Showing posts with label collateral damage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label collateral damage. Show all posts

Sunday, October 22, 2023

The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center has always been the best source for information during Israel's wars in Gaza. They have connections in the IDF that the media generally do not have.

In their update from October 19, they show exactly how many terrorist rockets have been shot since October 7 - and how many have exploded in Gaza.




About 10% of rocket launches have been unsuccessful, according to their analysis. Moreover, the percentage of failed launches has been increasing in recent days: 25% on 10/14, 18% on 10/18. 

By now the number must be closer to 900 failed launches. 

While some of these failed launches explode on the ground, hundreds clearly get airborne and then fall inside Gaza. And as we've seen, not just from the Al Ahli hospital incident but from previous wars, Gaza civilians are often killed by these rockets. 

And the media usually doesn't even consider that possibility when they discuss fatal "airstrikes" in Gaza. 

The percentage of failed rocket attacks has always been in the 15-20% range in previous wars as well. 






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Friday, July 07, 2023



YNet reports that the IDF, for the first time, used tiny suicide drones in Jenin to neutralize some of the terrorists and destroy command centers.

For the first time ever, the IDF has dispatched the cutting-edge SPIKE FireFly suicide drone in an operational capacity during this week’s large-scale counterterrorism offensive in the West Bank city and refugee camp of Jenin.

The elite Duvdevan and Maglan units deployed six of these loitering munitions, manufactured by Defense giant Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd., which carry a small amount of explosives to target terrorist targets around the Jenin refugee camp, including command centers that housed dozens of explosive charges.

The mini-kamikaze drones managed to destroy the targets from afar, thus minimizing risk to troops. The IDF considers the weapon system’s first baptism of fire a remarkable success and examines its future use for targeted assassinations of terrorists.

According to the arms manufacturer, the weapon, which is known in the IDF as MAOZ, “was designed for the dismounted soldier fighting within the urban arena where situation awareness is limited, the enemy is behind cover, and precision is critical.”

FireFly drones hover silently around alleys or inside buildings. They can be operated autonomously and explode precisely and lethally on the target without endangering soldiers.
The video by Rafael explains it better:



Israel haters love to say that Israel field tests weapons against Palestinians. But when the weapon is designed to minimize collateral damage, and also to minimize the danger to troops, what exactly is wrong with that? If the alternative is a massive bombing from the air, isn't this better?

The objection is simply to invoke an antisemitic trope of greedy Jews stopping at nothing to sell their deadly wares. Any army would do its own extensive testing of any new weapon and not buy them simply because Israel had already used it (and indeed, the US Army tested the Firefly last year, and the British army is also interested.) 

Israeli defense contractors build weapons with the primary purpose of minimizing damage to civilian objects while being just as deadly to the terrorists. Anyone who cares about human rights should be applauding weapons like this. 

But Israel's critics don't care about human rights.



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Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

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Tuesday, June 13, 2023



Amnesty released a quite predictable report on the mini-war in Gaza last month. 

As is always the case, Amnesty assumed that ay Israeli actions were war crimes before writing a single word and then fit the facts to their predetermined conclusion.

Amnesty International investigated nine Israeli airstrikes that resulted in the killing of civilians and in the damage and destruction of residential buildings in the Gaza Strip. Three separate attacks on the first night of bombing on 9 May, in which precision-guided bombs targeted three senior Al-Quds Brigades commanders, killed 10 Palestinian civilians, and injured at least 20 others. They were launched into densely populated urban areas at 2am when families were sleeping at home, which suggests that those who planned and authorized the attacks anticipated – and likely disregarded – the disproportionate harm to civilians. Intentionally launching disproportionate attacks, a pattern Amnesty International has documented in previous Israeli operations, is a war crime.   
The ICRC says 
The principle of proportionality prohibits attacks against military objectives which are “expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated”.
The legal definition of proportionality demands that the attacker weigh the military advantage of the attack against the expected loss of innocent life. Israel clearly did this: Amnesty admits the targets were senior terrorist commanders, and Amnesty agrees that Israel used precision weapons meant to minimize collateral damage. But even so, it declares the attacks "disproportionate" without a grain of evidence that the military advantage was not great enough. 

Of course, Amnesty doesn't have a clue as to the military advantage of killing senior PIJ terrorists. It doesn't even try to quantify that. But that is the entire point of the principle of proportionality to begin with. 

Amnesty is saying that any civilian deaths, even when the attack is clearly against significant military targets, are war crimes - and that is exactly the opposite of what international law says. 

Ironically, one of the ICRC's main sources for a detailed discussion of proportionality and the difficulty of defining it comes from....the Israeli High Court. Israel has teams of international law experts who approve these kinds of airstrikes. In this case, certainly Israel knew ahead of time - based on huge amounts of intelligence - that civilians were going to be killed, and it determined that this was a necessary but unfortunate consequence of defending itself legally. Amnesty, with next to no information about the military targets, breezily declares them not to be very important. 

As a reminder, the international law standard on what is proportionate allows far, far more dead civilians for far less military advantage.

