Israeli Military's Use of Digital Tools in Gaza (www.hrw.org)

Human Rights Watch and investigative reporting have documented that the Israeli military has deployed multiple data‑intensive digital tools in Gaza — an evacuation monitoring system based on mobile‑phone location data, and tools nicknamed Lavender, The Gospel and Where’s Daddy — to guide targeting decisions during the 2023–24 campaign. HRW found that these tools rely on widespread, continuous surveillance and pre‑existing personal data, and that an apparent public leak of operational source data (including block‑level population figures and family names) exposed how granular the datasets are. The significance is legal and humanitarian: these systems are being used to inform attacks and evacuation policy despite flawed inputs and opaque algorithms, raising strong risks of misidentifying civilians as combatants and violating international humanitarian law’s rules on distinction and precautions. Technically, the evacuation monitor uses cell‑tower triangulation and other signals to paint a live map of movement across 620 Gaza blocks — a method known to have low spatial precision, worsened by power outages and network damage. Lavender reportedly uses semi‑supervised “positive unlabeled” machine learning to score people’s likelihood of militant affiliation from social‑graph and behavioral proxies (phone changes, group chats, connections), with thresholds set by officers. Such approaches amplify bias, depend on incomplete or stale labels, and are effectively unreviewable, meaning high false‑positive rates and opaque decision chains. HRW concludes these tools do not reliably shrink civilian harm and instead create new technical, ethical and legal hazards for targeting in armed conflict.