Isaac Chotiner
Since the war began in Gaza, more than six months ago, the Israeli magazine +972 has published some of the most penetrating reporting on the Israel Defense Forces’ conduct. In November, +972, along with the Hebrew publication Local Call, found that the I.D.F. had expanded the number of “legitimate” military targets, leading to a huge increase in civilian casualties. (As of this writing, more than thirty-two thousand Palestinians in Gaza have been killed.) Then earlier this month, +972 and Local Call released a long feature called “Lavender: The AI Machine Directing Israel’s Bombing Spree in Gaza.” The story revealed how the Israeli military had used the program to identify suspected militants, which in practice meant that tens of thousands of Palestinians had their homes marked as legitimate targets for bombing, with minimal human oversight. (In response to the “Lavender” article, the I.D.F. said that it “outright rejects the claim regarding any policy to kill tens of thousands of people in their homes.” The I.D.F. also said that, according to its rules, “analysts must conduct independent examinations” to verify the identification of targets. In an earlier statement, from November, the I.D.F. acknowledged “the use of automatic tools to produce targets at a fast pace.”)
The author of both stories was Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist and documentary filmmaker. Abraham co-directed the documentary “No Other Land,” about the daily struggles of Palestinians in the West Bank. During his acceptance speech upon winning the award for Best Documentary at the Berlin International Film Festival, in February, Abraham called for a ceasefire in Gaza. In response, he and his family in Israel received death threats. Many people in Germany took issue with the speech, too—including Berlin’s mayor, who implied that it was antisemitic.
I recently spoke by phone with Abraham. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Israel’s command structure has been making decisions during the war, why military sources have been giving Abraham so much information, and his experience—as a man who had family members die in the Holocaust—of being accused of antisemitism in Berlin.
As a longtime critic of the Israeli military, how do you think that its decision-making about civilian lives has changed since October 7th?
If you examine the military’s conduct in 2021 in Gaza, in the border protests that happened in 2018 and 2019, and in the 2014 war, there was always quite a disregard for Palestinian civilian life and very little accountability for crimes and alleged crimes that were committed by soldiers in Gaza. In 2014, more than five hundred Palestinian children were killed and the military said that it would investigate what happened. There were many cases opened, blaming soldiers and I.D.F. policies, and in the end just a single case resulted in indictment and it was about three soldiers who committed or assisted in acts of looting. This military is not holding itself accountable, obviously, which is why I think a lot of people are hoping that external courts, such as the I.C.C. and I.C.J., could hold the military accountable.
But I would say that the main changes in this operation were the scope and how automated things became, and the automation is very much related to the scope. The military has this term called “human targets.” What it meant in the past was that these are particular individuals, who are senior-ranking commanders in Hamas or Islamic Jihad military wings, and that because of their military importance, the I.D.F. international-law departments made a decision that civilians can be killed alongside these people. So usually what this means is that they will be bombed inside their houses, killing not only them but often entire families in the process. And this, sources told me, used to be quite a small list because it’s quite a brutal way to kill somebody. You’re dropping a bomb and destroying the entire house that that person is in.
After October 7th, higher-ups—and we don’t know if they were people in the military or on the political side—made quite an unprecedented decision to mark everybody in those military wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad as human targets, meaning that going forward, anybody in those groups, regardless of age, regardless of military importance, not only can we bomb them but we can bomb them with civilians present.
And this posed a technical problem for the military because when you’re working on a small list of these so-called human targets, you need to answer four questions. You need to prove that the individual really belongs to a Hamas or Islamic Jihad military wing. You need to prove where their house is. You need to prove how they are communicating with the world. And then in real time, you have to know when they entered their house so you can bomb it. When the list was small, human beings could do that. When they decided to expand the list to so many people, it became impossible, and that’s why they decided to rely on all of these sophisticated automation and artificial-intelligence tools, and the results of that are horrific.