Amnesty's obsessive hate for Israel and willful ignorance of international law doesn't end there. It describes an airstrike that destroyed a building but didn't hurt anyone:

Israel’s deliberate destruction of civilian homes also took a heavy toll on civilians in the Gaza Strip, including on people living with disabilities. 

On 13 May, Israeli forces targeted a four-storey building in the Jabalia refugee camp. The building was home to 42 people from the extended Nabhan family. Five members of the family live with disabilities, including three being wheelchair users.  

Hussam Nabhan, an eyewitness to the attack, told Amnesty International he had received a call he believed to be from an Israeli intelligence officer at around 6pm, saying residents of the building had 15 minutes to evacuate. Hussam told the caller that there were people with disabilities in the building and they needed more time, but the caller just repeated the warning. 

After the strike, 22-year-old Haneen Nabhan was so traumatized she found it hard to talk, saying that her wheelchair had been buried under the rubble of her home so she could no longer move around independently. 

Research by Amnesty International found no evidence that the Nabhan building – and other residential buildings destroyed or damaged during the last two days of the offensive – had been used to store weapons or any other military equipment or that rockets had been launched from their direct vicinity.  

The root cause of this unspeakable violence is Israel’s system of apartheid. This system must be dismantled, the blockade of the Gaza Strip immediately lifted, and those responsible for the crime of apartheid, war crimes and other crimes under international law must be held to account,” said Morayef. 
The bias here is undeniable. According to Amnesty, Israel - for no reason whatsoever - targeted a building filled with disabled people, and ensured that it was empty before attacking. 

This is a blood libel. 

Israel has an extensive methodology for determining valid military targets. Only the most rabid antisemite would claim that Israel went through all the effort - determining a target, warning residents, choosing the appropriate weapons - just to make civilian lives miserable. And only Amnesty International is so self-righteous to assume that their parachuting in and talking to a few residents who are frightened of Hamas is enough of an investigation to determine that the targeted buildings had no military value. 

An expert on the laws of armed conflict states, accurately:
For commission of a war crime, a culpable state of mind is an essential element. Article 8 of the ICC’s Rome Statute requires a showing of either intent to harm civilians or recklessness: ordering an attack with the knowledge that the resulting harm to civilians would be “clearly excessive in relation to the … military advantage anticipated.” The high threshold for proof of a culpable state of mind is no accident. Rather, it is a recognition that a less demanding test would not adequately acknowledge the risk of harm that inevitably flows from the fog of war.
Amnesty is not interpreting international law. It is twisting international law to damn Israel - without any evidence whatsoever that Israeli actions were reckless or meant to intentionally harm civilians. 

We've come to expect such libels from Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, but it is important to call it out each time. Because the pattern of ignoring facts, and blaming Israel for war crimes that all evidence proves otherwise, and of determining the outcome of the faux "investigations" before they even occur - this pattern proves that these NGOs are not interested in the truth, in international law or even in human rights. 

Their entire aim is to demonize Israel. 






Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

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Wednesday, June 07, 2023

Human Rights Watch issued a dispatch by an associate in its arms division, Susan Aboeid, "Palestinian Forum Highlights Threats of Autonomous Weapons:"

In late May, I addressed a panel on the militarization of digital spaces – specifically on how Israeli authorities use surveillance technologies to deepen systemic discrimination against Palestinians. I warned that the use of autonomy in weapons systems was a dangerous part of this trend and highlighted the urgent need for an international legal response. ...  

...Israeli authorities are also developing autonomous weapons systems. These trends, globally reflect a slide towards digital dehumanization, and in the case of Israel this means of Palestinians. ... A senior Israeli defense official said recently that authorities are looking at “the ability of platforms to strike in swarms, or of combat systems to operate independently, of data fusion and of assistance in fast decision-making, on a scale greater than we have ever seen.”

Incorporating artificial intelligence and emerging technologies into weapons systems raises a host of ethical, humanitarian, and legal concerns for all people, including Palestinians. Campaigners have called for the adoption of a treaty containing prohibitions and restrictions on autonomous weapons systems, which many countries, including Palestine, have joined.

Autonomous weapons systems could help automate Israel’s uses of force. These uses of force are frequently unlawful and help entrench Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians. Without new international law to subvert the dangers this technology poses, the autonomous weapon systems Israel is developing today could contribute to their proliferation worldwide and harm the most vulnerable.
That last paragraph assumes that Israel is inherently immoral and therefore any AI-assisted weapons it develops must also likely be immoral by design. 

This is the opposite of the truth.

There is no doubt that there are many potential dangers of AI. Any decision that an AI makes independently could easily be a wrong decision, and malicious actors could use AI deliberately to violate the laws of war. 

In the end, though, AI is just another tool that could be used for good or bad. HRW's assumption that Israel's use of AI would only be for violating international law shows how biased the organization is. 

Israel has been exploring AI in warfare for years. Its position mirrors that of the US, UK, Australia and others that AI could actually save lives in combat. 

