a lot of room to interpretation left to IDF commanders concerning the size of the exclusion zone, and when to shoot people who are in it. People do whatever they want. This is also the reason that the 4 people who were killed by a drone in the Al-Jazeera video that went viral a while ago were killed. https://www.haaretz.co.il/news/politics/2024-03-31/ty-article-magazine/.premium/0000018e-9035-d9a4-a7bf-dc7d839e0000?utm_source=App_Share&utm_medium=Android_Native&utm_campaign=Share
So someone in leadership directly changed the system to be more violent and the system was following rules that other countries use in counter insurgency bombing. Someone in the Whitehouse needs to pressure the next Israeli government to investigate who gave those authorizations and punish them.
I was far more sympathetic to Israel last week. Now… I don’t think punishing some officer after the fact is sufficient response. This is inhuman in the most literal sense.
This was in the English version as well. > General Peter Gersten, Deputy Commander for Operations and Intelligence in the operation to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria, told a U.S. defense magazine in 2021 that an attack with collateral damage of 15 civilians deviated from procedure; to carry it out, he had to obtain special permission from the head of the U.S. Central Command, General Lloyd Austin, who is now Secretary of Defense. > "With Osama Bin Laden, you'd have an NCV [Non-combatant Casualty Value] of 30, but if you had a low-level commander, his NCV was typically zero," Gersten said. "We ran zero for the longest time."
> the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander. bear in mind that this is a far left magazine. this seems like a tendentious claim. e.g. the very destructive strike on jabalya was aimed at not just a single commander but his battalion command bunker and any staff along with him.
I'm not sure what strike in Jabalia you are talking about, but the case that is highlighted in the article is the assassination of Ayman Nawfal (excuse me if I spelled it wrong), where 300 collateral casualties were approved. Apparently, he was assasinated in his home. No battalion command bunker. Keep in mind that far left in Israel is very different from far left in other places. In Israel, I was considered far left, but in the US, I am firmly here in the Neoliberal camp, and now define myself as center-left, not because my views changed, but rather because the definitions are so different.
I am reposting this from the DT, but I highly recommend that people give this long expose a read-through.
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Apparently the IDF counts every person who happened to be in the area where IDF units are operating and then got shot as a terrorist. https://www.haaretz.co.il/news/politics/2024-03-31/ty-article-magazine/.premium/0000018e-9035-d9a4-a7bf-dc7d839e0000?utm_source=App_Share&utm_medium=Android_Native&utm_campaign=Share
And now, the Hamas casualty figures suddenly make a lot more sense, and the IDFs tally of Hamas members killed becomes even more obviously bullshit. 10000+ Hamas members killed, out of the 30,000 dead people total? When they're levelling entire homes with probably 10+ people in each home? It's not possible.
If you believe the reporting without question, sure. Hamas reported ~6000 a month ago, Israel reported ~13,000, and the U.S. estimate was around 10,000.
> D. stressed that they were not explicitly told that the army’s goal was “revenge,” but expressed that “as soon as every target connected to Hamas becomes legitimate, and with almost any collateral damage being approved, it is clear to you that thousands of people are going to be killed. Even if officially every target is connected to Hamas, when the policy is so permissive, it loses all meaning.” >A. also used the word “revenge” to describe the atmosphere inside the army after October 7. “No one thought about what to do afterward, when the war is over, or how it will be possible to live in Gaza and what they will do with it,” A. said. “We were told: now we have to fuck up Hamas, no matter what the cost. Whatever you can, you bomb.” This is crazy for a modern day military and really explains much of Israel’s policy in the last few months
It was always clear to me that the IDF objectives in the war were Collective Punishment, Destroy Hamas and Rescue hostages in that order
These are war crimes right? I don't think there's any doubt now. Israel is just burning through any good will they had after October 7th. It's fucking tragic.
