[0:00]Eight weeks now into the war on Gaza. We're looking at multiple angles of this story and the way it's been covered. Starting with artificial intelligence, as an Israeli weapon of war and the real life and death consequences for Palestinians. Israeli hostages released by Hamas are telling stories that are proving very inconvenient for the Israeli government. And the West Bank, what should be a safer space is wracked with violence and under constant Israeli surveillance.
[0:37]More than two months of Israeli bombing have turned the Gaza Strip into a hellscape. Entire neighborhoods have been wiped out, made uninhabitable. With more than 16,000 Palestinians killed, it is a population on the run, an unfolding genocide. And we now know that the unprecedented killing of Gazans is being powered at least in part by AI. An Israeli artificial intelligence system that generates new targets at a rate we have never seen before. One former Israeli intelligence officer likens the AI system to a mass assassination factory. Reports about that technology have now been published by two Israeli news outlets, 972 and local call. For years, the Israeli military has been milking the country's tech sector to find more and more ways of managing its occupation of Palestinians. And AI is just the latest high-tech weapon in what has turned into a barbaric Israeli war on Gaza, one bombing after another, the mass killing and displacement of Palestinian civilians. The Gaza Strip has been a testing ground for Israel's surveillance technologies, for AI-powered lethal weapons. Excellent, good hit. Technology that you see in sci-fi films or in some dystopian horror movies, but it is the reality of many Palestinians on the ground. And it is where the biblical meets the dystopian, the gospel. That's what the Israeli military calls the artificial intelligence system it has deployed in Gaza. The AI does not issue commands or push buttons. That is done by a human. It just generates the targets, more than ever before. The latest revelations about the gospel were provided by two Israeli news outlets, 972 Magazine and Local Call. They have unmasked how the Israeli military has loosened its already permissive constraints on the killing of Palestinian civilians. As one source told 972, nothing happens by accident. When a three-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it's because someone in the army decided it wasn't a big deal for her to be killed. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home. When the Gospel system was rolled out, it was said to be one of the state-of-the-art AI systems that would allow the military to pinpoint targets quickly and accurately. It's allowed the army to essentially target at a mass scale, what what soldiers have described as a mass assassination machine, which means that they're not just pinpointing military infrastructure, they're bombing civilian homes. We have three AI systems, which operate in concert. We have the Alchemist system, which collects information.
[3:45]We have the second layer of this AI system, which is called the Fire Factory, which analyzes the data, and the gospel system, which produces possible military targets. It must be stressed that every military target which is attacked from the air by the IDF, goes through an analysis of both intelligence officers and legal advisors. So while AI systems produce potential targets, at the end of the day, these are human beings which are authorizing them. This is not the first we've heard of the Israeli military harnessing AI technology. In 2021, it called its bombing campaign in Gaza the world's first AI war. One month into this war, the military released a statement about its AI-powered target factory and its ability to produce reams of Hamas targets rapidly. The language in that statement, the talk of precise attacks and minimal harm on civilians has been decimated by 972's journalism, with the help of its sources, current and former Israeli intelligence officials. One told 972, the emphasis is on quantity and not quality.
[5:03]Others talked of the significant expansion of targets beyond military ones. The term the Israelis now use is power targets, meaning public buildings, universities, schools, hospitals, libraries. Mass destruction that Israeli forces in Gaza have been proudly posting online. Prior to this war, power targets were were were not so central to military doctrine and strategy. The emphasis was really on precision bombing, but we're seeing those kinds of limits on civilian deaths kind of go out the window with this new tactic of causing as much destruction and as much horror as possible to put pressure on Hamas. What this means for Gazans is that nowhere is actually safe from Israeli targeting. And it goes to show how this current war is really shaped by a desire for revenge and retribution. We have seen agonizing videos of fathers and mothers holding the dead bodies of their children and babies, showing the rest of the world what Israel's bank of targets look like. The system spits out hundreds of targets under the premise that those are Hamas or Islamic Jihad targets. Many of those so-called targets are just basic innocent civilian infrastructure. According to the family, they were not doing anything. Suddenly, air strikes started targeting their houses. This is so violent, so aggressive, what we're witnessing every single day in the Gaza. And what Israel considers military targets are used to, according to the testimonies from Israeli officers, instill shock and suffering on Palestinians in order to turn against Hamas, to inflict as much violence and destruction among civilians and their infrastructure in order to weaken and eliminate the fabric of society. The Israeli government from the Defense Minister, the Prime Minister to many other senior officials have said in plain terms that they hold the entire population of Gaza responsible for the October 7th attacks. It's an entire nation out there that is responsible. It's not true, this rhetoric about civilians not not aware, not involved. It's absolutely not true. And their action indicates that they are punishing that entire 2.2 million population of Gaza for the actions of Hamas. The flattening of Gaza, that's what we're going to do. That is collective punishment. That is a textbook war crime. So this report does shed new light into what's taking place, but it is in line with the actions and words of the Israeli government officials which have articulated a criminal intent to commit mass atrocities. Having long developed the means to track and locate Gazans, Israel has been dropping leaflets on them, ordering them in Arabic to leave their homes for so-called safe zones in the south, which Israel has also repeatedly bombed. One of the latest leaflets comes with a QR code that takes Palestinians to a map of Gaza, carved up into numbered squares, some safe, some not. One aid worker likened it to a macabra game of battleships in which terrified civilians will be left guessing which square will save their life. The Israeli government has issued a QR code in a more detailed map that it says is aimed at facilitating the evacuations of civilians in Gaza, but to provide a QR code to a population that's been under relentless bombardment for two months, that has had their access to to internet, um to um electricity to charge their phones, cut is a sick joke.
