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https://fortune.com/2024/04/04/israel-idf-ai-warfare-gaza-palestinian-hamas-lavender-972/

The IDF added that it does not carry out strikes when the expected collateral damage from the strike is excessive in relation to the military advantage.

However, the way in which Lavenders output was reportedly used may explain some of the extraordinary civilian death toll, particularly early in the war. Nearly 15,000 Palestinians died in the first six weeks, most of them women and children.

Not only were thousands of junior Hamas operatives targeted, but the IDF reportedly took the unprecedented step of deciding that as many as 15 or 20 people would be acceptable collateral damage in each case, the article said. The IDF also tended to bomb their targets at home, using different automated systems that decided when the target had arrived at homethere is a very high level of surveillance in Gaza. According to +972s sources, some systems often inaccurately estimated the number of other people who were also in the building. Because of the low value of the targets, dumb bombs were routinely used, further increasing the civilian death toll, the sources said.

Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy, one source said.

Not only that, but they chose militants by feeding the data from their Gaza surveillance systems into an AI, and the only form of verification they did that someone was a militant was checking if they were male.

According to the publications multiple sources within Israeli intelligence, Lavender was trained on multiple kinds of datafrom photos and cellular information to communication patterns and social media connectionsto recognize the characteristics of known Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives. The dataset also included some Palestinian civil defense workers. Then Lavender was used to assign a score of one to 100 for almost everyone in Gaza, based on how many characteristics they matched. Those with high ratings became potential assassination targets, with Lavenders list reportedly including as many as 37,000 people at one point.

Despite the fact that Israeli intelligence knew the system was only 90% accurate in identifying militants, little in the way of human review followed, the sources said. According to the intelligence officers, the list was so long, and the majority of people on it of such low importance, that they only spent seconds verifying the target, mostly by confirming that it was a man.