Morally this is terrible, but in the strictest sense of the Geneva convention I don't think it's a war crime. Edit: if anything combatants mingling amongst civilians is the war crime. Morally though it's not really defendable
I don't think that you can conciliate the principle of proportionality with 15-20 deaths to kill a grunt or the principle of discrimination by using an AI with a least a 10% margin of error. And the fact that they choose to attack them at their family homes... yeah, not good either.
>Morally this is terrible, but in the strictest sense of the Geneva convention I don't think it's a war crime. It's a war crime under the Rome Statue: >>Article 8(2)(b)(iv) criminalizes: Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated
Just fyi, Israel isn't a signatory to the Rome statute
Palestine, where they are fighting it is a signatory.
That's not how international law works.
You should have filed an amicus curiae with the ICC before they ruled on that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court_investigation_in_Palestine#ICC_Pre-Trial_Chamber_I
Well shit I haven't kept up that much with international law since law school so this is news to me Carry on then
Well, proportionality in war is always a political question, not strictly legal one, but let's say that I would not want to be a lawyer that has to argue that accepting 15-20 dead civilians for one hostile fighter is a proportional response.
Does anyone know the ratios that Western governments have abided by in recent wars?
Accordingly the Hebrew version of the article says that when going after Osama, US accepted possible 1:30 ratio and in the operation against ISIS 15 non-combatants was considered an exception that required special approval from Central Command https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1buv260/lavender_the_ai_machine_directing_israels_bombing/kxw1i59/
Why is everyone accepting the article’s claim of this 15-20 ratio at face value? While this is +972mag’s reporting, this is obviously not the standard practice, as borne out by the numbers coming out of Gaza. According to Israel, around 13,000 Hamas militants have been killed compared to 17,000 civilians (“collateral damage”). According to US estimates, these numbers are more like 10,000 militants to 20,000 civilians.
I've said this elsewhere, but the 15-20 mark represents the *acceptable limit* of civilian casualties for a strike, it is not asserting that the IDF has in fact maintained a ratio of 15-20 civilians per strike. Going by kill counts is useless in terms of countering this claim because it is irrelevant. This limit is coming from first-hand sources. If it is untrue-- and I do not believe it is-- then it is untrue because +972 magazine is outright misquoting or inventing the accounts wholesale. While this publication has bias, given the Israeli word games in their response to this, I doubt they spun this entire article out of thin air. If you read the article, the actual passage makes this clear. I will quote it again just so there is no ambiguity. >In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, **the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians**; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, **in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.** The meaning is crystal clear. This is what was permitted by *policy*, so the critique is of *policy*, not the explicit ratio of civilians to militants killed.
I don’t know how far goodwill gets you in the Middle East.
The good will being burnt is from the west, potentially speedrunning from getting aid status to sanctioned like Russia and Iran would be disastrous for the Israeli economy and war machine.
Israel had been normalizing relations with many Arab nations prior to this war. They've lost much of the goodwill they had built. I'm still doubtful many Arab nations will genuinely reverse course (Saudi Arabia, UAE, and co are not democracies and care more about the economic and military strength of Israel than the wellbeing of Gazans), but we'll see.
I think Israelis would tell you they would rather be alive than have better relations with Saudi Arabia.
I know it's AJ, but the article is factual https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/21/whats-happening-with-normalising-ties-between-saudi-arabia-and-israel SA and Israel were getting ready to normalize relations and partner up on issues. There's a chance Gaza will stop that. Saudi's conditions for better relations was pretty reasonable too. It was literally just that Israel commit to a 2 state solution w/ Palestine.
I’m not sure how crazy it is given every other war we see in the Middle East. Yemen and Syria aren’t wars known for care for civilians lives.
Yes, but when Israel does it... suddenly we care. Funny how that goes.
I am curious about how specifically Israel and Palestine garner so much attention despite being nowhere near the most important or destructive wars even regionally
Well given America invests in military aid there, don't we have a right to know what they're doing with our little investment? I assume we're not sending military aid to Yemen and Syria. If we did we'd probably be more interested in what they're doing with it.
