The fog of war has thickened in Gaza, a ground invasion is gathering steam, and aerial bombardments continue at a furious pace. On Tuesday, missiles struck a refugee camp in Jabaliya, where the Israel Defense Forces said a senior Hamas leader was stationed, killing dozens of civilians. Debate over the crisis rages online and off, yet for all the discourse, there’s one lingering question I haven’t seen widely considered: To what extent is Israel relying on artificial intelligence and automated weapons systems to select and strike targets? In the first week of its assault alone, the Israeli air force said it had dropped 6,000 bombs across Gaza, a territory that is 140 square miles — one-tenth the size of the smallest U.S. state of Rhode Island — and is among the most densely populated places in the world. There have been many thousand more explosions since then. Israel commands the most powerful and highest-tech military in the Middle East. Months before the horrific Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, the IDF announced that it was embedding AI into lethal operations. As Bloomberg reported on July 15, earlier this year, the IDF had begun “using artificial intelligence to select targets for air strikes and organize wartime logistics.” Israeli officials said at the time that the IDF employed an AI recommendation system to choose targets for aerial bombardment, and another model that would then be used to quickly organize ensuing raids. The IDF calls this second system Fire Factory, and, according to Bloomberg, it “uses data about military-approved targets to calculate munition loads, prioritize and assign thousands of targets to aircraft and drones, and propose a schedule.”
Full commentary : How is Israel’s military using AI in Gaza strikes?
