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In late November 2023, less than two months after the Hamas attacks of October 7 and the start of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, Yuval Abraham published an investigation in +972 Magazine that transformed how people around the world viewed the war. Based on conversations with sources in Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate and Air Force, he exposed for the first time that Israel was using artificial intelligence to generate bombing targets at a rate far exceeding human capabilities, effectively creating what one source described as a “mass assassination factory.”
Four months later, Abraham published another groundbreaking exposé revealing how one of those AI-based systems, known as “Lavender,” was operating. This program, he explained, ranked Gaza’s entire population according to the likelihood that each person was a militant, on the basis of characteristics that Israel deemed potentially incriminating. Every Palestinian whose ranking surpassed a certain threshold was marked for assassination — a kill list the army adopted with barely any human oversight.
These AI systems, Abraham emphasized, did not operate in a vacuum. They were deployed in a context where Israel’s political and military leadership had lifted virtually all legal and moral restraints. In particular, the army systematically bombed suspected militants in their family homes and dramatically expanded the number of Palestinian civilians that soldiers were permitted to kill in each airstrike: up to 15-20 in the case of a suspected junior militant and “hundreds” when targeting a senior commander.
Together, these policies paved the way for a campaign of mass slaughter with few parallels in modern warfare — one which the UN, leading human rights groups, and the vast majority of genocide scholars have determined constitutes genocide. And yet, speaking on the latest episode of The +972 Podcast, Abraham says he believes we’ve still only exposed the tip of the iceberg.
Diving deep into the making of these and some two dozen other investigations for +972 over the past two years — from exposing an internal Israeli intelligence database indicating that 83 percent of Gaza’s dead were civilians, to highlighting the complicity of tech giants in storing troves of Israeli surveillance data on Palestinians — Abraham unpacks the principal challenges and dilemmas that this kind of reporting involves. He discusses why, after years of writing mainly about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, he redirected his efforts to prying open the black box of Israel’s war machine. And he dissects the mentality that enabled ostensibly “liberal” soldiers to become genocidaires.