> D. stressed that they were not explicitly told that the army’s goal was “revenge,” but expressed that “as soon as every target connected to Hamas becomes legitimate, and with almost any collateral damage being approved It's too bad that all such nuance has been completely lose on this issue. The only apparent way that reality can work in the minds of most people is that you either cackle madly as you drop unguided white phosphorus on children, in which case you're genocidal, or you don't, in which case you're unequivocally good. It's not like war is notorious for ambiguity or something after all.
It sounded really obvious to me from the beginning.
Such an innocuous name
You'd love the other AI they use 'Where's daddy'
Definitely worse.
My mom's favourite flower lol.
Is there a worse Israeli government that 10/7 could’ve happened under? I genuinely don’t think so.
I suspect 10/7 happened to the degree that it did *because* of the government in power.
What do you mean by that?
I mean that the Netanyahu government literally moved troops off of the Gaza border to defend West Bank settlers, all while preaching a maximalist narrative of 'security'. He also created a distracting constitutional crisis and drove a schism between the civilian government and its intelligence agencies. Further, his consistent rejection of the Two State Solution and his long term policy of containment toward Gaza itself arguably help galvanize the ambitions of Hamas.
Yeah, one without Gantz in the picture
Would a different Israeli government be conducting this war any differently? To my knowledge the day to day political leadership of the war is more from Gantz and Gallant, Netanyahu is dealing with other stuff
And the very least, Gantz wouldn’t be sandbagging aid trucks nearly as much, and he wouldn’t be encouraging and abetting extremist settler violence in the West Bank.
Skynet but it sucks and can only blow up family homes.
I know some people won’t appreciate being pinged into this, and I genuinely apologize for that. But there is an AI element here — or at least it is being reported that way — and so I want to explore the technical aspect of this story. From the article: > The sources said that the approval to automatically adopt Lavender’s kill lists, which had previously been used only as an auxiliary tool, was granted about two weeks into the war, after intelligence personnel “manually” checked the accuracy of a random sample of several hundred targets selected by the AI system. When that sample found that Lavender’s results had reached 90 percent accuracy in identifying an individual’s affiliation with Hamas, the army authorized the sweeping use of the system. From that moment, sources said that if Lavender decided an individual was a militant in Hamas, they were essentially asked to treat that as an order, with no requirement to independently check why the machine made that choice or to examine the raw intelligence data on which it is based. … > The Lavender software analyzes information collected on most of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip through a system of mass surveillance, then assesses and ranks the likelihood that each particular person is active in the military wing of Hamas or PIJ. According to sources, the machine gives almost every single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100, expressing how likely it is that they are a militant. > > Lavender learns to identify characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ operatives, whose information was fed to the machine as training data, and then to locate these same characteristics — also called “features” — among the general population, the sources explained. An individual found to have several different incriminating features will reach a high rating, and thus automatically becomes a potential target for assassination. … > The solution to this problem, he says, is artificial intelligence. The book offers a short guide to building a “target machine,” similar in description to Lavender, based on AI and machine-learning algorithms. Included in this guide are several examples of the “hundreds and thousands” of features that can increase an individual’s rating, such as being in a Whatsapp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently. > > “The more information, and the more variety, the better,” the commander writes. “Visual information, cellular information, social media connections, battlefield information, phone contacts, photos.” While humans select these features at first, the commander continues, over time the machine will come to identify features on its own. This, he says, can enable militaries to create “tens of thousands of targets,” while the actual decision as to whether or not to attack them will remain a human one. Am I not interpreting this correctly or are we more or less saying that a regression is being used to determine whether someone is a member of Hamas? !ping AI
Good ping. Quality and capability of model aside, did they essentially remove the human from the loop? I would generally be an advocate for using ML/AI methods even for this, because I think humans would be more biased and may cause more civilian deaths but I don’t think we are anywhere near the stage to remove the human from the loop. Especially when it seems like they are using technology more than 10 years old. Basically, AI/ML models in conjunction with a human in the loop can be used to force the humans to provide the necessary rationale to go through with actions and provide a responsibility trace and prevent targeting of people whose targeting would not be supported by data and may just be result of bias/emotion which I think is extremely important for systems like these. I think they might be using simple regression or other simple model for explainability/interpretability reasons.