Israel's position a decade ago shows that it has given far more thought about the moral implications of this issue than HRW ever did when it launched its own shallow campaign against "killer robots." At a conference on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) in 2013, the Israeli delegate made it crystal clear that Israel is only planning to use AI as a tool where a human is the one who makes all of the important decisions:

In order to ensure the legal use of a lethal autonomous weapon system, the characteristics and capabilities of each system must be adapted to the complexity of its intended environment of use. Where deemed necessary, the warfare environment could be simplified for the system by, for example, limiting the system's operation to a specific territory, during a limited timeframe, against specific types of targets, to conduct specific kinds of tasks, or other such limitations which are all set by a human, or, for example, if. _ necessary, it could. be programmed to refrain from action, or require and wait for input from human decision-makers when the legality of a specific action is unclear. Indeed, appropriate human judgment is injected throughout the various phases of development, testing, review, approval, and decision to employ a weapon system. The end goal would be for the system's capabilities to be adapted to the operational complexities that it is expected to encounter, in a manner ensuring compliance with the Laws of Armed Conflict. In this regard, LAWS are not different from many other weapon systems which do exist today, including weapons whose legal use is already regulated under the CCW.
The HRW quote above of an Israeli official mirrors this: the systems are meant to assist in decision making, not to make decisions itself.

Utterly absent in HRW's one-sided, biased screed is the potential that AI can save people's lives and enhance compliance with the laws of armed conflict:

In our view, there is even a good reason to believe that LAWS might ensure better compliance with the Laws of Armed Conflict in comparison to human soldiers. In many ways, LAWS could be more predictable than humans on the battlefield. They are not influenced by feelings of pressure, fear or vengeance, and may be capable of processing information more quickly and precisely than a person. Experience shows that whenever sophisticated and precise weapons have been employed on the battlefield, they have led to increased protection of both civilians and military. forces. Thus, Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems may serve to uphold in an improved manner, the ideals of both military necessity and humanitarian concern - the two pillars upon which the Laws of Armed Conflict rest.

Israel's history in incorporating human rights laws and protecting civilians in its development of weapons is unparalleled, with the possible exception of the US - and therefore not something that HRW wants anyone to know about.  

Self-driving cars, while not perfect, have been shown to be much less likely to be involved in fatal accidents than humans. There is no reason to assume that weapons systems would be any different. It is clear that Israel's position is to develop such systems that will minimize the dangers to innocent people, all with appropriate oversight by human experts. There are still some areas that need to be worked out, like who is responsible for mistakes made by such systems, but these issues all mirror similar issues in complex wartime environments today. 

Israel intends to use AI to minimize collateral damage, save lives and adhere to the laws of armed conflict better than humans can alone. These are positions that real human rights advocates should fully support. But because it is Israel, they instead assume that whatever the Jews invent must be to oppress Palestinian victims and they reflexively oppose it.

Which means that Human Rights Watch cares less about Palestinian lives than Israel does.

UPDATE: I coincidentally just came across an article by Marc Andreesen, legendary computer expert most responsible for creating the first popular web browsers Mosaic and Netscape, on his optimistic predictions for AI. He writes:

I even think AI is going to improve warfare, when it has to happen, by reducing wartime death rates dramatically. Every war is characterized by terrible decisions made under intense pressure and with sharply limited information by very limited human leaders. Now, military commanders and political leaders will have AI advisors that will help them make much better strategic and tactical decisions, minimizing risk, error, and unnecessary bloodshed.     
No surprise that Israel and the experts are on the same page, while HRW tries to scare everyone by referring to any smart weapons system as "killer robots."



Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Monday, January 30, 2023

From Iraqi News:

Media outlets reported that a fleet of container trucks was bombarded on Sunday after crossing the Iraqi border towards Syria.

Iraqi security sources mentioned that 25 container trucks coming from Iran crossed the Iraqi border towards Syria through an unofficial border crossing.

The sources explained that the unidentified warplanes that bombed the trucks fired warning missiles and waited for the drivers to get out before bombing the trucks.
Who else but Israel would go to such lengths - endangering their mission by lingering in the skies for minutes over an enemy country - to protect human lives?

And the drivers would be considered legitimate targets as support personnel, at least in wartime, although it is possible that they did not know what they were carrying.

Not only that, but it appears that Israel has been adding controls to avoid killing people like this as much as possible. In a very similar air raid in 2015, Israel killed seven truck drivers to stop a shipment of weapons. Quietly, behind the scenes, the IAF figured out a way to do raids like this while giving warnings and saving lives.

This requires layers of bureaucracy, changing training methods, dozens of practice runs - a great deal of time and money to save the lives of people who would be properly considered collateral damage by every other army on Earth.

It would be so easy for the IDF to just say, "Who cares? People will malign us anyway. Why risk our own mission for drivers whose deaths would not be considered war crimes by any objective court?" 

The fact that they go to such lengths anyway to save lives when they are nearly universally derided as the worst human rights violators is nothing less than superhuman. 

This incident proves that the IDF really is the most moral army in the world. 

(h/t Yochanan V)



Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

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