The Genocide Will Be Automated—Israel, AI and the Future of War

“We are here on the Gaza border,” said Shalev Hulio, posing with a gun slung over his shoulder.

It was November 7, 2023, and he was recording a video to announce the launch of his new cybertechnology start-up, Dream Security.

In 2022, Hulio had stepped down from his position as CEO of NSO Group, the Israeli cyber surveillance company that created the notorious Pegasus spyware. The choice of the video’s setting was a stark reminder that Palestine—and Gaza especially—is a laboratory for Israeli technology and weapons, which are then marketed globally. The timing—one month to the day following October 7—was a foretelling of Israel’s militarized applications of artificial intelligence (AI) to conduct “the world’s first AI-assisted genocide.”[1]

Since the start of the war in October 2023, Israel has been using AI tools to conduct its massive bombing campaign in Gaza. The Israeli military’s “directorate of targets” relies on soldiers with decoding, cyber and research capabilities to produce targets on a large scale. Pegasus is used to locate and collect data on individuals. This data is then fed to automated targeting platforms like Where’s Daddy, Gospel and Lavender, which utilize facial recognition, geolocating and cloud computing to generate targets at rapid rates. The spyware can also record and manipulate actions to manufacture fake digital evidence to retroactively justify the execution of civilians.

With the application of these new technologies, Gaza remains Israel’s premier testing ground for advances in the automation of war. These advances can then be marketed and exported on a global scale.

 

From Pegasus to Gaza

 

Pegasus is the most malicious spyware on the market.

Unlike other types of malware, which work by deceiving people into clicking a link that then infects their device, Pegasus has a zero-click capacity. The technology can be installed remotely without any interaction from the user, making it nearly impossible to detect. Attackers can take control of a phone’s camera and microphone, effectively transforming it into a live tracking and recording device; they can extract all data, including messages, emails, photos, recordings, browsing histories, calendars and locations; and they can use Pegasus to plant falsified and incriminating evidence on a target’s mobile device. Pegasus can spread like a virus through communication networks.

Citizen Lab, a Canadian digital watchdog organization based at the University of Toronto, began publishing damning and revealing reports about Pegasus in 2016. In 2019, two Israeli spies posing as investors requested meetings with Citizen Lab’s research team in Toronto. Senior researcher John Scott-Railton suspected their request was a ruse to gather information about the Lab’s investigative work and methodology. He took a lunch meeting with a man who described himself as a wealthy Parisian named Michel Lambert. During their conversation the investor pressed for information about the Lab’s reports on NSO Group. As they were eating dessert, a reporter and a photographer from the Associated Press, who had been tipped off about the set-up by Scott-Railton, approached the table. The visitor scrambled to flee the restaurant, taking along two other spies who had been recording the lunch meeting. Lambert was later exposed to be Aharon Almog-Assoulin, a retired Israeli security official.

In 2020, thanks to a massive data leak, the scale of Pegasus’s use became clear. The Forbidden Stories Consortium, a Paris-based international network of journalists dedicated to protecting reporters, discovered that over 50,000 people had been targeted by government customers of NSO Group. The targets included journalists, human rights defenders, academics, diplomats, union leaders, politicians and several heads of state. In the wake of the leak and working in coordination with Amnesty International’s Security Lab and Citizen Lab, Forbidden Stories met with victims to conduct forensic analyses of their devices. The Pegasus Project is their investigation into cyber-spying with the aim of countering high-tech threats to journalists and human rights defenders.

Forensic Architecture’s Digital Violence project has mapped every infected phone around the globe, documenting every case in which the spyware has been linked to state violence. Pegasus’s body count includes the assassination of Mexican journalist Cecilio Pineda on March 2, 2017 and the extrajudicial execution of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi kill squad in Istanbul on October 2, 2018.

The Pegasus scandals triggered some uncommonly strong reactions from governments. In November 2021, the US government blacklisted NSO Group for acting “contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.”[2] This decree barred the company from conducting business with any US-based industry. In February 2022, the European Union’s data watchdog called for Pegasus to be banned throughout the EU. To date, this has not happened.

