The Human And Political Choices Behind AI Warfare
By Antony Loewenstein
October 2, 2026
Israel's war on Gaza has become a testing ground for AI-enabled warfare. But behind the algorithms, data systems and targeting tools are people making decisions.
Gaza is an AI-enabled genocide. But more importantly, humans are ultimately making the decision about who lives and dies.
The AI apocalypse in warfare may be coming, but I want people to think more about the humans who are behind warfare now and in the future.
I've written about the Palestine Laboratory for well over a decade, investigating how Israel trials, tests and markets its surveillance technology, its weapons and its military systems on Palestinians in Palestine, Gaza, the West Bank and beyond, and then sells them around the world to dictatorships and democracies, from Rwanda to India to Saudi Arabia.
And one of the things that often comes up is what we see in Gaza. Gaza is an AI-enabled genocide, but more importantly, humans are ultimately making the decision about who lives and dies. It is not being made by machines alone, at least not yet.
One of the most disturbing aspects of Israel's genocide in Gaza is, yes, the use of AI-enabled tools, quadcopters, Silicon Valley cloud companies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon, and AI firms such as Palantir and Anthropic. They use huge amounts of data that ultimately goes to the Israeli military, which is still making the decision, sometimes with only 10 or 20 seconds to spare.
Who dies? Who lives? How many civilians are deemed acceptable to kill? That's why we have 70,000, 80,000, 90,000, 100,000 Palestinians dead, the vast majority of whom are civilians. It's why we see mass carnage in southern Lebanon.
It's why we see carnage in Iran.
It's why we see increasing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, partly enabled by AI software.
One of the issues I see discussed so often these days in relation to US wars in the Middle East, and Israel's wars as well, is the idea that we should worry when machines take over. And yes, we should worry about that.
But how about worrying about the humans who are behind these systems now?
All the data being processed by these companies originally comes from people, from human beings. Yes, it's gathered through social media data, mobile phone information and a range of other sources.
But ultimately, humans are making the decisions. One of the things I worry about is that people ignore the ideology behind these companies.
So many of these firms, not least companies like Palantir, Anthropic and others, view their role as supporting and advancing Western supremacy. And it's that ideology that we should be opposing, not just the idea of weapons taking over the world and killing huge numbers of civilians.
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