The latest Israel-Hamas war has provided an unprecedented opportunity for the IDF to use such tools in a much wider theatre of operations and, in particular, to deploy an AI target-creation platform called “the Gospel”, which has significantly accelerated a lethal production line of targets that officials have compared to a “factory”.
New details have emerged about the Gospel and its central role in Israel’s war in Gaza, using interviews with intelligence sources and little-noticed statements made by the IDF and retired officials.
This article also draws on testimonies published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, which have interviewed several current and former sources in Israel’s intelligence community who have knowledge of the Gospel platform.
Their comments offer a glimpse inside a secretive, AI-facilitated military intelligence unit that is playing a significant role in Israel’s response to the Hamas massacre in southern Israel on 7 October.
The slowly emerging picture of how Israel’s military is harnessing AI comes against a backdrop of growing concerns about the risks posed to civilians as advanced militaries around the world expand the use of complex and opaque automated systems on the battlefield.
“Other states are going to be watching and learning,” said a former White House security official familiar with the US military’s use of autonomous systems.
The Israel-Hamas war, they said, would be an “important moment if the IDF is using AI in a significant way to make targeting choices with life-and-death consequences”.
From 50 targets a year to 100 a day
In early November, the IDF said “more than 12,000” targets in Gaza had been identified by its target administration division.
Describing the unit’s targeting process, an official said: “We work without compromise in defining who and what the enemy is. The operatives of Hamas are not immune – no matter where they hide.”
The activities of the division, formed in 2019 in the IDF’s intelligence directorate, are classified.
However a short statement on the IDF website claimed it was using an AI-based system called Habsora (the Gospel, in English) in the war against Hamas to “produce targets at a fast pace”.
The IDF said that “through the rapid and automatic extraction of intelligence”, the Gospel produced targeting recommendations for its researchers “with the goal of a complete match between the recommendation of the machine and the identification carried out by a person”.
Multiple sources familiar with the IDF’s targeting processes confirmed the existence of the Gospel to +972/Local Call, saying it had been used to produce automated recommendations for attacking targets, such as the private homes of individuals suspected of being Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives.
In recent years, the target division has helped the IDF build a database of what sources said was between 30,000 and 40,000 suspected militants. Systems such as the Gospel, they said, had played a critical role in building lists of individuals authorised to be assassinated.
Aviv Kochavi, who served as the head of the IDF until January, has said the target division is “powered by AI capabilities” and includes hundreds of officers and soldiers.
In an interview published before the war, he said it was “a machine that produces vast amounts of data more effectively than any human, and translates it into targets for attack”.
According to Kochavi, “once this machine was activated” in Israel’s 11-day war with Hamas in May 2021 it generated 100 targets a day. “To put that into perspective, in the past we would produce 50 targets in Gaza per year. Now, this machine produces 100 targets a single day, with 50% of them being attacked.”
Precisely what forms of data are ingested into the Gospel is not known. But experts said AI-based decision support systems for targeting would typically analyse large sets of information from a range of sources, such as drone footage, intercepted communications, surveillance data and information drawn from monitoring the movements and behaviour patterns of individuals and large groups.
The target division was created to address a chronic problem for the IDF: in earlier operations in Gaza, the air force repeatedly ran out of targets to strike. Since senior Hamas officials disappeared into tunnels at the start of any new offensive, sources said, systems such as the Gospel allowed the IDF to locate and attack a much larger pool of more junior operatives.
One official, who worked on targeting decisions in previous Gaza operations, said the IDF had not previously targeted the homes of junior Hamas members for bombings. They said they believed that had changed for the present conflict, with the houses of suspected Hamas operatives now targeted regardless of rank.
“That is a lot of houses,” the official told +972/Local Call. “Hamas members who don’t really mean anything live in homes across Gaza. So they mark the home and bomb the house and kill everyone there.” Read more here…
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