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Algorithms and AI have turned Gaza into a laboratory of death
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260217-algorithms-and-ai-have-turned-gaza-into-a-laboratory-of-death/
A view of makeshift tents amid the rubble left behind by Israeli attacks as Palestinians carry on with their daily lives under harsh conditions in Gaza Strip on February 16
The revelations by +972 Magazine and Local Call have exposed the darkest core of the contemporary war in Gaza, in which genocide is carried out not only by bombs and missiles, but by data, algorithms and global digital platforms.
The Israeli artificial intelligence system known as Lavender has confirmed what the Palestinian resistance, Lebanon, and Iran have denounced for years: Technology as an organic part of the Zionist war machine, functioning as an instrument of surveillance, target selection, and mass extermination.
The liberal rhetoric of “digital privacy” collapses in the face of the facts. Applications such as WhatsApp insist on the promise of end-to-end encryption, but conceal what is essential, in which metadata are worth more than messages.
Lavender assessed virtually the entire population of the Gaza Strip, comprising more than 2.3 million people, assigning automated “risk scores”. Merely being in a WhatsApp group, maintaining frequent contact with someone already marked, or displaying digital patterns considered “suspicious” was enough to be placed on execution lists.
Human supervision was deliberately minimal, reduced to seconds, with conscious acceptance of high error rates. Entire families were killed in their homes, treated as “acceptable collateral damage” in an algorithmic equation that normalises massacre.
This is not a technical deviation. It is a policy of extermination. International Humanitarian Law explicitly prohibits indiscriminate attacks and requires distinction between civilians and combatants.
Systems that automate lethal decisions, pre-accepting the death of innocents, constitute crimes against humanity and reinforce the characterisation of genocide as a technologically organised and rationalised process.
The machinery that sustains this model is global. Twenty-first century espionage no longer depends on intercepting messages, but on controlling digital ecosystems.
Private platforms function as permanent sensors of planetary social life, feeding databases accessible to intelligence services such as the Mossad and the CIA, through formal cooperation, legal pressure or the exploitation of vulnerabilities. This represents a structural convergence between big tech companies, the military-industrial complex and the imperial security apparatus.
The denunciation is clear: Israel is not waging a war against combatants, but against Palestinian existence itself, now mediated by algorithms.
Hamas rejects Netanyahu aide’s 60-day ultimatum for group to disarm
Hamas has rejected remarks by an Israeli government official calling for the Gaza-based group to disarm in 60 days and threatening to resume Israel’s genocidal war if it fails to comply.
Senior Hamas official Mahmoud Mardawi told Al Jazeera Mubasher on Monday that he had no knowledge of such a demand.
“Statements made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu … and through the media are merely threats with no basis in the ongoing negotiations”, Al Jazeera Arabic cited him as saying.
Mardawi’s comments come after Israeli Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs, during a conference in Jerusalem on Monday, threatened to renew the genocidal war on Gaza if Hamas failed to disarm in 60 days, local media outlet the Times of Israel reported.
A top aide to Netanyahu, Fuchs claimed that the two-month period was requested by the United States administration. “We are respecting that,” he said.
Without confirming when the ultimatum would exactly start, Fuchs said it might begin with the February 19 meeting of US President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace – a Washington-backed plan for the reconstruction of Gaza.
“We will evaluate it,” Fuchs said. “If it works, great. If not, then the IDF [Israeli army] will have to complete the mission.”
Hamas’s Mardawi told Al Jazeera Mubasher that any threat to renew the war would have “serious repercussions for the region” and stressed that “the Palestinian people will not surrender”, AJA reported.
