Eighty days have passed since the deadly events of October 7. Israel’s retaliatory assault – Operation Iron Swords – has been way deadlier.

Eighty days into its bombing campaign – likened to the savage bombardment of Dresden, Cologne and Hamburg – Israel has dropped an estimated 25,000 tonnes of ordnance on the tiny enclave, among the most densely populated in the world, already crippled by eighteen years of Israeli siege.

Among Israel’s 22,000 targets, hundreds of residential buildings. “Power targets,” the Israelis call these.

Huge casualty numbers. Over 20,000 dead, half of them children and infants. Countless more are buried under the rubble. Fifty-three thousand Gazans have been injured, and 1.9 million displaced, cold, starving and ill.

Sound brutal? You bet. Also very intelligent.

Israel has an artificially intelligent targeting system. The Gospel, it’s called. Pioneers in mass surveillance, Israeli intelligence units have oceans of terabytes to feed it: countless hours of drone and satellite footage; intercepted communications; cell phone metadata; personal details up the yin-yang. Gospel spits out targets like there’s no tomorrow, from fifty a year to 100 a day.

It even calculates collateral damage! ““Nothing happens by accident,” an IDF source told Israeli journalists. When a 3-year-old girl is killed … it’s because someone decided it wasn’t a big deal; a price worth paying in order to hit someone else.

To learn more about AI-based warfighting systems like Israel’s Orwellianly-named Gospel, and their sinister connection to social media and domestic policing, the GPM traveled to Utrecht, the Netherlands, home base for the Realities of Algorithmic Warfare project.

The GPM spoke with three of the project’s staff: Lauren Gould is Assistant Professor of conflict studies at Utrecht University. Jessica Dorsey is Assistant Professor of International and European Law and a member of the Open-Source Global Justice Investigations Lab. She’s also the chair of the Dutch Airwars Foundation. Dennis Jansen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Media and Culture Studies, with an interest ‘ludification’ – playfulness – among Dutch military innovators.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Destruction in Gaza

Israel’s AI-based targeting system spares nothing and no one. Missile strikes and two-thousand-pound bombs reduce mosques and churches to rubble, along with fishing boats, journalists’ headquarters and cultural centers.

All perfectly legitimate targets, the Israeli military says. Their AI systems told them so.

Over in the West Bank, five minutes from Gaza, on the wings of an F-35, boots on the ground do the door-smashing.

On the night of December 12, in the besieged city of Jenin, IDF troops broke into the renowned Freedom Theater, ransacking and vandalizing its rooms and stage (as Israeli soldiers are wont to do), before moving on to the homes of the theater/cultural center’s extensively surveilled directors.

Ahmed Tobasi was released the next day. General Manager Mustafa Sheta remains in detention, reportedly in Megiddo, in northern Israel, where most of Israel’s 8000 political prisoners are held.

Under Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, occupying powers like Israel are required to detain prisoners inside occupied territory. Israel routinely flouts the Convention, with complete impunity.

I spoke with Mustafa Sheta last July. He will reportedly face a military court in the coming days. His chances of acquittal are virtually nil. The charges he faces are unknown. Such is the nature of Israeli military justice in occupied Palestine.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Mustafa Sheta (courtesy Jaashar Ashtiyeh/AFP)

Thanks to Dan Weisenberger for his great instrumentals.