These machines got it wrong many times, meaning that the push toward this extremely wide scope necessarily meant that they’re also erroneously targeting civilians, and because of the minimal supervision that was in place, they knew that they would not be able to prevent this. And the second thing is that when you take a policy of bombing houses and killing entire families in order to try to kill one senior target—it was already very controversial and very dubious under international law. But then they apply it in such a broad way, to include alleged low-ranking militants. One source said they called these targets “garbage targets.” We know they are not important from a military point of view, and yet we’re bombing the house. We’re killing a family.
So the decision was made at some higher level to put more people on these lists, but the only way to practically carry it out was the A.I.?
Yeah. I would say that that’s an accurate description. It’s based on machine learning, which is a subset of artificial intelligence. That’s how these machines were trained. They literally relied on it to determine whether human beings get to live or die, to determine whether an individual could be marked for assassination. And yes, if you are going to decide that you want to mark more than thirty thousand people for assassination in their houses and you want to know in real time when those thirty thousand people enter their houses, there is no other way to do it other than using automation and A.I. Yes.
One source put it to me like this. He said that the government wanted to be able to tell the Israeli public, “We killed a very high number of Hamas operatives.” That’s the goal. And then, in practice, again, the way these systems were actually used is that a large number of the people who were being killed were not strictly Hamas operatives. They were either loosely related to the military or completely unrelated.
There’s been some reporting in Haaretz implying that commanders on the ground have leeway to make targeting decisions. Is that your sense as well?
In our reporting, we say that this machine, Lavender, which marked thirty-seven thousand Palestinians in Gaza as suspected militants, had a supervision protocol in certain areas of the I.D.F. of only checking whether the selected target is a male or a female. Intelligence officers were told that if it’s a female, then the machine made a mistake for sure because there are no women in the military wing, but if it’s a male, they were allowed to incriminate the target—meaning to mark that person for assassination—without going in depth and checking why the machine made the decision that it made.
Some sources lower down the chain of command said that they thought the protocol was so outrageous that they went against it. The more low-ranking officers said, “Well, we have to check a little bit more because we’re killing civilians as targets.” That’s an example of a policy that to me seems like a potential war crime that came from above. Then again, as you said, and as Haaretz has reported, it seems that there are a lot of policies that are from the bottom and the higher-ups are unaware of what is going on.
Sources that I spoke with said that during the first weeks of the war, for the low-ranking militants that they were bombing inside their houses, they were allowed to kill about fifteen civilians. And for the senior commanders in Hamas, the number of civilians was, on several occasions, more than a hundred. In the past, these high numbers would have to be approved by the Army’s international-law department. That’s how it works. But I’ve heard from sources that you would have a particular commander who was very trigger-happy and would authorize high numbers without reporting it to the law department.
In brief, it seems to me that there are certain policies that are coming from above and people on the ground are actually resisting because they seem to be so outrageous. And then there is the other thing, too, which happens quite often from what I’m hearing, especially in these areas that the I.D.F. occupied in Gaza, with commanders deciding to open fire without coördinating it with other areas of the military that actually know Palestinian civilians are supposed to be in that area. So there’s a lot of chaos.
I assume from your early answer about accountability within the military that even if there was very little accountability before October 7th, the hope for true accountability post-October 7th is, given the political climate, pretty distant.
I think it’s even less. However, I think there is one difference now, which is that the military knows that it is going to be under extreme scrutiny, both from the I.C.J. and the I.C.C. There are separate legal procedures being conducted in The Hague against Israeli military policies. There’s this idea in international law which basically says that these courts would have the authority to intervene in Israel’s policies if Israel independently is not able or willing to do so itself. And from what I’m hearing, Israeli military and political leaders are very, very afraid of what the international courts will do, of how they will respond to the destruction in Gaza and the mass killing of civilians, especially as journalists are going to be able, I hope, to enter Gaza and join the Palestinian journalists and investigate things.
I think the military would really want to present a case to the world that actually it’s doing its own investigation. Now more than ever, the state of Israel is going to want to present a case to these courts, to the I.C.C. and the I.C.J., and say, You don’t need to intervene because, look, we’re already doing it.
