TX replacing 1000s of human exam graders with AI

(...)
One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.

Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses.

Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.

(...)

The result, as the sources testified, is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions.

“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.”

In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.

(...)

In the Israeli army, the term “human target” referred in the past to a senior military operative who, according to the rules of the military’s International Law Department, can be killed in their private home even if there are civilians around. Intelligence sources told +972 and Local Call that during Israel’s previous wars, since this was an “especially brutal” way to kill someone — often by killing an entire family alongside the target — such human targets were marked very carefully and only senior military commanders were bombed in their homes, to maintain the principle of proportionality under international law.

But after October 7 — when Hamas-led militants launched a deadly assault on southern Israeli communities, killing around 1,200 people and abducting 240 — the army, the sources said, took a dramatically different approach. Under “Operation Iron Swords,” the army decided to designate all operatives of Hamas’ military wing as human targets, regardless of their rank or military importance. And that changed everything.

The new policy also posed a technical problem for Israeli intelligence. In previous wars, in order to authorize the assassination of a single human target, an officer had to go through a complex and lengthy “incrimination” process: cross-check evidence that the person was indeed a senior member of Hamas’ military wing, find out where he lived, his contact information, and finally know when he was home in real time. When the list of targets numbered only a few dozen senior operatives, intelligence personnel could individually handle the work involved in incriminating and locating them.

(...)

However, once the list was expanded to include tens of thousands of lower-ranking operatives, the Israeli army figured it had to rely on automated software and artificial intelligence. The result, the sources testify, was that the role of human personnel in incriminating Palestinians as military operatives was pushed aside, and AI did most of the work instead. According to four of the sources who spoke to +972 and Local Call, Lavender — which was developed to create human targets in the current war — has marked some 37,000 Palestinians as suspected “Hamas militants,” most of them junior, for assassination (the IDF Spokesperson denied the existence of such a kill list in a statement to +972 and Local Call).

(...)

The sources said that the approval to automatically adopt Lavender’s kill lists, which had previously been used only as an auxiliary tool, was granted about two weeks into the war, after intelligence personnel “manually” checked the accuracy of a random sample of several hundred targets selected by the AI system. When that sample found that Lavender’s results had reached 90 percent accuracy in identifying an individual’s affiliation with Hamas, the army authorized the sweeping use of the system. From that moment, sources said that if Lavender decided an individual was a militant in Hamas, they were essentially asked to treat that as an order, with no requirement to independently check why the machine made that choice or to examine the raw intelligence data on which it is based.

(...)

The Lavender software analyzes information collected on most of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip through a system of mass surveillance, then assesses and ranks the likelihood that each particular person is active in the military wing of Hamas or PIJ. According to sources, the machine gives almost every single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100, expressing how likely it is that they are a militant.

Lavender learns to identify characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ operatives, whose information was fed to the machine as training data, and then to locate these same characteristics — also called “features” — among the general population, the sources explained. An individual found to have several different incriminating features will reach a high rating, and thus automatically becomes a potential target for assassination.

In “The Human-Machine Team,” the book referenced at the beginning of this article, the current commander of Unit 8200 advocates for such a system without referencing Lavender by name. (The commander himself also isn’t named, but five sources in 8200 confirmed that the commander is the author, as reported also by Haaretz.) Describing human personnel as a “bottleneck” that limits the army’s capacity during a military operation, the commander laments: “We [humans] cannot process so much information. It doesn’t matter how many people you have tasked to produce targets during the war — you still cannot produce enough targets per day.”

The solution to this problem, he says, is artificial intelligence. The book offers a short guide to building a “target machine,” similar in description to Lavender, based on AI and machine-learning algorithms. Included in this guide are several examples of the “hundreds and thousands” of features that can increase an individual’s rating, such as being in a Whatsapp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently.

“The more information, and the more variety, the better,” the commander writes. “Visual information, cellular information, social media connections, battlefield information, phone contacts, photos.” While humans select these features at first, the commander continues, over time the machine will come to identify features on its own. This, he says, can enable militaries to create “tens of thousands of targets,” while the actual decision as to whether or not to attack them will remain a human one.

The book isn’t the only time a senior Israeli commander hinted at the existence of human target machines like Lavender. +972 and Local Call have obtained footage of a private lecture given by the commander of Unit 8200’s secretive Data Science and AI center, “Col. Yoav,” at Tel Aviv University’s AI week in 2023, which was reported on at the time in the Israeli media.

In the lecture, the commander speaks about a new, sophisticated target machine used by the Israeli army that detects “dangerous people” based on their likeness to existing lists of known militants on which it was trained. “Using the system, we managed to identify Hamas missile squad commanders,” “Col. Yoav” said in the lecture, referring to Israel’s May 2021 military operation in Gaza, when the machine was used for the first time.

(...)

