A 2006 ruling by Israel’s Supreme Court was supposed to set the limits. The Lavender AI system is what happened next.
The Case That Changed Everything
On 13 December 2006, Israel’s Supreme Court sitting as the High Court of Justice issued its ruling in Case No. HCJ 769/02 — The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel v. The Government of Israel. The petitioners had challenged what the Israeli state called its “policy of targeted frustration”: the systematic killing of Palestinians it designated as members of armed organizations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. ICRC
The court, presided over by Justice (Emeritus) Aharon Barak, did not prohibit the policy. It regulated it.
In doing so, it produced one of the most consequential legal documents in the modern history of warfare — not because it restrained Israel’s killing program, but because it gave that program a legal framework that other states and military establishments could study, adopt, and build upon. The ruling’s influence has extended far beyond Israeli courts and Israeli airstrikes. It helped establish the intellectual architecture that now underpins drone warfare from Waziristan to Mogadishu.
What the court built, Israeli military technology has since automated nearly out of existence.
The Legal Problem: Who Can Be Killed?
The ruling’s central intellectual challenge was a classification problem embedded in the laws of war. International humanitarian law, as the court acknowledged, divides people into two categories: combatants and civilians. ICRC
Combatants — members of armed forces or organized militias meeting specific criteria — are lawful targets of military attack at any time. Civilians are protected from attack except “for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.”
The problem the court confronted was that Palestinian armed organizations did not fit neatly into either category. As the court put it, they “do not fulfill the conditions for combatants” — they carry no fixed emblem recognizable at a distance, they do not conduct operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war. They are, the court found, legally civilians. ICRC
But they are not, the court continued, civilians entitled to full civilian protection. They are “civilians taking a direct part in the hostilities” — and therefore, for the duration of that participation, they may be lawfully targeted.
The court declined to create a third legal category — “unlawful combatants” as a formal status distinct from both combatants and civilians — finding that existing treaty and customary international law did not support such a classification. But it effectively created one in practice, by expanding the concept of “direct participation in hostilities” to cover people the Israeli military designated as members of armed organizations, even when they were not actively engaged in fighting at the moment of their killing. ICRC
The ruling also acknowledged in plain terms the human cost already incurred: according to figures the petitioners submitted to the court, from the start of the policy through the end of 2005, close to three hundred members of designated armed organizations had been killed by targeted strikes. More than thirty attempts had failed. Approximately one hundred and fifty civilians who were in proximity to targeted individuals had been killed during those operations. Hundreds more had been wounded. ICRC
These were the numbers before the court issued a ruling that, in significant respects, endorsed the policy’s continuation.
Four Criteria and Two Safeguards
The court did impose conditions. Research published in the Israel Law Review by Shahaf Rabi and Avery Plaw — researchers at the Israeli Center for the Study of Targeted Killing and the University of Massachusetts Strategic Studies Group — summarized the ruling’s framework: the court laid out four criteria that must be met for targeted killing operations to be performed legally, and imposed two safeguards to ensure compliance. Cambridge University Press – Israel Law Review
The research found “strong evidence” suggesting Israel complied with the court’s four substantive requirements. But it reached a sharply different conclusion about the safeguards — particularly safeguard one, which required an independent ex post facto investigative committee to review operations causing civilian casualties.
The concerns Rabi and Plaw documented were pointed: questions about the committee’s composition, its objectivity, and its independence from the military establishment it was supposed to oversee. The research also found an absence of evidence that safeguard two — judicial oversight — had occurred at all. Cambridge University Press – Israel Law Review
The ruling, in other words, built a legal structure. The structure’s oversight mechanisms were not functioning as designed, even by the account of researchers whose framing was sympathetic to the court’s enterprise.
The Proportionality Gap
At the heart of targeted killing law — and at the heart of its failure — is the principle of proportionality. Under international humanitarian law, an attack is unlawful if the anticipated civilian harm is excessive in relation to the expected military advantage.