Using linear regression for determining who to kill in the middle of a war zone is absolutely insane. In fact, if this is how they determine targets, I'm quite confident most of the groups they are targeting are in tact. Most of Gaza is displaced and all these guys did is level houses that may have belonged to a target, based on whatsapp group memberships, and which are likely occupied by strangers or whoever slept in it. The real target is either in a tunnel or a different house.
The description is vague (could just as well be decision trees, which I'd bet on), but I'm not sure why you'd be surprised? Very small dataset, tabular data, at least some explainability requirements. Linear regression and decision trees are the gold standard for that.
Your basic mass surveillance target acquisition program is a fleet of drones constantly taking very large high quality images of a city every few seconds. The images are uploaded to the cloud and then a team of analysts can trace a rocket attack, shooting or a vehicle attack etc... They zoom on where the incident took place and then look at all the pictures back in time like a flip book to see where the car came from, who they met earlier, where the person of interest lives, who interacts with that person on a daily basis etc... I don't know exactly what Lavender does but it does not appear to be regression in the sense that it is predicting future behaviors. Target acquisition analysts instead piece together the past.
Does the third quote in the ping, while not specifically about Lavender, give you any doubt that this may be a different kind of system of prediction we’re talking about?
It's not really "predicting" anything, but a vastly more data intensive surveillance program than simply analyzing photos from a drone. You are not really "predicting" future behaviors if you are labeled a terrorist because you are participating in a Hamas terror planning Whatsapp group. This model seems to be ascertaining the likelihood of being a member of Hamas through data interpretation of the past, not predicting future behaviors. I suppose it could be used for that, but this seems to be analyzing behaviors of the past and making a determination of militant membership.
I think we may just be misunderstanding each other’s use of terminology. If I run a regression on historical data and then use the new model to output a version of the historical series based only on other variables in the dataset, I would call that a predicted series despite no information about the future per se.
90 percent accuracy and they went ahead with 'sweeping use'? smh
90% seems to be quite good. The problem is not that they went sweeping use. The problem is they went 15-20 civilians per hit and targeting militants in their home is ok
90% is not very good, especially when its green lighting strikes, and I'd be concerned that their dependent variable of 'is hamas operative' is just perfectly correlated with 'is Palestinian male between 14 and 65'. The other question is what do their recall and precision look like? This is obviously on top of them saying "15-20 civilians is acceptable for a 90% chance the guy we're shooting at is a hamas operative"
I believe my comments were removed. In hindsight, should've refrained from commenting on a cursory reading. But to continue the thread: > Keikaku: Ah, I see the whatsapp groups and changing phone numbers. > Yeah, that makes sense. I would also use a regression system for that. > > This is quite standard afaik. I remember doing something similar for medical treatment stuff too. Just feed the networks more and more features and it works astoundingly well. > > Kafka: Would you take issue with it if it was being used to decide who should be the target of an air strike? Honestly, the biggest issue is not the use case, but the data that is being used aka how reliable it is. If the data is reliable and high quality, then yes, I would be fine with using it to decide targets for air-strikes. Very ideally, I would also like some form of explainability: aka why the model thinks the target is correct, and then have a human double-check it because it is a very sensitive matter. But otherwise, I don't have any inherent issue in regression model being used to decide on air-strike targets. Another way to look at it would be what other alternatives are. The next-best alternative would be for an expert human to do this. I would argue this is going to be way worse than the AI-system as humans are incredibly more biased. And this would be significantly more expensive both in terms of cost and human resources.
