Using polluting algorithms to erase Palestinian identity
Dr Ashraf Abul Saud
In the emerging model of artificial intelligence-driven warfare, troops are no longer combatants in the traditional sense.
They are operators who are detached, remote, and guided, not by the messy reality of human lives, but by the cold outputs of automated systems.
Systems like Lavender generate lists of human targets. “Where’s Daddy?” tracks whether those targets are at home. Gospel selects which buildings to strike.
In this machinery, victims cease to be victims of war in any classical understanding. They become data points, positive results in a complex algorithmic model.
Behind a veil of pseudo-scientific neutrality, human tragedy is rendered almost invisible. What we are witnessing is a new and particularly vicious ethics, one that blurs the line between a legitimate military operation and deliberate genocide.
To grasp the scale of this system, it is necessary to understand Project Nimbus, one of the most significant technological undertakings in Israel’s military apparatus.
Valued at $1.2 billion, the contract brings Google and Amazon into close partnership with the Israeli government and army, supplying advanced cloud infrastructure and machine-learning capabilities.
What makes this arrangement especially troubling is not that these AI systems accelerate violence, but that they appear to absorb and operationalise the genocidal logic of their operators.
When Israeli officials say “there are no innocent civilians in Gaza”, the systems are effectively trained to treat the entire population – young and old – as legitimate targets.
Palestinians, their families, and their homes are reduced to removable objects. Contaminated algorithms, fed with distorted data, turn people into “targeted garbage”.
In March 2024, Google deepened this co-operation by establishing a dedicated landing zone within its cloud infrastructure for Israeli military units.
At the same time, Amazon Web Services and Google provided Israeli military intelligence with a private server farm offering virtually unlimited capacity to store surveillance data harvested from Gaza’s residents.
Microsoft went further still, hosting components of the Israeli army’s mass surveillance programme on its cloud servers.
These systems stored recordings of millions of intercepted phone calls from Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, material later used to identify bombing targets, pressure individuals, and justify operations against unarmed civilians.
When Microsoft eventually acknowledged that its technologies had been used in ways that violated its own terms of use, the admission was carefully limited. Its services continued uninterrupted. The company remained, in effect, part of the machinery.
The role of major technology firms has expanded far beyond providing infrastructure. They now help generate the lists of people to be killed, the families to be erased, and the neighbourhoods to be destroyed.
Artificial intelligence has become the backbone of this campaign, an instrument of war, ethnic cleansing, and, in the eyes of many observers, genocide. Palestine has been turned into a testing ground for automated systems of destruction.
This shift did not occur in isolation. Over time, major technology companies quietly set aside earlier moral restraints in pursuit of lucrative military contracts. Google and OpenAI walked back earlier commitments not to deploy AI for military purposes.
In November 2024, Meta announced that its large language models, known as Llama, would be made available to US government agencies and national-security contractors.
Anthropic and Palantir are followed by partnering with Amazon Web Services to supply AI technologies to American intelligence and defence bodies.
The US Army even granted executive ranks of colonel to leaders from these companies and brought them into its advisory structures, integrating private technology executives directly into the command of modern battlefields.
The human cost is visible in the ruins. Recent United Nations figures paint a devastating picture. According to them, approximately 94 per cent of hospitals in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed or damaged, and 81 per cent of buildings across the territory have been affected.
What is being engineered is not only the elimination of lives, but the systematic dismantling of a society’s ability to survive, remember, and remain itself.
This is cultural and spatial erasure carried out through algorithms, executed according to an Israeli security and military vision that treats Palestinian presence itself as a problem to be solved.
There is a further, unsettling paradox. Most of what is publicly known about systems, such as Lavender, Gospel, and “Where’s Daddy?” originates from media reports based on leaks or statements from within the Israeli military establishment.
Such selective disclosure is rarely innocent. It serves at least two purposes. First, it offers a ready-made escape from legal and moral responsibility: the systems are complex, the argument goes, and therefore prone to error.
Atrocity is reframed as technical malfunction rather than deliberate policy. A crime becomes an unfortunate accident. Human agency dissolves into the impersonal workings of a machine that cannot itself be put on trial.
These revelations function as a form of technological theatre, projecting an image of the Israeli military as the most advanced, precise, and superior force on the planet. The message is directed as much at governments and populations in the surrounding region as at Western audiences.
We are witnessing a new chapter of power projection, now reinforced by artificial intelligence. The question that lingers, heavy and unresolved, is simple and chilling: who will be next?
By Dr Ashraf Abul Saud
Writer and an international relations scholar
