Israel and Accountability in Gaza

An article in the Economist comments that ON MAY 14TH 1948, in its Declaration of Independence, Israel embraced universal human rights “irrespective of religion, race or sex”.

Gaza Casualties chart

(https://ponderpatterns.blogspot.com/2024/05/numbers-propaganda.html)

 The Economist Leaders article on the War in Gaza explains “Why Israel must hold itself to account.” The founding vision of Israel and the laws of war are under attack in Gaza. In its bombed and barren landscape the fate of both lies in the balance.

Gaza shows how this vision is failing. The laws of war are being broken and the system for upholding them is not working. However, that failure does not exonerate Israel from having to answer for its actions in Gaza, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. Indeed, its foundations as a liberal democracy demand that it must.

Worse, Israel’s government, despite its duties as an occupying power, has used the distribution of food to civilians as a weapon against Hamas. It continued even when, as predicted, that led to starvation and the death of desperate people queuing for survival rations. By corralling civilians in pockets as it systematically bulldozes their homes, Israel is also practising ethnic cleansing.

 

  It is not too late. The urgent test is whether Israel floods Gaza with food and medicine in order to stop the incipient famine. It should also agree on a ceasefire, which will enable it to recover its hostages. The second, longer-term test will be whether it sets up a truly independent commission of inquiry after the war ends, probably under a new prime minister. (The Economist Leaders Article, 2025)

David Gritten in London and Imogen Foulkes in Geneva reporting for the BBC comment that a United Nations commission of inquiry says Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. 

The Israeli military launched a campaign in Gaza in response to the unprecedented Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage. At least 64,905 people have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza since then, according to the territory's Hamas-run health ministry.

Most of the population has also been repeatedly displaced; more than 90% of homes are estimated to be damaged or destroyed; the healthcare, water, sanitation and hygiene systems have collapsed; and UN-backed food security experts have declared a famine in Gaza City.

The 72-page document alleges that Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces have committed and are continuing to commit four of the five acts of genocide defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention against a national, ethnic, racial or religious group - in this case, Palestinians in Gaza:

• Killing members of the group through attacks on protected objects; targeting civilians and other protected persons; and the deliberate infliction of conditions causing deaths

• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group through direct attacks on civilians and protected objects; severe mistreatment of detainees; forced displacement; and environmental destruction

• Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the group in whole or in part through destruction of structures and land essential to Palestinians; destruction and denial of access to medical services; forced displacement; blocking essential aid, water, electricity and fuel from reaching Palestinians; reproductive violence; and specific conditions impacting children

• Imposing measures intended to prevent births through the December 2023 attack on Gaza's largest fertility clinic, reportedly destroying around 4,000 embryos and 1,000 sperm samples and unfertilised eggs (Gritten & Foulkes, n.d.)

William Christou in Beirut and agency reporters for the Guardian reveal that the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said sanctions were imposed on the rights monitors for having “directly engaged in efforts by the International Criminal Court to investigate, arrest, detain or prosecute Israeli nationals, without Israel’s consent”.

Days earlier, the world’s leading genocide scholars’ association said Israel’s actions in Gaza met the legal definition of genocide, an accusation Israel has denied.

The groups asked the ICC in November 2023 to investigate Israeli airstrikes on densely populated civilian areas of Gaza, the siege of the territory and displacement of the population.

Since filing the lawsuit, the humanitarian conditions in Gaza have worsened significantly, with the territory facing a starvation crisis and more than 80% of its infrastructure destroyed by Israeli bombing. At that point, nearly 10,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza – the number of dead is now more than 64,000.

Two weeks ago, an Israeli strike on Nasser hospital in southern Gaza that killed 22 people, including five journalists, raised further questions about Israel’s conduct in the strip.

An investigation released by the Associated Press on Friday cast doubt on Israel’s explanation that its forces had struck a position that was well known as a journalists’ gathering point because they believed a camera on the roof was being used by Hamas to observe troops. The AP said it had gathered new evidence indicating the camera in question actually belonged to a Reuters video journalist who was killed in the initial strike.

