President Biden recently condemned Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing” of Gaza. Israel’s defenders reply by insisting that Israel’s bombs are carefully calculated to hit only designated targets; there is nothing indiscriminate about them.
A recent investigation by journalists at +972 magazine now explains how to resolve this seeming contradition. The massive bombing campaign is not indiscriminate. It only looks that way because of a new Israeli computer program linked to artifcial intelligence.
The new AI program can isolate a vast array of possible targets within seconds and send misssles to each of them. As a result, the massive levels of damage caused by Israel’s bombing campaign is not only deliberate but well calculated.
It is precision bombing on a massive scale.
The Israeli military has so much confidence in this new AI killing program that it has been labeled “The Gospel” — a most repulsive, ghoulism blasphemy, in my view.
Below are selected excerpts from the article written by Yuval Abraham. It is titled “‘A Mass Assassination Factory’: Inside Israel’s Calculated Bombmg of Gaza.” (All emphasis is mine):
The Israeli army’s expanded authorization for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals. These factors, as described by current and former Israeli intelligence members, have likely played a role in producing what has been one of the deadliest military campaigns against Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948.
. . . has seen the army significantly expand its bombing of targets that are not distinctly military in nature. These include private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks, which sources say the army defines as “power targets” (“matarot otzem”).
The bombing of power targets, according to intelligence sources who had first-hand experience with its application in Gaza in the past, is mainly intended to harm Palestinian civil society: to “create a shock” that, among other things, will reverberate powerfully and “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas,” as one source put it.
Several of the sources, who spoke to +972 and Local Call on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed.
In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,” said one source.
“Nothing happens by accident,” said another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”
Give special attention to Israel’s bizarre rationale for excusing this murderous behavior. Israel is “not like Hamas,” we are told, because Israel deliberately targets civilians; knows exactly how many civilians will end up as ‘collateral damage’; and so is killing massive numbers of innocent men, women and children knowingly, intentionally.
And this makes Israel superior to Hamas?
Really?
Here we have a good illustration of how the arrogance of privileged power-brokers can scorch the conscience, twist our sense of right and wrong, and rationalize even the most ludicrously cruel, murderous calculations.
Read the entire article here.
David: This is really powerful. I caught the +972 article as well. It strikes me as so offensive, given Israel’s reliance on American evangelicals, to call this “the gospel.”
Gary, I agree completely. The dehumanization of Palestinians as the heart of this military program is shocking. I honestly wonder if American evangelicals will be offended by a bombing program being called The Gospel, given their general enthusiasm for this war.