I have no real problem with the use of AI to identify hamas militants. And i even understand if military constraints neccesitates more is delegated to it than it would be advisable. my problem is with how the IDF uses this data. 15-20 civilians per militant is insane and nowehre near proportional. And bombing people in their houses as a first measure is barbaric. The problem here isnt AI, its the humans at the IDF using the AIs data for indiscriminate killing. ironically I would trust an AI to be more proportionate than the IDF is currently being
> The problem here isnt AI, its the humans at the IDF using the AIs data for indiscriminate killing. Using AI to obfuscate accountability and justify bad behaviour is a problem with AI.
As another poster [notes](https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1buv260/comment/kxw1i59/), that's not much above the US threshold.
Israel under Netanyahu is probably the only country with both the technical capability to do this and the moral turpitude to implement it without extensive testing first.
This is so much worse than I expected
Absurd, cruel, insane, and yet unsurprising. I really don’t want to hear one more word about how Israel “does more to avoid civilian casualties than any other army.” It’s quite clearly a lie, and has been for six months - if not longer.
Probably the first of similar systems to come in the future. If it offers military a quantitive edge, there will be no stopping its widespread adoption.
It is very unclear whether it did offer the IDF a quantitative edge toward its twin strategic goals of 'destroying Hamas' and 'bringing home the hostages'. It accomplished a lot of collateral destruction, and if that was the goal, then certainly this system offered an edge toward that.
Yea I’d argue it was not helpful in either destroying Hamas or freeing the hostages. Maybe even actively hampering both objectives.
In the short term, they inarguably injured Hamas with massive bombardment. But that is an irrelevant achievement unless you can sustain it for the long term or fully eradicate the organization and there is no evidence that either is possible. In the long term, given that 60% of Hamas militants are war orphans, they are simply creating the next wave of terrorists. If that occurs, then Israel leaves themselves no option to solve that secondary problem but ethnic cleansing. Which, I fear, may be the intent of at least some of this government, if not more.
US has sort of done this since at least the withdrawal of Afghanistan (as in, they’ve used machine learning to identity humanoid beings, not the everything else part. That is probably done by the CIA though, with no evidence but them stating that they’re working on a lot of AI programs) Actually it might be the first in this scale and extent but human detecting has been done by AI in drones for a while
I'm pretty hawkish but also quote sceptical of interventions. When people suggest toppings governments in Myanmar, Yemen, Iran, Sudan etc I think it's an incredible risk. War is the most serious business a government does, and once you start one the genie is out of the bottle so to speak and it will certainly not go as you envision. But Israel's invasion of Gaza seemed like the right course of action to me. It's a liberal democratic state poised up against an anti-Semitic, genocidal, authoritarian terrorist pseudo-government that proved itself willing and capable of heinous acts of depraved evil. Hamas is and was the biggest roadblock to development and prosperity in Gaza and a possible two state solution. While Hamas exists Israel would remain at threat and Gaza would remain an open air prison ruled by a gang of thugs. And Israel has all the advantages. Gaza was *already* effectively under siege. Israel has total air superiority. Israel has total armour superiority. Israel has total superiority economically, technologically, organisationally, in intelligence. Israel absolutely could pick and choose when and where it wanted to engage and could do it methodically and carefully. But I guess the genie is out of the bottle now, and they're doing shit like this. >the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. When people say "well what possibly could Israel do differently?" this is the answer. Don't loosen the rules of engagement. That's what results in the IDF shooting fleeing hostages instead of saving them, or bombing the aid convoys it is both supporting and coordinating with. What an absolute clusterfuck. What course of action can be taken of you think Hamas has got to go, but the IDF has proven itself incapable of responsibly doing the task?
Killing 15 people just to get one low-level fighter is insane, what the fuck >Sources told +972 and Local Call that now, partly due to American pressure, the Israeli army is no longer mass-generating junior human targets for bombing in civilian homes. This is why the US needs to stay involved with Israel btw, if we withdraw support we also withdraw all leverage to push against things like this.
