The UN special committee investigating Israeli practices in the occupied Palestinian territories has raised concerns about “mass civilian casualties” and the use of “famine as a weapon of war.” Washington has “unequivocally” rejected the findings of the UN document.
In its report released on Thursday, November 14, the UN special committee asserts that the warfare methods employed by the Israeli state in Gaza since the October 7 attack exhibit the “characteristics of genocide,” highlighting “mass civilian casualties” and the utilization of “famine as a weapon of war.”
The report further expresses “serious concerns” regarding “Israel’s use of artificial intelligence (AI) in combat, which has killed not only Hamas fighters but also civilians, including many women and children,” notes Al Jazeera.
“The Israeli army’s reliance on AI-assisted targeting, with minimal human oversight, combined with heavy bombs, underscores Israel’s disregard for its obligation to distinguish between civilians and combatants and to take adequate precautions to prevent civilian deaths,” the committee writes.
An investigation by the Qatari channel revealed in April that the Israeli army had heavily relied on the Lavender system, an AI tool, to identify around 37,000 human targets. The left-wing Israeli magazine +972 and the Hebrew news site Local Call asserted that the military had largely trusted AI decisions, spending very little time verifying identified targets before authorizing bombings.
Accusations Rejected by Washington
The British newspaper The Guardian notes that the UN special committee, made up of representatives from Senegal, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka, was “unable to access the examined areas” to prepare its report. “Its requests for visits to Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and Israel were left unanswered,” the newspaper specifies.
The paper points out that the Israeli government, which accuses the UN of being “obsessed” with the Hebrew state and “biased against it,” did not immediately respond to the report’s allegations.
The United States, Israel’s main ally, likewise “unequivocally” disapproved of the conclusions of the UN document. “We believe that such wording and these types of accusations are certainly unfounded,” stated State Department spokesman Vedant Patel on Thursday.
This is not the first time Israel has faced such accusations since the outbreak of the war over a year ago. In March, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, stated in a report that there were “reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating that acts of genocide” had been committed “against Palestinians in Gaza had been reached.”
On Thursday, Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesman for the UN Secretary-General, accused Israeli authorities of blocking humanitarian aid from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs to northern Gaza six times in recent days, reports The Times of Israel. On Tuesday, Washington asserted that the Hebrew state was not violating American law regarding humanitarian aid entering the territory while calling for further progress.
