The press releases promise "AI for Good." But in Gaza, the sanitized language of tech innovation collides with a brutal reality in which artificial intelligence systems designed in Silicon Valley are now choosing who lives and who dies. Marwa Fatafta, a Palestinian researcher and policy analyst based in Berlin, has spent months documenting how this happened. Her new report reveals something that should shake us all. Big Tech's cloud computing and AI tools aren't just being used in Israel's war on Gaza; they've become essential infrastructure for what multiple UN bodies have called genocidal acts.

Twenty Seconds to Mark a Human for Death

Inside Israeli military operations centers, AI systems with names like "Lavender," "The Gospel," and "Where's Daddy?" are running around the clock. They're not assisting human decisions so much as replacing them.

Lavender can identify and approve a target in just 20 seconds. Think about that. In the time it takes to read this paragraph, the system has already decided someone should die.

The scale is breathtaking in its horror. According to reports from Israeli military sources, Lavender generated a list of 37,000 people it identified as Hamas members. Many were low-ranking. Some had no confirmed military roles at all. The Israeli military was striking as many as 250 targets daily, more than double the rate of previous conflicts. By December 2023, more than 22,000 targets had been hit inside Gaza, a pace that would be impossible without algorithmic automation.

Then there's "Where's Daddy?", a system that reportedly tracks militants through their mobile phones and waits. It waits until they go home. Until they're with their families. The system treats their presence at home as confirmation of identity. And then it strikes.

One senior Israeli military source described how it works: each target comes with a "collateral damage score", a calculation of how many civilians will likely die. Operators, the source said, use "very accurate" measurements of how many civilians evacuate a building just before a strike. Another military insider compared it to "a traffic signal."

Families become acceptable losses. Homes become kill boxes. Children become collateral, their deaths pre-calculated and deemed acceptable.