Victims of Pegasus and rights organizations have brought lawsuits against NSO Group in multiple jurisdictions, including the United States, Spain and Britain. Apple, which produces iPhone technology, and WhatsApp, a widely used text-messaging program owned by Facebook’s parent company Meta, are suing the company because their products were compromised by Pegasus. NSO Group tried to have the WhatsApp case in a California District Court dismissed on the grounds that, as a foreign entity, it is immune from litigation. The US Supreme Court, however, rejected that argument and the case is proceeding. Forbidden Stories discovered that Israeli officials tried to seize NSO documents to prevent them from being subject to the discovery process in the WhatsApp case in order to block exposure of the company’s activities and clients.

NSO Group has attempted to exploit the current war on Gaza to reverse these restrictive measures against it. On November 7—the same day that Hulio announced his new startup from the Gaza border—legal representatives of the company sent an “urgent” letter to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken asking to be taken off the blacklist. The letter claimed that “NSO cyber intelligence is a critical tool that is used to aid the ongoing fight against terrorists.”[3]

 

Surveillance for Control and Profit 

 

For decades, the Israeli military, dubbed a world leader in cybersecurity, has tested new weapons and surveillance technologies on Palestinians.

Indeed, Israel’s control of occupied Palestinians is where a nexus of racialization, securitization and settler-colonialism made the rise and spread of such advanced technologies of control possible. For example, in October 2023 Israeli authorities began using an experimental facial recognition system known as Red Wolf to track Palestinians and automate harsh restrictions on their freedom of movement. When Palestinians step within a range of surveillance cameras, their faces are scanned, and an AI program checks them against a wanted list. This program is run by the cyber-surveillance Unit 8200 using technology developed by the private Israeli company Corsight and Google photos.

To develop its surveillance capacities, the Israel government relies heavily on its private tech sector. These companies, often launched and run by former intelligence officers, leverage their relationships within the military to deploy their technologies on Palestinians before they are marketed as “field-tested.”

Israel’s surveillance industry is thoroughly integrated within the global market. Governments seeking to enhance their control through technology with invasive capacities are eager consumers of Israeli products, which, in turn, gives Israel diplomatic leverage over those governments. Morocco, for example, is a major client of NSO Group; over 10,000 of the phone numbers identified through the Pegasus leak were sourced to the Moroccan government, including the Spanish and French heads of state. In 2022, Morocco became the third Arab state to agree to normalization with Israel, through the so-called Abraham Accords (the first two, UAE and Bahrain, are also notable consumers of Israeli spyware). In June 2024, Morocco allowed an Israeli warship carrying weapons to dock after Spain refused.

India, too, signed a two-billion-dollar deal with Israel in 2017 to acquire missile systems and licensing for Pegasus. In exchange, India voted in Israel’s favor in 2019 at the UN’s Economic and Social Council to deny observer status to a Palestinian human rights organization. The Modi government has used Pegasus to fabricate evidence against journalists on charges of terrorism.

AI targeting systems are the logical outgrowth of human rights-abusing products like Pegasus. They also mirror another AI system used worldwide: predictive policing through “data-driven systems,” which uses surveillance technology to quantify, track and predict human behavior. In the case of Gaza, this technology is applied to allegedly identify who may be a member of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Like predictive human-based racial-profile in policing, data-based systems are inherently flawed and discriminatory as they reduce human beings to statistical data points. For example, the Lavender machine used in Gaza has mistakenly flagged individuals like police, civil defense workers, relatives of militants and residents who happen to have an identical name or nickname to a combatant, as Hamas or PIJ operatives and subsequently placed them on kill lists.

This AI killing machine also relies on the support of foreign tech companies, including cloud computing from Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. Through Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government, Google and Amazon Web Services provide cloud computing infrastructure and machine learning services to Israel. Google is also offering advanced AI tools to Israel to be used for data harvesting for facial recognition and object tracking as part of Project Nimbus. It has also been suggested that metadata from WhatsApp, owned by Meta, has been used to provide data for the Lavender targeting system. For example, one input into the AI is whether someone is in a WhatsApp group chat with a suspected Hamas or PIJ militant.

