Tech & Genocide - Of the Palestinians

Reliable information about the technologies deployed, their numbers and capabilities are scarce. Some were created by Unit 8200 an Israeli Intelligence Corps unit of the Israeli Defense Forces working in clandestine operations, collecting signal intelligence, code decryption, counterintelligence, cyberwarfare, intelligence assessment, military intelligence, strategic intelligence and surveillance. Other were created by former soldiers who went onto create their own firm or occupy important positions in IT companies in Silicon Valley and the rest of the world.

AI systems have been designed to generate targets faster than humans with main goal to never run out of places and people to bomb. For example, Habsora or Gospel is used to target buildings and structures; Lavender mark people and identify them as potential low ranking Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad operators. "Where is daddy?" used in conjunction with the previous one track the targets to kill them in their home.

Theses systems have played a central role in the indiscriminate bombing specially in the early stage of the war. Using mostly unguided "dumb" bombs for low ranking targets with a predetermine collateral damage of 15 to 20 people in contrast to 100s for senior targets.

These systems are known to misidentify people, inaccurately estimate the number of civilians affected and no real time verification of the target’s presence.

The direct involvement of American companies (i.a Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, IBM, Palantir, …) can be explained by a shift in their businesses, the ideology of many of their executives and the long standing policy of the American government toward Israel irrespective of Democrat or Republican administration.

They are now central to Israel’s surveillance apparatus.

With Project Nimbus, Google and Amazon provide cloud services to the Israeli government and military. Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services store surveillance intelligence on Palestinians and runs AI and Machine Learning services such as facial detection, image categorization, object tracking, sentiment analysis. Similar services have been provided by Microsoft with their platform Azure.

Social medias like Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube and Tiktok censor pro-Palestine voices under the guise of hate speech or terrorism while allowing the Israeli propaganda without any moderation. Some companies like Google have been paid to run global digital advertising campaign promoting the official state messaging.

The few employees of these companies who spoke out were told the subject was off-limit, their speech monitored and scrubbed from internal communication tools and ultimately got fired. While the current and former heads of these firms have praised Israel policies and made pro-genocide statements.

Palestine has become a laboratory for these different technologies. They are tested, refined, showcased in Gaza before being exported to the rest of the world, authoritarian countries and democracy alike.

For example, surveillance drones experimented in Gaza have been deployed in Europe by Frontex to surveil migrants and surveillance towers at the Mexico–United States border.