Target Practice

In April 2024 international news sources circulated a video of a talk delivered by a senior Israeli military official during a tech conference at Tel Aviv University about a year earlier. The speaker, whose face is not shown, introduces himself only as “Colonel Yoav,” the head of data science and AI for Unit 8200, an elite outfit within Israel’s intelligence directorate. He is there to talk about the force’s embrace of artificial intelligence for the purposes of, as one slide in his presentation puts it, “finding new terrorists.”During Israel’s May 2021 assault on Gaza, Colonel Yoav explains, his unit had used AI to generate two hundred targets, a process that in the past would have taken “almost a year.” In comparison, he suggests, the algorithm could identify likely members of militant organizations in practically no time: “Let’s say we have some terrorists that form a group, and we know only some of them. By practicing our data science magic powder we are able to find the rest.”When Israel again began bombing Gaza after the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023—commencing a war on the Strip that leading experts and human rights organizations have termed a genocide—it used AI to i...