How does Israel compare to failed states? | Israel-Palestine conflict

Critics describe Israel as a political entity that can only survive with repression and state-sanctioned violence.

Israel has been in a state of near-perpetual war for decades, receives billions of dollars a year in aid and weapons, and has consistently broken international law by expanding its occupation and settlements.

Governments and international human rights organisations have called for war crimes investigations into Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.

Yet, for leader Benjamin Netanyahu, it is “the only democracy in the Middle East”, a view often repeated by supporters.

Critics say Israel is a political entity that can only survive with repression, the denial of rights, and violence.

So is Israel a normal state? Could it be defined as a fragile state? Or does it have the characteristics of a failed state?

Presenter: Cyril Vanier

Guests:

Ali Abunimah – Co-founder of the Electronic Intifada, an independent online news publication focusing on Palestine

Paul Turner – President and executive director of the Fund For Peace, a non-profit research organisation that produces the annual Fragile States Index

Ilan Pappe – Israeli historian and author of, The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge

Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Nativity scene places baby Jesus in rubble | Israel-Palestine conflict News

NewsFeed

“This is what Christmas looks like in Palestine.” A church in the occupied West Bank has changed this year’s nativity scene, laying baby Jesus in the rubble, to show solidarity with the people of Gaza.

Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Israeli army surrounds Khan Younis as southern Gaza attacks intensify | Israel-Palestine conflict News

Israeli forces are surrounding the city of Khan Younis, Israel’s top military commander has said, as the ground offensive spreads to the south of the Gaza Strip.

“Sixty days after the war began our forces are now encircling the Khan Younis area in the southern Gaza Strip,” said Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, the Israeli army’s chief of general staff, on Tuesday.

“We have secured many Hamas strongholds in the northern Gaza Strip, and now we are operating against its strongholds in the south,” Halevi said, according to the Times of Israel newspaper, as he announced the next phase of Israel’s ground offensive against the Palestinian group.

“Anyone who thought that the IDF [Israeli army] would not know how to resume the fighting after the truce was mistaken,” he added of the pause in hostilities that collapsed on Friday, and that enabled the exchange of captives held in Gaza for Palestinians in Israeli jails.

Hamas’s Osama Hamdan said there would be “no negotiations or a [prisoner] swap” before the Israeli assault comes to an end.

Speaking to reporters in Beirut, Hamdan also said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “responsible” for the lives of Israeli captives in Gaza, adding that his true objective is to “eliminate the Palestinian people”.

The Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, said it had engaged in fighting against the Israeli army in all areas of the Strip since Tuesday morning.

A statement on the group’s Telegram channel claimed it totally or partially destroyed 24 army vehicles in Khan Younis, Gaza’s second-largest city. It added its snipers killed and wounded eight Israeli soldiers.

More than one million Palestinians have been displaced from northern Gaza since October 13, when the Israeli military ordered residents there to evacuate to the south on 24 hours’ notice.

After the weeklong truce expired, the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of Palestinians from southern Gaza.

Families in Khan Younis were packing up again and heading further south to Rafah, a town on the Egyptian border. Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from Rafah, said the tight pocket of land was already crammed with people camping out in the open and lacking basic services including water and sanitation.

“Rafah is now the last shelter left for Palestinians, [but] the bombardment continues also in this area,” he said.

Richard Peeperkorn, the World Health Organization (WHO) representative for the occupied Palestinian territories, told reporters via video link from Gaza that “the situation is getting worse by the hour”.

“There’s intensified bombing going on all around, including here in the southern areas, Khan Younis and even in Rafah,” Peeperkorn said.

WHO has repeatedly warned that the spread of disease could be even deadlier than air strikes. While disease surveillance systems are hampered, the UN agency has noted increases in infectious diseases, including acute respiratory infections, scabies and diarrhoea.

Thomas White, director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza, said the agency was “not able to provide for more internally displaced people (IDPs)”.

“Rafah normally has a population of 280,000 and already hosting around 470,000 IDPs will not cope with a doubling of its IDP population,” White said.

