In my book, Goliath, I recounted how a former Israeli military intelligence analyst told me he nearly lost his mind during the second Lebanon invasion in 2006, when the army ran out of targets, and his unit was asked to concoct them. This meant finding any civilian structure in southern Lebanon to hit, and obliterating family homes, hospitals, apartment blocs - anything. In a state of anguish, he asked a friend to break his leg with a 2x4 so he could escape military service, but the bone refused to give in. He eventually left Israel for Germany and became involved in anti-Zionist activism.
A handful of Israeli intelligence sources involved in the current assault Gaza appear to have developed similar issues with their military's targeting system. In anonymous interviews with the left-liberal
@972mag, they disclosed how Israel uses AI to generate targets out of the Gaza population register. They call it a "mass assassination factory."
Under the AI system, known as "The Gospel," any home or neighborhood containing even a low level Hamas activist becomes a target, and the civilian death toll is known in advance: "Nothing happens by accident,โ said one source. โWhen a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, itโs because someone in the army decided it wasnโt a big deal for her to be killed โ that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.โ
As is well known, Israel's Unit 8200 tracks cellphone signals to find targets. In the current round of fighting, if the army detects the cell signal of a Hamas target in a densely populated area like the Jabaliya refugee camp, "we shell based on a wide cellular pinpointing of where the target is, killing civilians. This is often done to save time, instead of doing a little more work to get a more accurate pinpointing," a source told 972.
The intelligence sources not only state that most targets in Gaza contain zero military value, but that the logic of "human shields" used to justify slaughtering civilians could easily be turned back on Israeli society. โI remember thinking that it was like if [Palestinian militants] would bomb all the private residences of our families when [Israeli soldiers] go back to sleep at home on the weekend,โ reflected a soldier in an intel unit.
I have been saying since the start of the Israel military's blitzkreig on Gaza that its conduct is influenced less by strategic guidance than by a political imperative to satiate the outrage and bloodlust of the Jewish Israeli public. This too is confirmed by an intelligence source: "There is a feeling that senior officials in the army are aware of their failure on October 7, and are busy with the question of how to provide the Israeli public with an image [of victory] that will salvage their reputation.โ