Proportionality is also, in practice, nearly impossible to enforce after the fact. The Rabi and Plaw study acknowledged that there was “insufficient information to render a definitive conclusion” regarding compliance with the proportionality requirement — not because Israel had demonstrably violated it, but because the information required to evaluate compliance was not available to outside scrutiny. Cambridge University Press – Israel Law Review
This opacity is itself a feature of how targeted killing programs are administered. Proportionality assessments are conducted internally, by military lawyers embedded in the chain of command, reviewing intelligence to which no independent body has access. When strikes kill civilians, the standard response is an internal review by the same institutional structure that authorized the strike.
Human Rights Watch documented this pattern in its investigation of three Israeli airstrikes during eleven days of hostilities in Gaza in May 2021, which together killed 62 Palestinian civilians. In the al-Wahda Street attack alone — in which Israeli aircraft struck roads and sidewalks in the heart of Gaza City over four minutes, collapsing three multi-story residential buildings — 44 civilians were killed, including 18 children. The Israeli military said it had targeted tunnels and an underground command center used by armed groups. Human Rights Watch found that, since the attack, the Israeli military had “produced no evidence of a military target in the vicinity to justify the attack.” If a military target existed, Human Rights Watch concluded, the Israeli military had also “not shown that it was important enough to justify the risk to civilians.” Human Rights Watch
The organization characterized these attacks as “serious violations of the laws of war and apparent war crimes,” and called on the International Criminal Court prosecutor to investigate. Human Rights Watch
The proportionality principle is not absent from the legal framework. It is present as language and absent as enforcement.
Lavender: When the Framework Meets the Algorithm
The 2006 ruling imagined a world in which human intelligence officers assembled dossiers on specific individuals, a complex “incrimination” process cross-checked evidence, and senior commanders authorized individual strikes. It imagined, in other words, targeted killing as a slow and deliberate process — one in which the legal criteria it articulated could, in principle, be applied case by case.
That world ended on the morning of 8 October 2023.
An investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call, published in April 2024 and based on testimony from six Israeli intelligence officers who served during the current war on Gaza, revealed the existence of an artificial intelligence system called “Lavender.” +972 Magazine
Lavender, the sources told +972, was designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad — including low-ranking ones — as potential targets for air strikes. The system analyzed surveillance data collected on most of the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip, assigned each person a score from 1 to 100 estimating the likelihood they were a militant, and generated kill lists that officers were expected to act upon. +972 Magazine
During the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which designated as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible strikes. The IDF Spokesperson denied the existence of such a kill list in a statement to +972 and Local Call. +972 Magazine
The system’s accuracy had been validated by an internal check of a random sample. When that sample found Lavender’s results had reached 90 percent accuracy in identifying an individual’s affiliation with Hamas, the army authorized its sweeping use. The implication — acknowledged by the sources — was that the system was known in advance to produce erroneous designations approximately 10 percent of the time. +972 Magazine
“There was no ‘zero-error’ policy. Mistakes were treated statistically,” one source told +972. +972 Magazine
Twenty Seconds per Target
What made the +972 investigation so legally significant was not merely the existence of an AI targeting system. It was the description of how human beings interacted with it.
Human personnel, sources said, often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions. Normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to verify that the Lavender-marked individual was male. +972 Magazine
They were not required to independently check why the machine had selected the individual. They were not required to examine the raw intelligence data. The outputs of the AI system were treated, sources said, “as if it were a human decision.” +972 Magazine
A companion system, called “Where’s Daddy?” — also revealed in the +972 investigation — tracked Lavender-designated targets and signaled to the army when they had entered their family homes. The army then systematically attacked targets while they were in their homes, usually at night, when entire families were present. +972 Magazine
“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” intelligence officer A. told +972. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.” +972 Magazine
For junior militants designated by Lavender, the army also preferred unguided munitions — so-called “dumb bombs” — rather than precision-guided weapons, which destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants. The reasoning given by one source: “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs].” +972 Magazine
The policy on civilian casualties had also changed in ways that no court had authorized. According to two sources, the army decided during the first weeks of the war that for every junior Hamas operative Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians. In the case of senior Hamas officials of battalion or brigade commander rank, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in a single assassination. +972 Magazine
These ratios bear no relationship to any proportionality analysis the 2006 ruling contemplated. They represent a codified, pre-authorized civilian death toll — not an individualized assessment of military advantage weighed against anticipated harm, but a standing numerical license to kill bystanders by rank of the intended target.