The agency noted it had repeatedly informed the army its journalists were stationed there, and that its investigation showed that troops used high-explosive tank shells to strike the hospital, instead of more precise guided weapons that might have resulted in fewer casualties.

 

It said that soon after the first strike, Israeli forces had hit the same position again, after medical and emergency workers had reached the scene to treat the injured. The timing was reminiscent of the “double-tap” technique used by al-Qaida and by forces of the former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and others.

The three rights organisations released a joint statement condemning the sanctions, which they described as “immoral, illegal and undemocratic”. (Christou, 2025)

Anna Ahronheim,  in an article for the Jerusalem Post, interviewed a former IDF senior officer. After years of silence, the officer, once a key architect of the IDF’s digital transformation, explained how the IDF rewired the battlefield for the first AI war.

 

Seven years ago, the IDF was still shackled to legacy systems, using fax machines, outdated servers, and siloed intelligence. 

Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Aviv Kohavi, the chief of staff at the time, envisioned something radically different: a battlefield where cyber, air, sea, and ground forces operated as one, connected by real-time data and precision targeting. The digital transformation of the IDF was one of Kohavi’s top priorities when he began his term – not only to further strengthen the military but to provide the most advanced capabilities for its troops.

 

Citing the Yom Kippur War, the former senior officer said troops “fought pretty much alone, with support being slow to arrive.” But with the digital transformation, he said, ground troops can call in the target, and it would be struck by the platform best suited to take it out a short time later.

“We implemented AI in order to differentiate between civilians and terrorists,” he said. “We harness AI and technology to focus on the hostile forces.”

 

Critics also say the use of AI to reduce civilian deaths is highly contested, with several investigations finding that AI systems have wrongly identified targets after using faulty data and flawed algorithms.

But the former senior officer pushed back hard on that, calling it “a lie.”

“AI and technology allow you to be more moral,” he said. “Intelligence and precision together allow for a different moral standard. We are implementing and incorporating AI in order to differentiate between civilians and terrorists, and the main rule in international law is the principle of differentiation between fighters and noncombatants.” (Ahronheim, 2025)

Yuval Abraham, a journalist and filmmaker based in Jerusalem, in an article for +972 magazine, in partnership with Local Call, reports 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.

A new investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call reveals that the Israeli army has developed an artificial intelligence-based program known as “Lavender.” 

Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets. The sources told +972 and Local Call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes.

“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

The Lavender machine joins another AI system, “The Gospel,” about which information was revealed in a previous investigation by +972 and Local Call in November 2023, as well as in the Israeli military’s own publications. A fundamental difference between the two systems is in the definition of the target: whereas The Gospel marks buildings and structures that the army claims militants operate from, Lavender marks people — and puts them on a kill list.

In addition, according to the sources, when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs), which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” said C., one of the intelligence officers. Another source said that they had personally authorized the bombing of “hundreds” of private homes of alleged junior operatives marked by Lavender, with many of these attacks killing civilians and entire families as “collateral damage.”

B., a senior officer who used Lavender, echoed to +972 and Local Call that in the current war, officers were not required to independently review the AI system’s assessments, in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances.

 

“Everything was statistical, everything was neat — it was very dry,” B. said. He noted that this lack of supervision was permitted despite internal checks showing that Lavender’s calculations were considered accurate only 90 percent of the time; in other words, it was known in advance that 10 percent of the human targets slated for assassination were not members of the Hamas military wing at all. (Abraham, n.d.)

The superior technology of the IDF has probably contributed to a reduced casualty count for the Israeli forces in the war in Gaza. The horrendous death toll in the Palestinian community raises serious concerns about the possible lack of attention to Discrimination and Proportionality that is a requirement under International Humanitarian Law (IHL). Armed Forces with sophisticated tools that could be used to reduce collateral casualties are more accountable for war crimes that result when techniques to reduce civilian harm are ignored. 