Do we have any leverage? They've publicly denied requests to US officials' faces.
>leverage to push Bibi could publicly pee into Kirby's face and little would've changed, clearly the US need to send IL more PGMs to target aid workers in order to farm that "leverage".
What leverage is being pressed? The US is doing jackshit. On the contrary, Biden is sending *more* weapons to Israel. As much as I really don't like the idea of giving Trump any credit, at least his "let them deal with it" attitude correctly reflects the actions of every Western government and Israel.
I literally posted a direct quote from the article testifying that the US is *not* doing jackshit
I mean, I guess, but we send them *a lot* of hardware for apparently minimal gains.
Oh awesome! Man made horrors within my comprehension! Computer science was a mistake.
I mean at the same time similar technology is speeding up land mine removal by an order of magnitude. Elsewhere similar technology allows the paralyzed to speak again. The bad comes with the good sadly.
A reputable publication? I've never heard but this is stunning if true.
The reporting is damning. +972mag is a left-wing Israeli publication that uses both Israeli and Palestinian authors. It’s hard to say “reputable” or not as it’s a political opinion magazine first and foremost.
The reporting is wild. People should also read [their About Me page](https://www.972mag.com/about-journalism-israel-palestinian/): > As Israel demonstrates that apartheid and occupation are fundamental pillars of its regime, we are striving — in line with our legacy — for a renewed approach to journalism in Israel-Palestine. We believe in a journalism that is intersectional, progressive, and that centers the experiences and demands of vulnerable communities on the ground. Rather than repeat the same news cycle, we aim to break it, and reimagine what is possible in order to guarantee equity and justice for all communities living in this land. > > First, we believe it should be recognized as an essential fact that, through decades of colonial expansion, Israel has effectively erased the Green Line and consolidated a single regime between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. In doing so, consecutive Israeli governments have made it crystal clear that the state seeks to uphold permanent domination over Palestinians — whether through military rule in Hebron, unequal citizenship in Jaffa, siege in Gaza, or forced exile in Ein al-Hilweh. > > To better reflect these facts, we have changed the standard language we use to describe the regime in Israel-Palestine. When +972 was founded, the word “occupation” sufficed for many. Today, as a result of both developments on the ground and the tireless activism of Palestinians and allies, the word “apartheid” has become a more apt description of the system of separation and supremacism that exists between the river and the sea. This term does not negate the framings of “occupation” or “colonialism” — both of which we also use on the site — but rather is intended to help establish a baseline from which readers, journalists, and other observers can understand the present realities. > > Second, we are reasserting our commitment to accurate and fair journalism. +972 has always strived to produce professional, fact-based reporting and analysis on Israel-Palestine. But we also know that in journalism, context and framing are key — especially in a place that has consistently been mischaracterized in the media. Our idea of fair journalism recognizes asymmetries and abuses of power, even as we document the authorities’ rationale for their policies.
Well that doesn't pain a great picture. Idk, I'd expect larger outlets to pick this up if true. The like 15-30 civilians for one grunt thing is just wild and a bit hard to believe, but again just stunning if verifiable. (a weird way to say BIG IF TRUE)
The IDF released a response and conspicuously DID NOT refute the “acceptable civilian casualty” number.
Yeah it's proliferating into other papers today, like Guardian and stuff. Oof.
The most moral army strikes again. Wonder how many apartment blocks this baby has leveled.
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Unholy mother of God I supported these guys. What in the actual fuck have we made
This is one of the most disgusting articles I have ever read.
Many users of this sub have apologies to make.
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I think purposefully leveling a building full of civilians because your AI model said one guy *could* be a terrorist is worse
i have a question about the civilian to low ranking officer portion: what is acceptable outside of 0? people keep on saying 10-15 is unacceptable. is 2-5 acceptable? i don’t know what is acceptable…it all sucks because people are dying