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/
