UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks to the press at UN headquarters in New York on Friday. AFP
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres Friday expressed serious concern over reports that Israel was using artificial intelligence to identify targets in Gaza, resulting in many civilian deaths.
According to a report in independent Israeli-Palestinian magazine +972, Israel has used AI to identify targets in Gaza — in some cases with as little as 20 seconds of human oversight.
Guterres said that he was "deeply troubled by reports that the Israeli military's bombing campaign includes Artificial Intelligence as a tool in the identification of targets, particularly in densely populated residential areas, resulting in a high level of civilian casualties."
"No part of life and death decisions which impact entire families should be delegated to the cold calculation of algorithms," he said.
The +972 report claims that "the Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties." The report said that, according to "six Israeli intelligence officers", a system dubbed Lavender had "played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war." "According to the sources, its influence on the military's operations was such that they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine 'as if it were a human decision'," +972 reported.
Two sources said "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".
If "the target was a senior Hamas official... the army on several occasions authorised the killing of more than 100 civilians," it added.
Israel's aggression against the Gaza Strip has killed at least 33,091 people, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run Palestinian territory.
The UN has warned of imminent famine in the besieged territory.
Israel began hyping AI-powered targeting after an 11-day conflict in Gaza during May 2021, which commanders branded the world's "first AI war".
The military chief during the 2021 war, Aviv Kochavi, told Israeli news website Ynet last year the force had used AI systems to identify "100 new targets every day", instead of 50 a year previously.
Weeks into the latest Gaza war, a blog entry on the Israeli military's website said its AI-enhanced "targeting directorate" had identified more than 12,000 targets in just 27 days.
In a rare confession of wrongdoing, Israel Friday admitted a series of errors and violations of its rules in the killing of seven aid workers in Gaza, saying it had mistakenly believed it was "targeting armed Hamas operatives".
Alessandro Accorsi, a senior analyst at Crisis Group, said the +972 report was "very concerning".
"It feels very apocalyptic. It's clear... the degree of human control is very low," he told AFP.
"There are a thousand questions around this obviously — how moral it is to use it — but it is hardly surprising it is used," he said.
Johann Soufi, a human rights lawyer and former director of the UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA's legal office in Gaza, said the +972 article described methods that were "undeniably war crimes".
They were "likely crimes against humanity" in view of the high civilian casualties, he added on X, formerly Twitter.