The lecture presentation slides, also obtained by +972 and Local Call, contain illustrations of how the machine works: it is fed data about existing Hamas operatives, it learns to notice their features, and then it rates other Palestinians based on how similar they are to the militants.

“We rank the results and determine the threshold at which to attack a target,” “Col. Yoav” said in the lecture, emphasizing that “eventually, people of flesh and blood take the decisions. In the defense realm, ethically speaking, we put a lot of emphasis on this. These tools are meant to help intelligence officers break their barriers.”

In practice, however, sources who have used Lavender in recent months say human agency and precision were substituted by mass target creation and lethality.

‘There was no “zero-error” policy’

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.

For example, sources explained that the Lavender machine sometimes mistakenly flagged individuals who had communication patterns similar to known Hamas or PIJ operatives — including police and civil defense workers, militants’ relatives, residents who happened to have a name and nickname identical to that of an operative, and Gazans who used a device that once belonged to a Hamas operative.

“How close does a person have to be to Hamas to be considered by an AI machine to be affiliated with the organization?” said one source critical of Lavender’s inaccuracy. “It’s a vague boundary. Is a person who doesn’t receive a salary from Hamas, but helps them with all sorts of things, a Hamas operative? Is someone who was in Hamas in the past, but is no longer there today, a Hamas operative? Each of these features — characteristics that a machine would flag as suspicious — is inaccurate.”


Similar problems exist with the ability of target machines to assess the phone used by an individual marked for assassination. “In war, Palestinians change phones all the time,” said the source. “People lose contact with their families, give their phone to a friend or a wife, maybe lose it. There is no way to rely 100 percent on the automatic mechanism that determines which phone number belongs to whom.”

According to the sources, the army knew that the minimal human supervision in place would not discover these faults. “There was no ‘zero-error’ policy. Mistakes were treated statistically,” said a source who used Lavender. “Because of the scope and magnitude, the protocol was that even if you don’t know for sure that the machine is right, you know that statistically it’s fine. So you go for it.”

“It has proven itself,” said B., the senior source. “There’s something about the statistical approach that sets you to a certain norm and standard. There has been an illogical amount of bombing in this operation. This is unparalleled, in my memory. And I have much more trust in a statistical mechanism than a soldier who lost a friend two days ago. Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”

Another intelligence source, who defended the reliance on the Lavender-generated kill lists of Palestinian suspects, argued that it was worth investing an intelligence officer’s time only to verify the information if the target was a senior commander in Hamas. “But when it comes to a junior militant, you don’t want to invest manpower and time in it,” he said. “In war, there is no time to incriminate every target. So you’re willing to take the margin of error of using artificial intelligence, risking collateral damage and civilians dying, and risking attacking by mistake, and to live with it.”

B. said that the reason for this automation was a constant push to generate more targets for assassination. “In a day without targets (whose feature rating was sufficient to authorize a strike), we attacked at a lower threshold. We were constantly being pressured: ‘Bring us more targets.’ They really shouted at us. We finished (killing) our targets very quickly.”

He explained that when lowering the rating threshold of Lavender, it would mark more people as targets for strikes. “At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets,” said B. “But the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is. There were times when a Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defense personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs. They help the Hamas government, but they don’t really endanger soldiers.”

One source who worked with the military data science team that trained Lavender said that data collected from employees of the Hamas-run Internal Security Ministry, whom he does not consider to be militants, was also fed into the machine. “I was bothered by the fact that when Lavender was trained, they used the term ‘Hamas operative’ loosely, and included people who were civil defense workers in the training dataset,” he said.

The source added that even if one believes these people deserve to be killed, training the system based on their communication profiles made Lavender more likely to select civilians by mistake when its algorithms were applied to the general population. “Since it’s an automatic system that isn’t operated manually by humans, the meaning of this decision is dramatic: it means you’re including many people with a civilian communication profile as potential targets.”
‘We only checked that the target was a man’

The Israeli military flatly rejects these claims. In a statement to +972 and Local Call, the IDF Spokesperson denied using artificial intelligence to incriminate targets, saying these are merely “auxiliary tools that assist officers in the process of incrimination.” The statement went on: “In any case, an independent examination by an intelligence analyst is required, which verifies that the identified targets are legitimate targets for attack, in accordance with the conditions set forth in IDF directives and international law.”

However, sources said that the only human supervision protocol in place before bombing the houses of suspected “junior” militants marked by Lavender was to conduct a single check: ensuring that the AI-selected target is male rather than female. The assumption in the army was that if the target was a woman, the machine had likely made a mistake, because there are no women among the ranks of the military wings of Hamas and PIJ.

“A human being had to verify the target for just a few seconds,” B. said, explaining that this became the protocol after realizing the Lavender system was “getting it right” most of the time. “At first, we did checks to ensure that the machine didn’t get confused. But at some point we relied on the automatic system, and we only checked that the target was a man — that was enough. It doesn’t take a long time to tell if someone has a male or a female voice.”