Your pieces have a lot of anonymous sources. Obviously journalists often use anonymous sources. You’ve mentioned sources several times in this phone call. Can you give us a little bit of a flavor of the people you’re talking to? Who are they, broadly, and why do you think they are talking to you?
For the last piece that we wrote, we mentioned six people and all six were drafted into the I.D.F. after October 7th. One of them is more senior than the other five who are not extremely senior in the military, but all of them are in the I.D.F., in what’s called the intelligence directorate. All of them had hands-on experience using programs like Lavender. And I feel for most of them, and the reason they spoke with me is because they were aware of my critical perspective, and they also had criticisms of what they were being asked to do.
Some of them described how they went to the military after October 7th. They were not sure they would go back to the military, but they were so shocked by the atrocities on October 7th, by this feeling of security collapse, that they said, “O.K., we’re going to go,” out of a sense of responsibility. But some of them, when they spoke to me, said, basically, “We were asked to do things that we don’t think are right or are justified.” Some of them had very particular instances that they remembered that I didn’t specify because I didn’t want to reveal their identity. They would go to prison. But they recalled certain cases. Some of them remembered the names of family members that they were involved in killing. Just an example: one of them described bombing a person inside their house. They bombed the house and there were two families in the house, and it turns out that the target was not even there. They didn’t check it thoroughly enough and it was a mistake.
And that was a reflection of the general permissive atmosphere that was happening in those places. And that source was really shocked by what had happened, and he was very happy to share. He said, “I feel better. I know that it doesn’t only stay with me. More people are going to know about it.” Israel has quite a big intelligence community, because military service is mandatory, so, unlike in the United States and the U.K., where you have the N.S.A. and G.C.H.Q., which are usually staffed with lifelong career people, and there is extreme loyalty to the system, and you get an Edward Snowden once every, I don’t know, two decades—in Israel, there are more people who are critical. They do it and they’re critical of it at the same time.
There has been some good work on this stuff in Haaretz, but it does seem like a lot of your reporting has not been followed up by the international or the Israeli media. Why do you think that might be?
For the international media, I feel there has been a growing interest, especially after the World Central Kitchen attack. Generally, during the past six months, most of the Israeli media, especially Israeli TV, don’t report what’s going on in Gaza. There is a feeling that the entire country is at war. Every family has at least, I don’t know if every family, but most Israeli Jewish families have people who are soldiers who are in Gaza. There are the Israeli hostages. My mother told me once, “I feel the country has not woken up from October 7th. There is no willingness to engage in anything that is critical.”
Unfortunately, that’s the way it is now. It’s extremely dangerous to be in that psychological place when you have one of the strongest militaries in the world, and you have destroyed more than sixty per cent of the houses in Gaza, killed more children in four months than in all conflicts all over the world for the past four years. To be in this sort of psychological state of rage, denial, revenge, grief is allowing the military to do what it’s doing, and it’s also preventing the media from critically reporting on what’s happening in Gaza.
Can you describe how +972 works with Local Call? What’s the organizational structure?
We consider ourselves sister Web sites. We work in quite close coördination. There is independence. Local Call writes in Hebrew, and it’s mainly directed at the Israeli Hebrew-reading population, and +972 is in English. We’re a team of Palestinian and Israeli journalists, and we’ve been for a long time, for quite some years, trying to do reporting in a way that highlights issues of structural violence in Israel and Palestine. We sort of try to read the media landscape, the mainstream-media landscape, and then use our very small flashlights and our very few resources to highlight issues that are not being discussed. And for me, these investigations are definitely part of that.
To what degree does +972 or Local Call have to coöperate with forms of military censorship going on now?
