UN chief ‘deeply troubled’ by reports Israel using AI to identify Gaza targets

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday expressed serious concern over reports that Israel was using artificial intelligence to identify targets in Gaza.

According to a report in the Israeli magazine +972, Israel has used artificial intelligence to identify targets in Gaza – in some cases with as little as 20 seconds of human oversight.

Guterres said that he was “deeply troubled by reports that the Israeli military’s bombing campaign includes Artificial Intelligence as a tool in the identification of targets, particularly in densely populated residential areas, resulting in a high level of civilian casualties.”

“No part of life and death decisions which impact entire families should be delegated to the cold calculation of algorithms,” he said.

The +972 report claims that “the Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties.”

In a rare confession of wrongdoing, Israel on Friday admitted a series of errors and violations of its rules in the killing of seven aid workers in Gaza, saying it had mistakenly believed it was “targeting armed Hamas operatives.”