Israel has been using AI technologies to identify, locate, and kill Palestinians in Gaza thank to the information provided to it by Meta Company.
This past Wednesday, five United Nations experts strongly condemned recent reports of the Israeli army’s use of artificial intelligence (AI) in Gaza. In recent weeks, there have been several reports revealing that Israeli forces are using artificial intelligence to identify and track targets in their military operation in Gaza, which has killed more than 33,800 people – mostly women and children.
“Six months into the current military offensive, more housing and civilian infrastructure has now been destroyed in Gaza as a percentage, compared to any conflict in memory,” said the experts, who included Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967.
The experts also asserted in the statement that tanks to this way of using technology to attack Palestinians, nearly 70 percent of all homes in Gaza, and up to 84 per cent of homes in northern Gaza, had been either fully destroyed or partly damaged.
What AI systems Israel uses against Gazans?
The Israeli army’s artificial intelligence systems, include “Lavender” and “The Gospel”. They both operate based on identifying suspected militants and their locations in Gaza and then attacking their locations. The Lavender system focuses on identifying individuals and earmarking them for possible elimination, while the Gospel system identifies buildings and facilities allegedly used by Hamas militants.
When using these technologies, Israeli army may consider common people as Hamas militants simply because of their membership in WhatsApp groups that some Hamas members may also be members of. After identifying them and their place of residence, Israel bombards them when they are at home along with all the family members. But where does Israel get this information from? Does WhatsApp provide them to the Israeli army? Actually, the answer is “yes”, but why does meta company do such a thing?
To answer this question, one needs to know that the top three managers of Meta have close ties with Israel.
Meta main managers all have ties with Israel!
Meta’s chief information security officer, Guy Rosen, is one of the company’s main policy makers, an Israeli who lives in Tel Aviv. He has a history of service in the Israeli army in unit 8200. Unit 8200 is actually Israel’s National Security Agency and it is the unit that built the Lavender system.
The next person is Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Meta, who has been one of the main supporters of Israel, advertising Israel values and narratives in the social media outlets under his control.
Since the beginning of this year, Zuckerberg has donated $125,000 to the Zaka Foundation, one of the main agents responsible for spreading false propaganda against Hamas and exaggerating their October 7 attack on Israel on social media. Zaka has also been very active in spreading the false narrative of “mass rape of Israeli women and girls by Hamas”.
And finally, Sheryl Sandberg, the former executive director and current member of Meta’s board of directors, is a senior member of the Zaka group and played a key role in spreading false propagandas against Hamas since October 7. Claiming to support the victims of sexual violence, he was one of the tough supporters of the idea that Hamas sexually assault Israeli prisoners. This is while he has always ignored the long history of Israeli soldiers assaulting Palestinians, especially in Israeli jails, and has never said a word about it.
