Israel repeats its military goals in the Gaza Strip every day: "The elimination of Hamas and the return of the hostages to Israel," Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said again on Monday, December 4. The truce between Israel and Hamas came to an end on December 1, and the army is now stepping up its strikes and deployment in the south of the enclave. But a series of investigations published in the Israeli and British press since November 30 has raised major questions. The investigations report that the Israeli army has allegedly used a computer platform equipped with artificial intelligence to pilot its bombing campaigns and carry out its stated objectives.

Although the Israeli army has defended its use of this technology, controversy is growing in light of the extension of its offensive to the whole of Palestinian territory and the number of victims – almost 16,000 according to the Hamas-administered Ministry of Health.

The Guardian and the left-wing Israeli +972 Magazine were behind the investigation, which was based on interviews with current and former Israeli military officers who disagreed with their strategy. The main platform used by the army today is called "Habsora" ("the gospel"). On the IDF's website, a page, posted on November 2, presents this software – without naming it – as a system that "produces targets at a fast pace," "through the rapid and automatic extraction of intelligence," "with the goal of a compete match between the recommendation of the machine and the identification carried out by a person." The page is enhanced by an emphatic headline: "A target factory" that "operates around the clock."

These statements directly echo the number of strikes and targets the IDF has been reporting on every day since the start of the war. On December 3, the military authorities reported that they had carried out "around 10,000 air strikes" on Gaza since October 7, a figure considered colossal by many specialists. The IDF also asserted that it attacked "15,000 targets" during the first 35 days of the conflict, compared with 5,000 to 6,000 during the 51 days of "Operation Protective Edge in 2014."

With Habsora, the army seems to have multiplied the number of possible targets and "accelerated the targeting cycle to a maximum," said Laure de Roucy-Rochegonde, a researcher at the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), referring to the lag between the identification of a target and the decision to fire. For the Iron Dome, for example, the system that protects Israeli territory from aerial threats, "the time left to the operators, often young people doing their military service, is around one minute," explained de Roucy-Rochegonde.

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