According to a
report published in +972 magazine, the Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using artificial intelligence (AI) targeting systems and “little human oversight.” The system being used is called “Lavender” and has “played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians, especially during the early stages of the war,” the report notes, underscoring that Israeli officials treated outputs as if they were “human decision.”
Esteban Carrillo, a Beirut-based Ecuadorian journalist and current editor for The Cradle, joined Sputnik’s Fault Lines on Friday to discuss the current events unfolding in the Gaza Strip.
Asked about Lavender, which is designed to mark all “suspected operatives” in Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) as potential threats, Carrillo noted that genocide is a “time-consuming endeavor” and the technology used most likely came from the West. Sputnik’s Jamarl Thomas pointed out the technology is acting as a form of “industrialized killing.”
“If you were killed in Gaza, you are a terrorist. This is what an Israeli reserve officer told Haaretz last week,” he added. “He said that a terrorist is anybody who gets killed in the field. They use these facial recognition cameras, they use AI to arrest, to kidnap Palestinian men, Palestinian women, I'm sure as well, children, to torture them, to keep them in detention.”
Seven employees with the World Central Kitchen (WCK) were killed on Monday by Israeli airstrikes.
Chef José Andrés, the organization’s founder, said his WCK team was deliberately targeted by the Israeli military, adding that his staff were in a deconfliction zone controlled by Israeli forces who had been given prior notice of their presence.
Following the fatal strike, US President Joe Biden warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday that any future support from the US is dependent on the protection of civilians and aid workers in Gaza. It proved the first time the US threatened to pull support from Israel.
“Joe Biden, according to all of these reports, he gave Netanyahu an ultimatum,” said Carrillo.
“Israel, today, said they would temporarily open another land crossing into Gaza, which is something we have been talking about for months. If you want more humanitarian aid into Gaza, open more crossings because hundreds of trucks are waiting to enter and protect humanitarian workers. So, yes, there's large condemnation about the deaths of these seven people,” he continued.
“But, because they are not Palestinian, because they are not Arab, all of a sudden their lives matter more? That, to me, is what is the biggest story here in the end.”
“Gaza, a media office this week updated the death toll to have already surpassed 33,000, including 7,000 missing over the past six months. So you're probably looking at a death toll of likely 40,000,” said Carrillo.
US media
reported that the Biden administration recently authorized a thousand MK-82 bombs in the latest arms shipment to Israel. Though it's reported the shipment was approved before the Israeli strike on the aid convoy, Carrillo noted politicians are simply “clutching their pearls” and saying “all the right things" as weapons continue to flow.
“Following the attack,” said Carrillo. “There was a shipment of aid that was coming from Cyprus that was turned around in the Mediterranean Sea. Because this is the Israeli policy, it's like when they were laying siege to Al-Shifa hospital. You know, the question was, why Al-Shifa hospital? Why hospitals?”