[8:56]International humanitarian law is clear that state parties must take feasible precautions to protect civilians, including issuing warnings, but issuing a warning when there is no safe place to go in Gaza, is not an effective warning and is not in compliance with international humanitarian law. So the the the general purpose of this map is actually to avoid civilian harm and try to help them to move into safer areas. And I think that the way that this map is being perceived in some outlets is missing the point. It is about saving Palestinian lives. Because the IDF would have had a much easier life of simply attacking. That's coming from a former legal adviser to the Israeli military and the Ministry of Justice, but it fails to square with reality, the evidence on the ground. The indefensibly high civilian death tolls, the appalling number of children killed, it is modern day Israeli mythology, like the line about Israel somehow having the most moral army in the world. What Israel does have is the technology to enforce a system of domination over Palestinians, what Amnesty International calls automated apartheid. That includes artificial intelligence systems that Israel is using to help bomb Gaza back to the Stone Age. While insisting that it helps save the lives of innocent Palestinians, rather than making it easier to take them. The Israeli government with or without automation is carrying out grave abuses against Palestinians. They have systematically unlawfully killed Palestinians. Um in situations that go beyond what internationally humanitarian law authorizes, they're increasingly not even going through the motions of showing why their actions comply uh with international law. These are not accidents. Automating an approach that authorizes unlawful killings, certainly presents heightened risk of harm to civilians. The Gaza strip and the occupied Palestinian territories have become a testing laboratory in every sense of the word. There is just simply no limitations to the extent that Israel can test these technologies against Palestinians. I think the objective is clear and that is the annihilation of of Palestinians in the Gaza strip, and making Gaza uninhabitable. These technologies that are used now in Gaza, we should probably upgrade the term from automated apartheid to automated genocide.
[11:47]The release of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas and held captive since October 7th has created some challenges for the Netanyahu government in its messaging. The Israeli media have gone wall-to-wall with their coverage of this story. And Meenakshi Ravi is here with more. Richard, during the seven-day pause in fighting late last month, Hamas and Israel exchanged hostages. The story has dominated Israeli headlines. The released Israelis, among them teenagers, women, and some elderly, have said that they were subjected to physical violence including beatings and degradation in Hamas captivity. However, some of the most explosive headlines have been their criticisms of the Israeli government. Leaked audio from a closed door meeting between the released hostages and Prime Minister Netanyahu and his cabinet showed just how acrimonious the encounter was. You're putting political over getting the hostages back. All you're thinking about is collapsing Hamas. F***, give them back whoever they want (Palestinian prisoners), and bring everybody (Israeli hostages) back. Palestinian hostages, many of them just young boys in their teens when they were taken in, have also emerged with stories of life in Israeli prisons. Jailed without charges, many have spoken about how they were deprived of basics such as food and warmth and repeatedly shocked, humiliated and degraded by their Israeli captors. The situation in the prisons is dire, people are broken, they are beaten constantly. Detainees are being sexually assaulted, even being raped. Going back to how the hostage narrative is unfolding in Israel, until this past week, the Netanyahu government had sought to control media interactions with abductees, vetting people before they would go on air, briefing them on talking points. However, the number of hostages released now has made them harder to control, and with each testimony, each pointed criticism, this story has become harder to contain. Thanks, Meena. Throughout this war, Israel has said that its goal in Gaza is to destroy Hamas. But Israeli attacks on Palestinians have also escalated on the West Bank, where Hamas has no authority or military presence. That violence is usually provoked by Israeli settlers. Prior to October 7th, almost 200 Palestinians had been killed on the West Bank in the past 10 months. That number has more than doubled since. Mariam Bargouti is a Palestinian journalist based in Ramallah. She's been interviewed by multiple media outlets about what's happening on the West Bank and in the war on Gaza. And some of those exchanges, like this one with the UK channel Sky News, have been testing. Dozens of Palestinians are killed, we call it a slaughter, we would have called it a massacre this time because it happened. Yeah. No, no. I'm talking about individuals. I'm just interested.