Adnan Abu Hasna, a UNRWA representative, said the agency was expecting more than one million people to arrive in Gaza’s southernmost city in the coming days.

“We have tens of thousands of families in the streets. They are already [sheltering] under random things – pieces of nylon and wood. It’s raining now. We will see the disaster,” he said, adding about 50 to 70 aid trucks entering Gaza daily via the Rafah border did not come close to meeting the needs of those displaced.

At the 44th summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which commenced on Tuesday in the Qatari capital Doha, Qatar’s emir said the deaths of innocent Palestinians in Gaza amounted to a “genocide committed by Israel”.

“It is a disgrace upon the international community to allow this heinous crime to continue … with systemic and purposeful killing of innocent unarmed civilians,” Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani said in his opening remarks.

Local residents in the north of Gaza, where a ground invasion began over a month ago amid a relentless air offensive, also described harrowing conditions. Munir al-Bursh, director-general of the Health Ministry in Gaza, spoke to Al Jazeera from inside the Kamal Adwan Hospital, which hosts thousands of refugees looking for safety.

“The Israeli occupation forces have laid siege to the facility from all sides. Patients and those who took shelter here are gripped with fear and overwhelmed by horror,” he said. “The Israeli forces are attacking with the aim of forcibly removing all those inside the hospital. These are patients, victims and displaced civilians.”

WHO recorded 203 attacks on healthcare facilities from October 7 to November 28, a number it described as “unprecedented.”

 

Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Lebanon army says one soldier killed in Israeli shelling on border post | Israel-Palestine conflict News

Attack marks first death for Lebanon’s armed forces since cross-border attacks with Israel started in October.

A Lebanese soldier has been killed in Israeli shelling on a military post near the country’s southern border, Lebanon’s army said, the first such death since cross-border hostilities began in October

Three others were wounded, according to an army statement on Tuesday, after the attack on the frontier post on Oweida hill.

“An army military position in the … Adaysseh area was bombarded by the Israeli enemy, leaving one soldier martyred and three others injured,” the statement said.

The attack marked the first time that a member of Lebanon’s armed forces has been killed since the current round of fighting between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas in Gaza started on October 7.

Since then, Israel and armed groups in southern Lebanon – some 200km (124 miles) from the Gaza Strip, particularly the powerful Iran-backed Hezbollah, have engaged in back-and-forth exchanges across the border that have killed more than 100 people, about 80 of them Hezbollah fighters.

Since Friday, when a truce collapsed between Hamas and Israel collapsed, Israeli forces and Hezbollah have exchanged fire across the Israel-Lebanon border on a daily basis.

On Tuesday, Hezbollah said that its fighters had attacked four Israeli positions along the border, while Israel said that several missiles launched from southern Lebanon fell in vacant areas.

Lebanon’s National News Agency reported that Israeli forces had shelled and carried out air raids in the area of southern Lebanon near the border.

Despite the steady pace of tit-for-tat reprisals, Israel and Hezbollah have so far taken steps to avoid escalation that could lead to a large-scale war. Lebanon’s army has not been involved in the fighting.

In late November, a UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon said that its forces had come under fire from Israeli forces, an incident it called “deeply troubling”.

Tens of thousands of people in communities near the borders of both countries have evacuated their homes, fearful that they could be caught up in the middle of an escalation if it eventually takes place.

Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Is Israel’s Gaza bombing also a war on the climate? | Israel-Palestine conflict News

Many of the world’s leaders are gathered in Dubai for COP28, the annual United Nations summit on climate change. Some 2,400km (1,500 miles) to the West, meanwhile, Israel’s war on Gaza is raging.

Sixty days into the war, Israel’s bombs have killed about 16,000 people, including more than 6,600 children. But increasingly, experts are also worried about its effect on the environment and on Gaza’s ability to combat climate change.

From polluted water supplies to toxic smoke-filled air from burning buildings and bodies, every aspect of life in Gaza is now filled with some form of pollution.