 

Learning from Pegasus 

 

Israel’s technologically sophisticated weaponry is sold worldwide, to at least 130 countries. Over the last five years, Israel’s arms exports have more than doubled, rendering it the world’s biggest weapons exporter per capita.

Since the start of the war on Gaza, weapons exports have reached an all-time high. The director general of Israel’s Ministry of Defense, Major General (Ret.) Eyal Zamir, explained, “Many countries in the world are following the successes of the Israeli combat systems in the war, in all dimensions, and are purchasing Israeli weapons to protect their citizens.”[4]

The shiny new product being field tested in Gaza is AI-powered targeting machines. Indeed, coupled with an all-time high in Israeli weapons exports, the future of warfare is undergoing a major transformation. In the 2000s, contemporary warfare expanded from human combat to technology-enabled killing with the US-led rise and diffusion of drones, which eliminated much of the risk for soldiers. Like drone warfare, cyber warfare involves the participation of combatants who are so far removed from the carnage that they may as well be playing a video game. The AI revolution in choosing targets removes humans even further from the process, since automated machines can do most of the work. Moreover, both drone warfare and cyber warfare share the myth of precision. In Gaza, this myth is especially evident, with loosened restrictions on the permissible number of killed civilians in the assassination of a suspected operative and the use of AI technology like Lavender to generate kill lists. Israeli intelligence officers deploying Lavender describe it as having “errors” in about 10 percent of cases and of marking individuals with little to no connection with militants as targets. Moreover, when a target is named, their entire family is marked for death, since the technology, Where’s Daddy, is used to bomb the home as opposed to a site of militant activity. (Bombings often take place at night, when combatants are sleeping at home with their family, hence the sordid name.) As a result, thousands of Palestinians, mostly women, children and non-combatants, have been wiped out by Israeli airstrikes.

If the Pegasus scandals are any indication, Israel’s latest AI-powered weaponry is bound to be exported for profit and used on other vulnerable populations. But the journalists and organizations involved in the Pegasus Project have also learned lessons about how technology can be used to improve rather than destroy human life and dignity. Targeted journalists have learned the importance of limiting their use of technology and protecting themselves with encryption programs. They also have learned to manipulate technology to their advantage by creating new ways to communicate with sources and report on events. Access Now, a digital rights organization, offers an around-the-clock Digital Security help hotline to at-risk populations. Reporters Without Borders offers scholarships to journalists working in war zones to take a digital security training program in Berlin.

The greatest challenge remains a lack of international regulation or oversight for malicious technologies. So far, the international outcry in response to Pegasus has proved to be an exception. The ongoing lawsuits against NSO Group may make a dent, but there is nothing in place to halt or deter Israeli companies from developing and selling other repressive and deadly technologies.

As the AI-powered genocide in Gaza demonstrates, the costs and risks associated with these technologies are not distributed equally. This era of mass surveillance and automated war is facilitated by Big Tech, global trade networks and a lack of international oversight. But the global reach of predatory technologies gives broad urgency to fighting back. The counter-cyber resistance is being waged by journalists, human rights organizations, legislators, tech employees and aggrieved members of the public. The horrors Israel is perpetrating on the people of Gaza and the globalized marketing for the instruments of their death are evidence that such resistance is imperative.

 

[Leila Katibah is a recent graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she researched the connections between surveillance, settler-colonialism and press freedom.]

 

This issue of Middle East Report, Carceral Realities and Freedom Dreams, has been produced in partnership with the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Security in Context.

 

This article appears in MER issue 312 “Carceral Realities & Freedom Dreams.”

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Endnotes

 

[1] Marc Owen Jones, “In Gaza, we are watching the world’s first AI-assisted genocide,” The New Arab, April 10, 2024.

[2] “Commerce Adds NSO Group and Other Foreign Companies to Entity List for Malicious Cyber Activities,” U.S. Department of Commerce, November 3, 2021.

[3] “Paul Hastings November 7, 2023, ‘Urgent’ Request for Meeting With Anthony Blinken,” Available on Document Cloud (contributed by the Intercept).

[4] Udi Etzion, “A new record in defense exports: over 13 billion dollars, but there are warning signs,” Walla, June 17, 2024. [Hebrew]