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How US Intelligence and an American Company Feed Israel’s Killing Machine in Gaza [1]

['James Bamford', 'Chris Lehmann', 'Benjamin Kunkel', 'Samuel Moyn', 'Hannah Gold', 'Natasha Hakimi Zapata', 'Walaa Alshaer', 'Elle Kurancid', 'Barry Yourgrau', 'Rania Abouzeid']

Date: 2024-04-12 09:30:00+00:00

How US Intelligence and an American Company Feed Israel’s Killing Machine in Gaza Because it isn’t so much the bombs that kill but the list that puts civilians in the way of the bombs.

Employees from the World Central Kitchen were killed in an Israeli air strike on their vehicles in the central Gaza Strip. (Majdi Fathi / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Glilot Junction, in the Israeli city of Ramat HaSharon, is a crossroad where the Trans-Samaria Highway bisects the Coastal Highway. It is also a key crossroad for Israel’s human and technical spies. On the east side of the highway is Hertzog Camp and to the west is Dane Camp. Together, the 462 acres of land make up Camp Moshe Dayan‑the most secret military base in the country.

Surrounded by a variety of intrusion-prevention devices and high steel fences topped with barbed wire, Camp Dayan is home to a number of highly sensitive military intelligence instillations, including its central training base; the advanced Targeting Center; Unit 81, a secret technology unit attached to the Special Operations Division; and the IDF Signals Intelligence College.

But by far the most secret is the headquarters of Unit 8200, which specializes in eavesdropping, codebreaking, and cyber warfare—Israel’s equivalent of the American National Security Agency. One of Unit 8200’s newest and most important organizations is the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Center, which, according to a spokesman, was responsible for developing the AI systems that “transformed the entire concept of targets in the IDF.” Back in 2021, the Israeli military described its 11-day war on Gaza as the world’s first “AI war.” Israel’s ongoing invasion of Gaza offers a more recent—and devastating—example.

More than 70 years ago, that same patch of land was home to the Palestinian village of Ajleel, until the residents were killed or forced to abandon their homes and flee in fear during the Nakba in 1948. Now, soldiers and intelligence specialists are being trained at Camp Moshe Dayan to finish the job—to bomb, shoot, or starve to death the descendants of the Palestinians forced into the squalor of militarily occupied Gaza decades ago.

Earlier this month saw a continuation of that effort, with the targeting of three well-marked and fully approved aid vehicles belonging to World Central Kitchen, killing their seven occupants and ensuring that the food would never reach those dying of starvation. The targeting was precise—placing missiles dead center in the aid agency’s rooftop logos. Israel, however, said it was simply a mistake, similar to the “mistaken” killing of nearly 200 other aid workers in just a matter of months—more than all the aid workers killed in all the wars in the rest of the world over the last 30 years combined, according to the Aid Worker Security Database.

Such horrendous “mistakes” are hard to understand, considering the enormous amount of advanced targeting AI hardware and software provided to the Israeli miliary and spy agencies—some of it by one American company in particular: Palantir Technologies. “We stand with Israel,” the Denver-based company said in posts on X and LinkedIn. “The board of directors of Palantir will be gathering in Tel Aviv next week for its first meeting of the new year. Our work in the region has never been more vital. And it will continue.” As one of the world’s most advanced data-mining companies, with ties to the CIA, Palantir’s “work” was supplying Israel’s military and intelligence agencies with advanced and powerful targeting capabilities—the precise capabilities that allowed Israel to place three drone-fired missiles into three clearly marked aid vehicles.

“I am pretty encouraged about talent here and that we are getting the best people,” Alex Karp, cofounder and CEO of the company, told a group soon after arriving in Tel Aviv last January. “What I see in Israel is this hybrid of talent that is qualitative and argumentative.” Immediately after the talk, Karp traveled to a military headquarters where he signed an upgraded agreement with Israel’s Ministry of Defense. “Both parties have mutually agreed to harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions,” said Executive Vice President Josh Harris.

The project involved selling the ministry an Artificial Intelligence Platform that uses reams of classified intelligence reports to make life-or-death determinations about which targets to attack. In an understatement several years ago, Karp admitted, “Our product is used on occasion to kill people,” the morality of which even he himself occasionally questions. “I have asked myself, ‘If I were younger at college, would I be protesting me?’” Recently, a number of Karp’s employees decided to quit rather than be involved with a company supporting the ongoing genocide in Gaza. And in London’s Soho Square, dozens of pro-Palestine protesters and health workers gathered at Palantir’s UK headquarters to accuse the firm of being “complicit” in war crimes.

Palantir’s AI machines need data for fuel—data in the form of intelligence reports on Palestinians in the occupied territories. And for decades a key and highly secret source of that data for Israel has been the US National Security Agency, according to documents released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. After fleeing to Hong Kong in 2013 with a pocket full of flash drives containing some of the agency’s highest secrets, Snowden ended up in Moscow where, soon after he arrived, I met with him for Wired magazine. And in the interview, he told me that “one of the biggest abuses” he saw while at the agency was how the NSA secretly provided Israel with raw, unredacted phone and e-mail communications between Palestinian Americans in the US and their relatives in the occupied territories. Snowden was concerned that as a result of sharing those private conversations with Israel, the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank would be at great risk of being targeted for arrest or worse.

According to the Top Secret/Special Intelligence agreement between the NSA and Israel, “NSA routinely sends ISNU [Israeli SIGINT National Unit] minimized and unminimized raw collection…as part of the SIGINT relationship between the two organizations.” It adds, “Raw SIGINT includes, but is not limited to, unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content.”

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[1] Url: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/nsa-palantir-israel-gaza-ai/

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