“On the ground, this war has destroyed every aspect of Gaza’s environment,” Nada Majdalani, the Ramallah-based Palestine director for EcoPeace Middle East, told Al Jazeera.

Here’s a look at how the unstoppable bombardment of the enclave could further affect climate change in a region that has already seen temperatures increase, with projections of a 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) rise by the end of the century.

How has the Israeli bombing affected Gaza’s climate change measures?

Gaza has been under an Israeli siege for 16 years, with Israeli authorities holding the switch to — among other things — dependable access to fuel and power in the enclave.

As a result, the people of Gaza turned significantly to solar energy to power their homes.

“Gazans have been climate adaptive, and some 60 percent of their energy would come from solar power,” Majdalani said.

But Israeli bombing has damaged or destroyed thousands of buildings, many of which were roofed with solar panels.

“Destroying the solar panels is not only targeting the wellbeing of people, it’s diminishing the efforts of the Gazans in taking climate adaptation and measures to secure clean energy,” she said.

“These solar installations now lay in the rubble with the buildings destroyed, setting back Gaza’s climate change efforts.”

What are the main environmental concerns on the ground?

Amid the war, “getting figures and measurements of the extent of the damage” to Gaza’s environment is difficult, said Majdalani.

But some things are clear. Decaying bodies and contaminated water supplies are a “ticking time bomb” that will lead to the spread of diseases, she said.

“Right now this is the greatest concern, and everyone should be worried, including Israel. Having military might on the ground cannot protect them against the spread of cholera which is predicted.”

Impending rains are another concern. Majdalani’s team estimates 44 percent of gas, water and sanitation facilities have either been completely or partially damaged in Gaza since the war began. This includes water wells and wastewater treatment. Sewage water has already flooded Gaza streets, but if rain mixes with the filth, the risks of cholera and other gastrointestinal diseases increase further.

“The war damage to Gaza’s water sanitation and hygiene infrastructure makes flooding more likely with the winter rains,” Doug Weir, director of the Conflict and Environment Observatory, an independent research body based in the United Kingdom, said.

Even before the current war, inadequate sanitation infrastructure and electricity shortages meant that untreated sewage water was dumped into the sea and was responsible for more than one-quarter of illnesses. It was the primary cause of child morbidity in the Gaza Strip.

According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, the total shutdown of wastewater treatment plants in October, after Israel imposed a complete blockade on any fuel entering the strip, led to the release of more than 130,000 cubic metres of untreated sewage into the Mediterranean Sea daily, posing a grave environmental hazard.

With the destruction amid the current war, huge volumes of debris and waste are blocking sewers, warned Weir. This, he said, “will allow more standing water, with associated risks to human health from transmissible diseases from wastewater mixing with rainwater.”

Could there also be a rise in carbon emissions adding to global warming?

This war, like others before it, requires vast quantities of fossil fuel, leading to excessive carbon emissions and pollutants in the environment.

Earlier reports suggest 25,000 tonnes of munitions were dropped on Gaza in the first few weeks of the war. The carbon emissions from this would equate with the annual energy use of approximately 2,300 homes, or the annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from approximately 4,600 passenger vehicles.

The world’s military forces also use fossil fuels to operate aircraft, tanks and weapons, accounting for approximately 5.5 percent of global emissions. The figure could be higher as defence forces are not bound to report their carbon emissions as it may undermine national security.

“Methodologies to count emissions from conflicts are in their infancy,” Weir told Al Jazeera.

But things are slowly changing.

Last week, the UN Environment Programme’s flagship Emissions Gap report, which is released before each COP meeting, made mention of conflict and military emissions for the first time, calling for more research into the topic.

What effects do the weapons used in Gaza have on the environment?

Groups like Human Rights Watch have also accused Israel of using white phosphorous munitions in Gaza, which added further to the pollution in the atmosphere, said Majdalani. “As Gaza enters the rainy season, we expect the rain to fall as acid rain, contaminated with white phosphorus.”