References

Abraham, Y. (2024, April 3). 'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing spree in Gaza. +972 Magazine. Retrieved September 17, 2025, from https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/ 

Ahronheim, A. (2025, September 17). How the IDF rewired the battlefield for the first AI war - interview. The Jerusalem Post - All News from the Middle East, Israel, and the Jewish World. Retrieved September 17, 2025, from https://www.jpost.com/ 

Christou, W. (2025, September 4). US imposes sanctions on Palestinians for requesting war crimes inquiry. The Guardian. Retrieved September 17, 2025, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/04/us-sanctions-palestinian-human-rights 

The Economist Leaders Article. (2025, August 7). Why Israel must hold itself to account. The Economist. Retrieved September 17, 2025, from https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/08/07/why-israel-must-hold-itself-to-account 

Gritten, D., & Foulkes, I. (n.d.). BBC News - Breaking news, video and the latest top stories from the U.S. and around the world. BBC. Retrieved September 17, 2025, from https://www.bbc.com/news/ 

Biden leads call to deny weapons to Israel

The decision by United States President Joe Biden not to supply weapons for an Israeli incursion into Rafah is in tension with resolve from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant who told Israel's "enemies and friends" on May 8, 2024 that it would do whatever necessary to achieve its war aims in Gaza and the north, in an apparent response to U.S. pressure to halt its operation in Rafah. One controversial strategy of the IDF has been the use of AI software to kill at scale.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant speaks during a joint press conference with U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin at Israel's Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv, Israel December 18, 2023. REUTERS/Violeta Santos Moura/File Photo

Nidal Al-Mughrabi, Mohammad Salem and Jarrett Renshaw reporting for Reuters, comment that Israel says Hamas militants are hiding in Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have sought refuge after fleeing combat elsewhere in Gaza, and it needs to eliminate them for its own security. Joe Biden, who says Israel has not produced a convincing plan to safeguard civilians in Rafah, issued his starkest warning yet against a full ground invasion.

"I made it clear that if they go into Rafah, ... I'm not supplying the weapons," Biden told CNN in an interview on Wednesday.

U.S. officials have said Washington paused delivery of a shipment of 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs to Israel because of the risk to civilians in Gaza.

Israel's United Nations ambassador Gilad Erdan said the U.S. decision to pause some weapons deliveries to Israel will significantly impair the country's ability to neutralise Hamas' power, according to Israeli public radio.

 Israel kept up tank and aerial strikes across Gaza on Thursday, however. Tanks advanced in the Zeitoun neighbourhood of Gaza City in the north, forcing hundreds of families to flee, residents said. The Israeli military said it was securing Zeitoun, starting with a series of intelligence-based aerial strikes on approximately 25 "terror targets".

The war began when Hamas militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing about 1,200 people and abducting 252, of whom 128 remain hostage in Gaza and 36 have been declared dead, according to the latest Israeli figures. Israel's assault on Gaza has killed 34,904 Palestinians, most of them civilians, the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said. A U.N. official said no fuel or aid had entered Gaza due to the military operation, a situation "disastrous for the humanitarian response" in the enclave, where more than half the population is suffering catastrophic hunger.

After fleeing combat further north, Palestinians have crammed into tented camps and makeshift shelters in Rafah. The closure of the Rafah crossing with Egypt had prevented the evacuation of the wounded and sick and the entry of medical supplies, food trucks and fuel needed to operate hospitals, the Gaza health ministry said on Thursday. (Al-Mughrabi et al., n.d.)

Kevin Liptak of CNN, adds that the president’s announcement that he was prepared to condition American weaponry on Israel’s actions amounts to a turning point in the seven-month conflict between Israel and Hamas. And his acknowledgement that American bombs had been used to kill civilians in Gaza was a stark recognition of the United States’ role in the war.

The president has come under extraordinary pressure, including from members of his own party, to limit shipments of arms amid a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Until now, the president had resisted those calls and strongly supported Israel’s efforts to go after Hamas. Yet a looming invasion of Rafah, the city in southern Gaza where more than a million Palestinian civilians have been sheltering, appears to have shifted the president’s calculus.