To conduct the male/female check, B. claimed that in the current war, “I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time. If the operative came up in the automated mechanism, and I checked that he was a man, there would be permission to bomb him, subject to an examination of collateral damage.”


In practice, sources said this meant that for civilian men marked in error by Lavender, there was no supervising mechanism in place to detect the mistake. According to B., a common error occurred “if the Hamas target gave his phone to his son, his older brother, or just a random man. That person will be bombed in his house with his family. This happened often. These were most of the mistakes caused by Lavender,” B. said.

(...)

The next stage in the Israeli army’s assassination procedure is identifying where to attack the targets that Lavender generates.

In a statement to +972 and Local Call, the IDF Spokesperson claimed in response to this article that “Hamas places its operatives and military assets in the heart of the civilian population, systematically uses the civilian population as human shields, and conducts fighting from within civilian structures, including sensitive sites such as hospitals, mosques, schools and UN facilities. The IDF is bound by and acts according to international law, directing its attacks only at military targets and military operatives.”

The six sources we spoke to echoed this to some degree, saying that Hamas’ extensive tunnel system deliberately passes under hospitals and schools; that Hamas militants use ambulances to get around; and that countless military assets have been situated near civilian buildings. The sources argued that many Israeli strikes kill civilians as a result of these tactics by Hamas — a characterization that human rights groups warn evades Israel’s onus for inflicting the casualties.

However, in contrast to the Israeli army’s official statements, the sources explained that a major reason for the unprecedented death toll from Israel’s current bombardment is the fact that the army has systematically attacked targets in their private homes, alongside their families — in part because it was easier from an intelligence standpoint to mark family houses using automated systems.

Indeed, several sources emphasized that, as opposed to numerous cases of Hamas operatives engaging in military activity from civilian areas, in the case of systematic assassination strikes, the army routinely made the active choice to bomb suspected militants when inside civilian households from which no military activity took place. This choice, they said, was a reflection of the way Israel’s system of mass surveillance in Gaza is designed.

The sources told +972 and Local Call that since everyone in Gaza had a private house with which they could be associated, the army’s surveillance systems could easily and automatically “link” individuals to family houses. In order to identify the moment operatives enter their houses in real time, various additional automatic softwares have been developed. These programs track thousands of individuals simultaneously, identify when they are at home, and send an automatic alert to the targeting officer, who then marks the house for bombing. One of several of these tracking softwares, revealed here for the first time, is called “Where’s Daddy?”

“You put hundreds of targets into the system and wait to see who you can kill,” said one source with knowledge of the system. “It’s called broad hunting: you copy-paste from the lists that the target system produces.”

Evidence of this policy is also clear from the data: during the first month of the war, more than half of the fatalities — 6,120 people — belonged to 1,340 families, many of which were completely wiped out while inside their homes, according to UN figures. The proportion of entire families bombed in their houses in the current war is much higher than in the 2014 Israeli operation in Gaza (which was previously Israel’s deadliest war on the Strip), further suggesting the prominence of this policy.

Another source said that each time the pace of assassinations waned, more targets were added to systems like Where’s Daddy? to locate individuals that entered their homes and could therefore be bombed. He said that the decision of who to put into the tracking systems could be made by relatively low-ranking officers in the military hierarchy.

(...)

Lavender and systems like Where’s Daddy? were thus combined with deadly effect, killing entire families, sources said. By adding a name from the Lavender-generated lists to the Where’s Daddy? home tracking system, A. explained, the marked person would be placed under ongoing surveillance, and could be attacked as soon as they set foot in their home, collapsing the house on everyone inside.

(...)

Once Lavender has marked a target for assassination, army personnel have verified that they are male, and tracking software has located the target in their home, the next stage is picking the munition with which to bomb them.


(...)


According to A., who was an officer in a target operation room in the current war, the army’s international law department has never before given such “sweeping approval” for such a high collateral damage degree. “It’s not just that you can kill any person who is a Hamas soldier, which is clearly permitted and legitimate in terms of international law,” A. said. “But they directly tell you: ‘You are allowed to kill them along with many civilians.’

(...)

The predetermined and fixed collateral damage degree helped accelerate the mass creation of targets using the Lavender machine, sources said, because it saved time. B. claimed that the number of civilians they were permitted to kill in the first week of the war per suspected junior militant marked by AI was fifteen, but that this number “went up and down” over time.


(...)

“Sometimes (the target) was at home earlier, and then at night he went to sleep somewhere else, say underground, and you didn’t know about it,” one of the sources said. “There are times when you double-check the location, and there are times when you just say, ‘Okay, he was in the house in the last few hours, so you can just bomb.’”