People who use plastic sheets to collect rainwater to drink directly, amid a shortage of drinking water, could be particularly at risk, she said.

In the first weeks of the war, the United Nations humanitarian agency OCHA reported Israel dropped 42 bombs every hour on Gaza.

In addition to the emissions from weapons, their manufacture also contributes to pollution, Weir explained. “Far more emissions come from them during production, for example in creating the metal for their casings.”

Reports from Ukraine suggested the fighting there released some 100 million tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere in the first seven months of the war.

So what about Gaza?

“We anticipate that the bulk of the emissions in this war will be from military fuel use – Israeli jet fuel and diesel, from urban and landscape fires caused either by the destruction of buildings or targeted attacks, and from the carbon costs of reconstructing Gaza.”

How will destroyed buildings and reconstruction add to climate change?

Other risks include fires, pulverised building materials that can include harmful substances like asbestos, and pollutants released from facilities containing hazardous materials.

Even rebuilding war-torn areas that have turned to rubble causes significant emissions. “Producing concrete and cement to rebuild generates a large quantity of carbon dioxide, which contributes to the climate crisis,” said Weir.

Lennard de Klerk, from the Initiative in GHG Accounting of War, did a rough calculation on how much GHG emission would result from rebuilding just residential and non-residential buildings that were destroyed or damaged after the first six weeks of the war.

He told Al Jazeera, “5.8 million tonnes of carbon emissions would be released to produce construction materials and the emissions of the construction activities itself”.

That is already a fifth of the projected emissions for the reconstruction of Ukraine from its war, which has been going on for 21 months as opposed to two months in Gaza.

Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Northern Gaza hospital ‘overwhelmed by horror’ as Israeli army lays siege | Israel-Palestine conflict News

Terrified civilians are trapped inside the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza as Israeli forces have encircled the medical facility, a senior official at the Ministry of Health tells Al Jazeera.

More than 100 people have been killed in strikes close to the facility, the ministry said on Tuesday.

“The Israeli occupation forces have laid siege to the hospital from all sides. As you can hear, we are targeted by gunfire and artillery shells,” said Munir al-Bursh, director-general of the Health Ministry in Gaza, speaking from inside Kamal Adwan.

“Patients, injured and those who took shelter in the hospital are gripped with fear; overwhelmed by horror,” he said.

Kamal Adwan is one of only six hospitals still operating in the Gaza Strip.

Footage from Kamal Adwan showed bodies swaddled in white, lined up in rows in a courtyard of the medical compound. Witnesses said anyone attempting to leave was being shot at by Israeli snipers.

“We fear a massacre inside Kamal Adwan Hospital, as happened in [al-Shifa Hospital] and the [Indonesian Hospital]”, al-Bursh said.

A Palestinian man receives treatment after an Israeli strike near the Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip on November 22, 2023 [File: Mohammad Ahmad/AFP]

‘They have already killed us’

Overnight, injured people continued to stream into the hospital amid ongoing bombardment, their heads and faces covered in dust. The hundreds of evacuees taking shelter there are shown resting or being treated on the floor by medics with extremely limited resources.

“What do they want from us? They have already killed us. Our families and friends are dead,” a man at the medical facility told Al Jazeera.

A second man explained that he moved to the hospital hoping to find safety from the Israeli air strikes, but his words were abruptly interrupted by the loud bang of an explosion that could be heard very close by.

“We wished we were not left behind,” screamed a woman, her hands shaking and her voice imbued with desperation.

More than 1.1 million people were ordered in mid-October to evacuate the north of the Strip and to move southwards as Israeli troops were advancing their ground offensive.

Battles and aerial strikes stopped for a weeklong truce to allow the exchange of captives Hamas took in its attack on Israel on October 7 for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. The temporary halt in fighting collapsed on Friday.

‘Holding our ground’

Since the truce ended, Israeli forces resumed their attacks across Gaza with a renewed intensity in the north, while also expanding their operations to the south.

Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed more than 15,900 Palestinians since October 7, after Hamas killed about 1,100 in Israel that day.