All Israeli media outlets and journalists, even before October 7th, when reporting about issues related to intelligence, have to send the piece to the military censor, who can basically decide to take parts out of the piece, to not authorize the piece at all, and you’re not actually allowed to say under Israeli law where the censor has intervened in the pieces. Legally we are binded to that, and I can’t go into too many details with regard to the specific Lavender piece, but it has to be, as any piece that is written on these topics, it had to be vetted by the Israeli military censor under Israeli law. And you can have a dialogue with the censor. You can even have a legal procedure with the censor to try to get the military to agree to publish more. And I would also say that, generally, as you can see, the censor allowed us to publish quite a lot. And I would say that the main form of censorship in Israeli media is self-censorship. It’s not military censorship. It’s journalists who are willingly not reporting about these issues.
And when you say that there can be somewhat of a back-and-forth, is it you doing that? Is it your lawyers doing that? I’m just curious what that process is.
It can be the journalists doing that. In my case, it was my editors who were doing it. And if you reach a disagreement, you can involve lawyers, but generally it’s the media outlets themselves who are having this back-and-forth with the censor.
You had a pretty interesting experience in Berlin in February—you gave a speech calling for a ceasefire and got a lot of heat from members of the German government, and a lot of death threats as well. What was that experience like?
We directed this film, “No Other Land,” which is about the expulsion of a community in the West Bank. We are a team of two Israelis and two Palestinians, and it’s our first film, and we were very surprised to win in Berlin. Basel Adra, one of the co-directors, and I made the speeches. Standing next to Basel, I felt that the most important thing I could say would be to highlight the systematic inequality between me and him, and I spoke about apartheid. I spoke about how I have freedom of movement and he doesn’t, and how I’m under civilian law and he’s under military law. And when I was saying that, I imagined there might be a strong response in Israel, which there was, and I was not surprised by it. I was surprised because two days after, a mob of right-wing Israelis came to my parents’ house and they had to leave the house. That was a really scary experience for them. It is the first time my family paid the price for things that I am saying or for my work.
I was surprised by the response in Germany, too. I wasn’t aware of how narrow freedom of speech is in Germany when it relates to being critical of Israeli policies. You had German politicians who are not Jewish who are implying the speech was antisemitic. My grandmother’s family and my grandfather’s family were killed in the Holocaust.
Is it true that your grandmother was born in a concentration camp?
My grandmother, Nelly, was born in Libya in a concentration camp called Giado, and her father was murdered by Fascist Italians. My grandfather’s family is originally from Romania and Hungary, in that area, and many of them were murdered in the Holocaust. So, for me, I feel like the word “antisemitism” really carries a lot of weight, and I do believe that antisemitism is on the rise all over the world. I’ve seen examples of it on the left and on the right, and I think that if you are weaponizing that term to silence legitimate criticism of Israel, then you are making it harder for us to identify the real faces of antisemitism. You are emptying it of meaning. That’s why I think it’s so dangerous what happened in Berlin.
What’s next? Are you planning to do documentary work or to keep reporting on the war?
There is still so much. I feel we uncovered ten per cent of what exists in the way these A.I. systems were used in the military and who made the decision to authorize the protocols that were in place. We reported that Lavender marked thirty-seven thousand people as alleged militants, but that according to sources in intelligence, the military knew that, on that list, you had thousands of people who were actually civilians.
That’s for me a very interesting question from a journalistic and investigative point of view. Who were these people? How many of them were police officers? How many of them were journalists? How many of them were civilians who had the exact same name and nickname as a Hamas operative. These are big questions, and I’m not sure I will have the access to answer them, but it’s definitely something that I would urge journalists who are reading us to look further into as well, because I think these policies of automation, systematically targeting alleged militants inside family houses, were extremely prevalent, especially during the first two months after October, and they led to thousands and thousands of civilians being killed and entire families being wiped out. I definitely think there’s a lot more work to do in that regard.
Why are these things less prevalent now than during the first two months?
I would say two reasons. The first is U.S. pressure. The second is that Israel already destroyed most of the houses in Gaza and uprooted most of the population. So when you have a system, an intelligence system, that is based on linking individuals to households and you destroy all the households or most of the households, then obviously that system becomes less relevant. But I would say that there is a danger if the military decides to escalate its operations in Rafah. There is definitely a danger that we will see these systems being used in the same or similar scale to how they were used in the past.
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