“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers,” Biden told CNN’s Erin Burnett in an exclusive interview on “Erin Burnett OutFront,” referring to 2,000-pound bombs that Biden paused shipments of last week.

“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah – they haven’t gone in Rafah yet – if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities – that deal with that problem,” Biden said. (Liptak, n.d.)

Reuters reports on a statement by Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant that Israel will achieve its war aims.

"I turn to Israel's enemies as well as to our best of friends and say - the State of Israel cannot be subdued," he said, according to remarks released by his office. "We will stand strong, we will achieve our goals - we will hit Hamas, we will hit Hezbollah, and we will achieve security."

The comments, from one of the war cabinet ministers considered to be most sensitive to the risk of alienating the United States, underlined the scale of the standoff between the Biden administration and the Israeli government. (Israeli Defence Minister Tells 'Friends and Enemies' Israel Will Achieve War Aims, n.d.)

Sulaiman Hakemy in an opinion piece for The National, asks about international law and the alleged use of AI software by the IDF to kill at scale.

To summarise the allegations briefly, the Israeli army has reportedly made use of an in-house AI-based programme called Lavender to identify possible Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) militants from within the Gazan population, and mark them as targets for Israeli air force bombers. In the early weeks of the war, when Palestinian casualties were at their highest, the military “almost completely relied on Lavender”, with the army giving “sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based”.

Four allegations, in particular, stand out because of their dire implications in international law.

First, Lavender was allegedly used primarily to target suspected “junior” (ie, low-ranking) militants.

Second, human checks were minimal, with one officer estimating them to last about 20 seconds per target, and mostly just to confirm whether the target was male (Hamas and PIJ do not have women in their ranks).

Third, a policy was apparently in place to try to bomb junior targets in their family homes, even if their civilian family members were present, using a system called “Where’s Daddy?” that would alert the military when the target reached the house. The name of the software is particularly malicious, as it implies the vulnerability of a target’s children as collateral damage. +972’s report notes that so-called dumb bombs, as opposed to precision weapons, were used in these strikes in spite of the fact that they cause more collateral damage, because precision weapons are too expensive to “waste” on such people.

And finally, the threshold for who was considered by the software to be a militant was toggled to cater to “a constant push to generate more targets for assassination”. In other words, if Lavender was not generating enough targets, the rating threshold was allegedly lowered to draw more Gazans – perhaps someone who fulfilled only a few of the criteria – into the kill net.

Every time an army seeks to kill someone, customary international law of armed conflict (that is, the established, legally binding practice of what is and is not acceptable in war) applies two tests. The first is distinction – that is, you have to discriminate between what is a civilian and a military target. The second is precaution – you have to take every feasible measure to avoid causing civilian death. (Hakemy, 2024)

The prospect of atrocious levels of civilian death and injury resulting from use of weapons that by nature or design are not restrained by military authorities to attend to the international humanitarian laws of distinction and proportionality is leading to further isolation of the Netanyahu government from friends and allies in the Western democracies.

References

Al-Mughrabi, N., Salem, M., & Renshaw, J. (n.d.). Israeli forces mass on Rafah's outskirts as US warns a major assault could halt arms. Reuters. Retrieved May 9, 2024, from https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-warns-israel-that-rafah-invasion-will-jeopardise-weapons-supply-assault-2024-05-09/ 

Hakemy, S. (2024, April 4). Israel, Gaza and AI machines - is this the automation of war crimes? The National. Retrieved May 9, 2024, from https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/2024/04/05/israel-gaza-ai/ 

Israeli defence minister tells 'friends and enemies' Israel will achieve war aims. (n.d.). Reuters. Retrieved May 9, 2024, from https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-defence-minister-tells-friends-enemies-israel-will-achieve-war-aims-2024-05-09/ 

Rafah Incursion Risks Allied Support

A leaders article in the Economist asserts that to accuse Israel of genocide requires that Israel is killing people in Gaza simply for being Palestinian. As Melanie Lidman reported for AP News on May 5, 2024, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he remains committed to an invasion of the southern Gaza city of Rafah, despite widespread international opposition because of the more than 1 million civilians huddled there.