While international pressure has been mounting on Israel to show restraint in targeting civilians in its second phase of the war, scores of dead have been reported each night.

On Monday night, at least 158 people were confirmed dead, Gaza’s Health Ministry said. Of these, more than 108 were killed in strikes close to the Kamal Adwan Hospital; 40 dead bodies were received at the Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis. The previous night, the ministry said 349 people were killed.

The situation at the Kamal Adwan Hospital echoes the events that unfolded at the al-Shifa Hospital, the biggest of the Strip, where people seeking shelter, patients in critical conditions and doctors were ordered, some at gunpoint, to evacuate after several days of siege. Israel denied doing so.

“The hospital is under attack by Israeli forces with the aim of evacuating all those inside the hospital,” said al-Bursh. “We, the medical staff, are holding our ground. We are standing by our patients and the wounded.”

Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Israel and WHO in online row over removal of medical supplies in Gaza | Israel-Palestine conflict News

An online row has emerged between the World Health Organization (WHO) and Israel after the United Nations health body said the Israeli army ordered it to remove supplies from its warehouse in southern Gaza, a claim Israel then denied.

The “WHO received notification” from the Israeli forces “that we should remove our supplies from our medical warehouse in southern Gaza within 24 hours, as ground operations will put it beyond use”, its chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a post on X on Monday.

He appealed to Israel to withdraw the order and take measures to protect infrastructure such as hospitals.

The Israeli army snapped back on Tuesday, saying it never issued such a warning. “The truth is that we didn’t ask you to evacuate the warehouses and we also made it clear [and in writing] to the relevant UN representatives,” COGAT, the Israeli defence ministry body responsible for Palestinian civilian affairs, said on X.

“From a UN official we would expect, at least, to be more accurate,” it added.

“This is a social media row that is burning up and we can expect that it will continue to rumble on,” said Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher, reporting from occupied East Jerusalem.

“We can see that the WHO did take this seriously to start moving stuff out of the warehouse,” our correspondent said, adding that the warehouse services 11 hospitals in southern Gaza, and there were concerns among UN officials that the removal of supplies could lead hospitals in the south to become even more overwhelmed.

“This has the possibility of growing into a bigger diplomatic row,” he noted.

The WHO, like other UN agencies, has repeatedly called on Israel to restrain its use of force to avoid targeting civilians and medical facilities in its military offensive in Gaza.

‘Nowhere is safe in Gaza’

Meanwhile, on Monday, Lynn Hastings, UN humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories, warned that an “even more hellish scenario is about to unfold, one in which humanitarian operations may not be able to respond”, adding that “the conditions required to deliver aid to the people of Gaza do not exist”.

Since the end of a seven-day truce, Israeli forces have pushed into southern Gaza, “forcing tens of thousands … into increasingly compressed spaces, desperate to find food, water, shelter and safety”, Hastings said in a statement. “Nowhere is safe in Gaza and there is nowhere left to go.”

After Hamas launched an assault in southern Israel on October 7 that killed more than 1,100 people, Israel has bombarded the Gaza Strip, killing more than 15,900 Palestinians, including 6,600 children. Entire neighbourhoods have been pulverised; about 1.9 million people, more than 80 percent of the population, fled their homes.

The WHO has recorded an unprecedented number of attacks on the strip’s healthcare system, including 203 on hospitals, ambulances, medical supplies, and the detention of healthcare workers.

 

‘Influx of bodies’

After focusing most of its air and ground raids on northern Gaza for more than a month, the Israeli army announced over the weekend the expansion of its operations to the south following the collapse of the truce. The move spurred great concerns among health officials who fear a further deterioration of an already catastrophic humanitarian crisis.

“We are flooded with an influx of dead bodies,” Munir al-Bursh, the director general of Gaza’s Ministry of Health, told Al Jazeera on Monday, describing a collapsed healthcare system unable to cope with the needs of the population amid an acute shortage of staff and medical supplies.