[14:38]If you would like to talk as a journalist, come with me with the right information, please. Mariam Bargouti joins us now from Ramallah. Ms Bargouti, that exchange that we just saw on Sky News. In the interviews that you've done, and the ones that you've seen on this topic since October 7th, how typical was that exchange, that moment? The way international journalists attempt to troll Palestinians and delegitimize, as well as deny the crimes against them, has has not only become vicious in in the way that journalists are framing it, like that interview, but it has increased and become lethal. In a way that it is a complete pro-genocidal stance by journalists that claim to be um objective, that claim to be non-partisan, that claim to be supporting um the truth to support accuracy for their audiences, but it's not just common, it is being encouraged by editors and policy makers, whether directly or indirectly. So you don't see that as someone not fully understanding the context and bringing the context to the interview. You see that more as an intention. Absolutely, as journalists, it is our job to do our due diligence prior to bringing in anyone who is giving a testimony. Um so to claim ignorance requires you to quit your job and go and learn. Let's talk about the West Bank, where you live. It's always been heavily surveilled. Hebron is often described as exhibit A in the modeling for automated Israeli apartheid. What have you seen in the way of surveillance and any escalation on the West Bank since October 7th? Of course, we have seen an escalation of surveillance across the West Bank, as well as for Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, which we tend to negate from the narrative um of the ethnic cleansing happening. But the surveillance within uh the West Bank is not just invasive, it is at levels of being lethal. First, you collect the data, you insert cameras on every single street where you have five cameras on every corner, keeping track of Palestinians. You gather car plate numbers in a big database of every single Palestinian driving which car, um to know the movement, as we have seen many of the assassinations being carried out by the Israeli military, are happening in people's cars. What we are seeing now is just an escalation, intensification, and an emboldenment to carry out step number two of Israel's surveillance operation and that is kill who we find. And this is all under the claim of having information for Palestinian terror activities, when in fact, it's just Israel trying to cripple Palestinian will, to cripple Palestinian morale in that it forgoes um the claim to liberation, the demands to be free and the end of the Israeli occupation. Since October 7th, uh journalists from around the world have flown into the region. A lot of them are still based in Israel, some of them have embedded with the Israeli military to get into Gaza. How difficult is it for journalists to get into the West Bank? And for those who haven't been to the West Bank to cover the story, what are they missing? It's relatively difficult for journalists to enter the West Bank only in comparison to previous times, but Israel is placing restrictions and is assigning things like minders to different bureau chiefs and international reporters in the region. And that is someone that responds and operates under the command of the Israeli military to attempt and coerce, manipulate, um as well as pressure journalists to cover in a certain angle or to deny information from audiences. But nonetheless, journalists still have the capacity to challenge this and come into the West Bank. The persons that they are bringing on to speak on the situation are the very people that are committing the crimes against Palestinians, that is Israeli military spokespersons, um that is Israeli policy makers and settlers. And at the same time, negating the Palestinian testimony, and if they do speak with Palestinians, it is always an attempt to frame a two-sidedism. But there is no two sides to this, not just because it's a false equivalence between colonizer and colonized, but because journalists are only showing one side and that is the Israeli side. And unfortunately, what we have seen more than that is a negation and a denial of the information and news that local journalists have, as though that is inferior, rather than recognizing that local journalists are the experts on the situation, even though their lives are at increased risk um from Israeli repression, as we have seen in their targeting in Gaza. So these layers contribute to the misinformation. These layers contribute to allowing global complicity, persistence and sustain um what we are seeing in Palestine.
[21:30]One last question for you. We've seen some amazing journalism coming out of Gaza, Palestinians, too many of whom have paid with their lives. Uh making a name for themselves, getting the recognition that they deserve. Can you give us a few names of some good follows of Palestinian journalists on the West Bank, people whose work is worthy of our following?
[22:00]Are you okay? Yeah, just one second. It's so difficult to speak about journalists here, considering just the targeting. It's heartache and and as a reporter, you know, I think we forget that these are our peers. And it also, you know, we're not advocating just for the protection of journalists, but as reporters and journalists, we're advocating for ourselves, um to to remain safe. But in terms of coverage, I think there are multiple reporters and news organizations that are actually going against the grain and going against the restrictions that are being imposed by editorial policies abroad at least. Al Jazeera has been doing incredible coverage um of what's been happening all across Palestine, not just Gaza and the West Bank, but in its entire context, we there are organizations such as Mondoweiss, which has also been reporting excellent um in print uh on the West Bank. Uh we have Middle East Eye that has also been showcasing excellent reporting on the West Bank, as well as highlighting and covering the disinformation and mistranslation that has been happening within international media organizations. But I mean in in terms of individuals, you can see the works of people like Fathn Elwan, uh you can see the works of Muhammad El Kurd, although he is not here, but he is able to amplify a lot of the coverage that is being sent from local journalists abroad. But yeah. I'm sorry, I don't have maybe two specific names. That's fine. That's fine. Mariam Bargouti, thank you for joining us today here at The Listening Post.
