O n 11 January, 2024 South Africa presented arguments accusing Israel of genocidal acts at the International Court of Justice. During the public hearing, South Africa emphasised the genocidal intent of its acts of destruction and the mass killing of Palestinian people. According to the Rome Statute of 1998, “genocide” means acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a group through killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, as well as deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
Judges were asked to respond to the intention of Israel and concluded that measures should be taken to prevent acts of genocide in the Gaza strip. Israel’s high-tech killing campaign relies on automatised weaponry, making it difficult to establish intent and accountability. Yet, the technology of genocide, programmed by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), is based on human agency — in it resides the impulse to model machines as automated systems of algorithmic killing.
The question of the intention to kill is central to assessing the responsibility of an agent committing a voluntary act. Two recent investigations revealed by independent publications +972 Magazine and Local Call detailed the systems developed and used by the IDF to program calculated bombing in Gaza, one that can program the destruction of targets using computational science. The first system, called “The Gospel” , can gen.