Areas in the south are jammed with civilians who escaped bombardment in the north after heeding Israeli evacuation orders that indicated southern Gaza as a safe space. But as that area is now being heavily bombed and tanks are approaching the south’s main city of Khan Younis, civilians describe a great sense of fear and frustrations on where to go next.

The WHO issued a statement warning that intensifying military ground operations in Khan Younis “are likely to cut thousands off from healthcare, especially from the area’s two main hospitals, as the number of wounded and sick increases”.

In the south, thousands of people are now sheltering at the Nasser Medical Complex and another 70,000 at the 370-bed European Gaza Hospital, the UN agency estimates.



Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Will Israel heed US calls to protect civilians or risk ‘strategic failure’? | Israel-Palestine conflict

The administration of US President Joe Biden appears to be ramping up pressure on Israel to keep Palestinians safe.

Israel’s military has resumed its assault on the besieged Gaza Strip after a seven-day truce collapsed.

More than 15,000 people have been killed in Gaza since early October, according to Palestinian health authorities.

The limited number of aid trucks going into Gaza is nowhere near enough to meet the desperate needs of millions of people, according to aid agencies, and the United Nations has warned of a humanitarian catastrophe.

After nearly two months of the Israel-Hamas war, the United States, a key Israeli ally, appears to be shifting its tone and warning against civilian deaths in Gaza.

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin says Israel risks a “strategic defeat” if it doesn’t do more to protect civilians.

It’s a sentiment being shared by other senior US officials.

So, what’s behind this warning from Washington?

Presenter: Laura Kyle

Guests:

Bushra Khalidi – policy lead for the occupied Palestinian territory and Israel at Oxfam

Elijah Magnier – military and political analyst

Hussein Haridi – a former assistant foreign minister of Egypt

Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Fact or fiction? Israeli maps and AI do not save Palestinian lives | Israel-Palestine conflict

On December 2, the Israeli army’s Arabic-language spokesperson Avichay Adraee posted a map of Gaza, broken up into a grid of numbered blocks with instructions that Palestinians living in certain areas evacuate to Rafah. Leaflets containing a QR code linking to the map on the Israeli army’s website were also dropped over Gaza.

This move came as Israeli fighter jets bombarded the south of the Strip – previously designated as a “safe zone” – killing hundreds of Palestinians in 24 hours. The Israeli army proudly announced that it had hit “400 targets”.

Meanwhile, media reports revealed that the Israeli army’s ability to intensify what it calls “precision” air strikes has been boosted by an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that generates “targets”.

The maps, the leaflets, the tweets, the claims of “precision” military technology, all feed into the narrative that Israel’s “most moral army” is taking care to protect civilians in Gaza. But all these are no more than a propaganda ploy to cover up what really is happening on the ground – an AI-assisted genocide.

A game of maps

Over the past two months of brutal war, Israel has constantly resorted to the use of “evacuation” maps and warnings issued on social media, calling on Palestinians to flee certain areas of Gaza.

Yet the mounting death toll – nearly 16,000 people and thousands more missing and likely dead – offers no evidence that Israel is in fact concerned about the wellbeing of Palestinian civilians.

What it is concerned is about the growing condemnations abroad of what legal experts are calling genocide and increasing pressure from the United States.

Just a few days ago, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Israel it has weeks, and not months, to finish its campaign in Gaza. His boss, President Joe Biden, is acutely aware of the growing domestic discontent with how he is handling the war, which could cost him votes in next year’s presidential election.

This “evacuation messaging” the Israeli army has been undertaking is more directed at Western audiences, seeking to assuage their fears about the civilian death toll, than the Palestinians in Gaza. The fact that it is delivered mostly on social media platforms indicates the intended audience is not the people in the Strip.

The Israeli army has not only cut off electricity to Gaza but also targeted and damaged its already temperamental mobile network, thus leaving most of the people there with almost no access to the internet.

The leaflets that were dropped over the weekend are also not worth the paper they were printed on. The QR code on them is of use only if there is a working phone with a charged battery and internet access.