The Quadcopter as Execution Weapon
Beyond the aerial bombardment enabled by Lavender, Israel has developed a parallel and lower-altitude killing system: the armed quadcopter drone.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor documented in June 2024 the Israeli military’s expanded use of small quadcopter aircraft to carry out what it characterized as extrajudicial executions of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The organization described these killings as a fundamental component of what it characterized as the genocide Israel has been committing against the Gaza Strip’s inhabitants since 7 October 2023. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
Among the cases documented: Silah Muhammad Ahmad Odeh, 52, was killed on 21 May by direct fire from a quadcopter while leading a group of approximately twelve people attempting to evacuate Jabalia refugee camp under a white flag. Her brother Nidal described watching the drone fire directly at her head as she stepped onto the main street. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
Fathi Hassan Yassin, 70, was killed on 10 May by quadcopter fire in Gaza City’s Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood. His son Ibrahim told Euro-Med Monitor that the killing occurred in the morning as the family attempted to evacuate; displaced people at the Zaytoun Martyrs school were “directly targeted by artillery shelling and quadcopter planes, causing multiple casualties.” Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
Euro-Med Monitor emphasized that the majority of Israel’s quadcopter targeting takes place in public spaces where the distinction between fighters and civilians is readily observable, and that the Israeli military flies these aircraft over target areas for long enough periods to allow for “precise monitoring and evaluation of field conditions.” The closeness of the targeting range, the organization found, made the killings deliberate rather than mistaken. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
Euro-Med Monitor submitted a primary report in late December 2023 to United Nations special rapporteurs and the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court documenting dozens of cases of what it characterized as field executions, requesting an immediate investigation. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
What the Law Cannot Absorb
The 2006 Supreme Court ruling is still cited, by Israeli legal officials and by international legal scholars, as evidence that Israel’s targeted killing program operates within a legal framework. The court engaged seriously with international humanitarian law. It cited custom. It named the principle of distinction. It named proportionality. It imposed oversight requirements.
What the Lavender investigation revealed is that the relationship between the legal framework and operational reality had, by October 2023, become almost entirely nominal. The 2006 ruling imagined individual judgment; Lavender replaced it with a 10 percent known-error rate treated as acceptable. The ruling imagined proportionality assessment; the army replaced it with pre-authorized kill ratios of 15 to 20 civilians per junior operative. The ruling imposed an ex post facto investigative committee; the Rabi and Plaw study found its independence and objectivity in serious doubt even before the current war. Cambridge University Press – Israel Law Review
Human Rights Watch has characterized the Israeli government’s policies and practices as constituting the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution. Human Rights Watch Euro-Med Monitor has characterized the military campaign in Gaza as genocide. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
What the accumulated record shows is something more specific than an allegation: a legal architecture constructed to authorize killing, with safeguards that were inadequate before they were tested, tested against a system designed to eliminate the human deliberation those safeguards assumed. According to data from the Palestinian Health Ministry — data on which the Israeli army itself has relied — Israel killed some 15,000 Palestinians in the first six weeks of the war, up until a ceasefire agreed on 24 November 2023. +972 Magazine
“At 5 a.m., [the air force] would come and bomb all the houses that we had marked,” one senior intelligence officer told +972. “We took out thousands of people. We didn’t go through them one by one — we put everything into automated systems, and as soon as one of [the marked individuals] was at home, he immediately became a target. We bombed him and his house.” +972 Magazine
The 2006 ruling asked whether Israel could lawfully kill people in their homes. The Lavender system automated the answer at industrial scale.
Sources:
- ICRC — “Israel, The Targeted Killings Case | How Does Law Protect in War?”
- Human Rights Watch — Targeted Killings and Drones
- Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor — “Gaza: Israeli Army Expands Its Use of Quadcopters to Kill More Palestinian Civilians”
- Cambridge University Press / Israel Law Review — “Israeli Compliance with Legal Guidelines for Targeted Killing”
- +972 Magazine — “‘Lavender’: The AI Machine Directing Israel’s Bombing Spree in Gaza”
Palestinian writer and researcher documenting life under occupation, drawing on primary sources from B’Tselem, Al-Haq, OCHA oPt, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and named scholars.