On December 2, Israeli army Arabic-language spokesman Avichay Adraee published a map of Gaza divided into a grid of numbered blocks with instructions that Palestinians living in certain areas should be evacuated to Rafah. Leaflets were also dropped over Gaza containing a QR code linking to the map on the Israeli army website.

This move came as Israeli warplanes bombed the south of the Gaza Strip – previously designated a “safe zone”. Killing hundreds of Palestinians in 24 hours. The Israeli army proudly announced that it had hit “400 targets.”

Meanwhile, media reports revealed that the Israeli army’s ability to step up so-called “precision” airstrikes has been boosted by an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that generates “targets.”

The maps, the leaflets, the tweets and the claims of “precise” military technology all feed into the narrative that Israel’s “most moral army” is concerned with protecting civilians in Gaza. But all of this is nothing more than a propaganda ploy to cover up what is actually happening on the ground – an AI-assisted genocide.

A deck of cards

Over the last two months of the brutal war, Israel has consistently resorted to “evacuation maps” and warnings on social media, urging Palestinians to flee certain areas of the Gaza Strip.

But the rising death toll — nearly 16,000 people and thousands more missing and likely dead — offers no evidence that Israel is truly concerned about the well-being of Palestinian civilians.

She is concerned about growing condemnation abroad of what legal experts call genocide and increasing pressure from the United States.

Just a few days ago, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Israel that it had weeks, not months, to complete its campaign in Gaza. His boss, President Joe Biden, is aware of growing discontent at home over his handling of the war, which could cost him votes in next year’s presidential election.

This “evacuation message” spread by the Israeli army is aimed at Western audiences rather than Palestinians in Gaza, in order to allay their fears about the civilian death toll. The fact that it is distributed primarily on social media platforms suggests that the target audience is not the people on the strip.

The Israeli army has not only cut off power to Gaza, but also targeted and damaged the already fragile mobile network, leaving most people there with almost no access to the internet.

Even the leaflets that were thrown away over the weekend are not worth the paper they were printed on. The QR code on it is only useful if you have a working phone with a charged battery and internet access.

Discrepancies between various maps shared by Israeli officials have also caused additional confusion. The orange-marked target areas didn’t even correspond to the number of blocks from which officials asked people to evacuate.

Consequently, the overall effect of the cards is to create “fear, panic and confusion,” as Melanie Ward, CEO of Medical Aid for Palestine, explained in a tweet.

Furthermore, the detailed mapping and dissection of Gaza is intended to give the impression of precision and caution, but the evacuation orders behind it prove the opposite.

Gaza is 360 square kilometers in size and has a population of 2.3 million. The average size of each of the 620 blocks on the map is 0.58 square kilometers, which equates to about 3,700 residents per block.

Asking dozens of blocks, i.e. tens of thousands of people, to move is hardly “precision.” It is a mass expulsion disguised as an economical precaution.

Israel’s digital killing machine

Aside from using digital maps and QR codes to prove to its allies that its army is not reckless, Israel is also bragging about its “precise” military technology.

Among them is an AI weapons system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”) that can quickly and automatically identify targets, much faster than older methods.

While the Israeli army manually selected 50 targets a day in previous bombing raids, today the new system selects 100.

According to a source cited by +972 magazine, this weapon has turned the Israeli army into a “mass murder factory,” focused more on “quantity rather than quality.”

The magazine reports that Israeli soldiers using the AI ​​targeting system are aware of the number of civilians they will kill; it will appear in the “Collateral Damage” category in the target file.

The Israeli army has set thresholds for civilian deaths ranging from five to hundreds. For example, the “collateral damage five” policy means that Israeli soldiers are authorized to kill a target that also kills five civilians.

At the high end, “the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single senior Hamas military commander,” reports +972 magazine.

Given that Israel views all 30,000 Hamas members in Gaza as potential targets, this means that “wiping out” the movement would result in a huge civilian death toll. If we use the lowest “collateral damage five,” the most conservative estimate is 150,000 civilians.

Of course, as the slain Hamas leaders are inevitably replaced, hundreds more Palestinians will be murdered as the AI ​​system generates more and more new targets. Since Hamas cannot be defeated militarily, the only logical outcome will be the continued murder or expulsion of everyone in Gaza.

Another troubling element of AI is that it reproduces biases that it has been trained to recognize. Historically, Israel has shown little regard for civilian lives in its bombing campaigns. One has to wonder to what extent the secret AI has learned to associate every Palestinian with “Hamas terrorists” based on the Israeli army’s past behavior. This may explain why it can generate so many new “targets” for bombing.

The propaganda of precision

Israel likes to brag about it his morals and high-tech precision strike capabilities, ironically as a means of defending against claims of indiscriminate attacks on civilians and accusations of war crimes.

This characterization of the Israeli army’s technological advances is also used by the United States to justify its support for Israel. For example, Blinken has stated that “Israel…has one of the most advanced militaries in the world. It is capable of neutralizing the threat posed by Hamas while minimizing harm to innocent men, women and children.”

But the more the US and Israel promote the narrative of their technological prowess, the more an element of legal jeopardy arises. As international law professor Michael Schmitt argued“The greater the precision capabilities of an attacker, the more convincing it is to characterize an attack on civilians or civilian objects as ruthless.”

In other words, a high-tech army has more of a duty to “prove” that it is not reckless. The more Israel and the US boast about Israel’s technological prowess, the more people wonder why so many civilians are being killed.

The only answer is that Israel has precision weapons but still targets people indiscriminately. Therefore, sophisticated technology does not serve its supposed purpose of precision and caution, but is instead used as a weapon of mass killing and destruction. In other words, what we are witnessing in Gaza is an AI-powered genocide.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.