Summary
The Israeli army’s artificial intelligence-based program, unveiled in ‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza, designed formally to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets, and which in the first weeks of the war clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes (lines 88-90).
Details
- Lavender analyzes information collected on most of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip through a system of mass surveillance, then assesses and ranks the likelihood that each person is active in the military wing of Hamas or PIJ, giving almost every single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100 (line 142).
- It learns to identify characteristics — “features” — of known Hamas and PIJ operatives fed to it as training data, and locates the same features among the general population; several incriminating features produce a high rating and automatic potential-target status (line 144).
- Training data included employees of the Hamas-run Internal Security Ministry, including civil defense workers, whom a data-science source does not consider militants, making the system more likely to select civilians with a civilian communication profile (lines 192-194).
- Approval to automatically adopt its kill lists, previously an auxiliary use, was granted about two weeks into the war after a manual sample of several hundred targets found 90 percent accuracy in identifying affiliation with Hamas (line 130). Internal checks put accuracy at 90 percent, meaning 10 percent of those slated for assassination were not members of the Hamas military wing at all (line 170).
- Mistakenly flagged individuals included police and civil defense workers, militants’ relatives, residents with a name and nickname identical to an operative’s, and Gazans who used a device that once belonged to a Hamas operative (line 172).
- The only human supervision protocol for suspected junior militants, sources say, was a check that the target was male rather than female, taking about 20 seconds per target (lines 92, 200-204). The IDF Spokesperson denied using artificial intelligence to incriminate targets, saying these are merely “auxiliary tools that assist officers in the process of incrimination” and that an independent analyst examination is required (line 198).
- Lowering Lavender’s rating threshold marked more people: “At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human targets” (line 188).
- Lavender marks people and puts them on a kill list, whereas Habsora (“The Gospel”) marks buildings and structures the army claims militants operate from (line 102). Its lists were combined with Where’s Daddy? home tracking, dumb bombs for junior targets, and fixed collateral-damage degrees (lines 104-106, 242-258, 264).
Where sources disagree
- Debunking the Genocide Allegations: A Reexamination of the Israel-Hamas War from October 7, 2023 to June 1, 2025 holds that AI in the IDF is an intelligence-processing and cross-referencing tool, not an autonomous decision-maker, approvals remaining in human hands, while hasty mechanical use by some soldiers is a grave concern (PDF p.117). Abraham’s sources describe the human approval for junior targets as a 20-second check that the target was male, with “zero added value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval” (line 204). Both accounts stand, attributed.
Related pages
‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza, Where’s Daddy?, Habsora, Unit 8200, The Human-Machine Team