Discrepancies of different maps being shared by Israeli officials have also resulted in additional confusion. Areas marked for targeting in orange did not even correspond with the numbers of blocks officials were telling people to evacuate from.

Consequently, the overall impact of the maps has been to create “fear, panic and confusion”, as Melanie Ward, CEO of Medical Aid for Palestinians, explained in a tweet.

Furthermore, the detailed mapping and dissection of Gaza are designed to create the illusion of precision and precaution, but the evacuation orders behind them demonstrate the opposite.

Gaza is 360 square kilometres and has a population of 2.3 million. The average size of each of the 620 blocks on the map is 0.58 square kilometres, which means approximately 3,700 residents per block.

Asking dozens of blocks equating to tens of thousands of people to move is hardly “precision”. It is mass displacement masquerading as parsimonious precaution.

Israel’s digital killing machine

Apart from using digital maps and QR codes to try and prove to its allies that its army is not reckless, Israel is also boasting about its “precision” military technologies.

Among them is an AI weapons system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”) which can quickly and automatically identify targets, much faster than older methods.

If in previous bombing campaigns, the Israeli army would manually select 50 targets per day, today the new system provides 100.

According to one source quoted by the +972 magazine, this weapon has turned the Israeli army into a “mass assassination factory”, focusing more on the “quantity and not quality”.

The magazine reports that the Israeli soldiers using the AI targeting system are aware of the number of civilians they will kill; it is displayed in the category “collateral damage” in the target file.

The Israeli army has categorised thresholds of civilian deaths, ranging from five to the hundreds. The directive “collateral damage five”, for example, means the Israeli soldiers are authorised to kill a target that will also kill 5 civilians.

On the higher end, “the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander”, +972 magazine reports.

Given that Israel considers all 30,000 Hamas members in Gaza as potential targets, this means that “wiping out” the movement would entail a massive civilian death toll. If we use the lowest “collateral damage five”, the most conservative estimate amounts to 150,000 civilians.

Of course, as Hamas leaders that are killed are inevitably replaced, hundreds more Palestinians will be murdered as the AI system generates more new targets. Since Hamas cannot be defeated militarily, the only logical outcome of this will be the perpetual murder or removal of everyone in Gaza.

Another disturbing element of AI is that it reproduces biases it has been trained on. Historically, Israel has shown little regard for civilian life in its bombing. One has to wonder to what extent the secretive AI has learned to associate any Palestinian with “Hamas terrorist” based on past Israeli army behaviour. This might explain why it is able to generate so many new “targets” for bombing.

The propaganda of precision

Israel likes to boast about its morality and high-tech, precision strike capabilities, ironically as a means of defending itself against claims of indiscriminately attacking civilians and allegations of war crimes.

This characterisation of the Israeli army’s technological sophistication is also used by the US to help justify its support for Israel. Blinken, for example, has stated that “Israel has … one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world. It is capable of neutralising the threat posed by Hamas while minimising harm to innocent men, women and children.”

But the more the US and Israel promote the narrative of its technological prowess, the more it gives an element of legal jeopardy. As international law professor Michael Schmitt argues, “the greater the precision capabilities of an attacker, the more compelling the characterisation of an attack striking civilians or civilian objects as reckless”.

In other words, a high-tech army has more of an obligation to try and “prove” that they are not being reckless. The more Israel and the US boast of Israel’s technical prowess, the more people question why so many civilians are being killed.

The only answer is that Israel has precision weapons, but is still targeting people indiscriminately. Thus, sophisticated technology, rather than serving its ostensible purpose of precision and precaution, is instead weaponised as a tool of mass killing and destruction. In other words, what we are seeing in Gaza is an AI-assisted genocide.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Israel expands ground operations in south Gaza | Israel-Palestine conflict

NewsFeed

Palestinians say they have nowhere left to run as Israel’s military expands its assault in south Gaza, where it told more than a million people to flee to.

Check out our Latest News and Follow us at Facebook

Original Source

Exit mobile version