Women mourn near the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes on Rafah. (Mohammed Salem/Reuters)

“I say to the leaders of the world: No amount of pressure, no decision by any international forum will stop Israel from defending itself,” he said, speaking in English. “Never again is now.” (Lidman, n.d.)

Yom Hashoah, the day Israel observes as a memorial for the 6 million Jews killed by Nazi Germany and its allies in the Holocaust, is one of the most solemn dates on the country’s calendar. The ceremony ushered in Israel’s first Holocaust remembrance day since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that sparked the war, imbuing the already somber day with additional meaning.

Hamas militants killed some 1,200 people in the attack, making it the deadliest violence against Jews since the Holocaust.

On Sunday, Netanyahu attacked those accusing Israel of carrying out a genocide against the Palestinians, claiming that Israel was doing everything possible to ensure the entry of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip.

Mouhamad Rachini  with CBC Radio reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would carry out a ground incursion of Rafah, with or without a hostage deal. The U.S. government, which provides military and diplomatic support to Israel, has said it opposes a military offensive in Rafah without a humanitarian plan.

Nyka Alexander, a communications officer with the UN's World Health Organization, has been in Rafah for two weeks. She spoke to Tom Galloway, CBC the Current, about what Palestinians are facing in Rafah and the state of health care in the city. Galloway asked for a sense as to how people in Rafah are feeling right now, given the idea of this escalation of a ground incursion hanging over their heads.

They're surrounded by garbage. They're surrounded by dirty water. They're surrounded by, essentially, open air toilets. And they're just tired and scared and don't want the next bad thing to happen on top of the other bad things that have already happened to them and their families.

Imagine all the sidewalks covered in tents and in these makeshift shelters. Imagine the streets flowing with greeny, bluey, black water that is feces mixed with garbage. Imagine there's no garbage cans, there's no garbage collection. There's just piles of garbage. 

People have tried their best. You can see that they've set aside areas where that community wants to put their garbage. But there's not a lot of organized garbage collection.

The flies are everywhere as well, and they're very aggressive. They want to go in your eyes, they want to go in your mouth. From a public health point of view, it's a really disastrous situation. (Rachini, 2024)

The Economist article raises questions of war crimes that may be committed by Israel in areas of discrimination between civilians and combatants and the proportionate use of force.

Those appalled by the suffering in Gaza may argue that genocide was the only charge that could be brought, because the ICJ has no jurisdiction over other war crimes. Yet the focus on an implausible crime diverts attention from the possibility that Israel is breaching the laws of war. These require Israel to distinguish between civilians and combatants and to minimise civilian casualties by being proportionate in the use of force.

The death toll of women and children raises grave doubts over whether Israel is meeting these obligations. It may also be failing to meet its duty under the Geneva Convention to provide medicine and food to civilians in the areas it occupies. As Gaza nears famine, its people do not need grandstanding, they need food. Israel’s leaders need to realise that if they block supplies, they will be held accountable by the court of public opinion—the only court available. (Charging Israel With Genocide Makes a Mockery of the ICJ, 2024)

The motives and actions of Israel are being assessed daily by student protests in the United States and in other western allies. The court of public opinion may decide, in a US election year, that when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects international pressure to halt the war in Gaza, he may live with his words: “If Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone.” (Lidman, n.d.)

References

Charging Israel with genocide makes a mockery of the ICJ. (2024, January 18). The Economist. Retrieved May 6, 2024, from https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/01/18/charging-israel-with-genocide-makes-a-mockery-of-the-icj 

Lidman, M. (n.d.). Netanyahu uses Holocaust ceremony to brush off international pressure against Gaza offensive. AP News. Retrieved May 6, 2024, from https://apnews.com/article/israel-holocaust-gaza-war-hamas-netanyahua 

Rachini, M. (2024, May 3). Under threat of military incursion, Palestinians in Rafah face feces-infested waters, illness: WHO official. CBC. Retrieved May 6, 2024, from https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/q-a-rafah-health-care-1.7193380