Lavender, Where’s Daddy and the ethics of AI-driven war

The world today is war-torn, starting with Russia's attacks on Ukraine to Israel's devastation in Palestine and now in Iran, putting the entire West Asia in jeopardy.

The geometrics of war has completely changed, from Blitzkrieg (lightning war) in World War II to the use of sophisticated and technologically driven missiles in these latest armed conflicts. The most recent wars are being driven by use of artificial intelligence (AI) to narrow down potential targets.

There have been multiple evidences which indicate that Israeli forces have deployed novel AI-driven targeting tools in Gaza. One system, nicknamed “Lavender” is an AI-enabled database that assigns risk scores to Gazans based on patterns in their personal data (communication, social connections) to identify “suspected Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives”. Lavender has flagged up to 37,000 Palestinians as potential targets early in the war.

A second system, “Where is Daddy?”, uses mobile phone location tracking to notify operators when a marked individual is at home. The initial strikes using these automated generated systems targeted individuals in their private homes on the pretext of targeting the terrorists. But innocent women and young children also lost their lives in these attacks. This technology was developed as a replacement of human acumen and strategy to identify and target the suspects.

According to the Humans Rights Watch report (2024), around 70 per cent of people who have lost lives were women and children. The United Nations agency has also verified the details of 8,119 victims killed in Gaza from November 2023 to April 2024. The report showed that 44 per cent of the victims were children and 26 per cent were women. The humans are merely at the mercy of this sophisticated technology that identified the suspected militants and targeted them.

The use of AI-based tools like “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy?” by Israel in its war against Palestine raises serious questions about the commitment of countries to the international legal framework and the ethics of war. Use of such sophisticated AI targeted tools puts the weaker nations at the dictate of the powerful nations who can use these technologies to inflict suffering for the non-combatants.

The international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL) play a critical yet complex role in the context of AI during conflict situations such as the Israel-Palestine Conflict. Such AI-based warfare violates the international legal framework principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution.

The AI systems do not inherently know who is a combatant. Investigations report that Lavender had an error rate on the order of 10 per cent and routinely flagged non-combatants (police, aid workers, people who merely shared a name with militants). The reported practice of pre-authorising dozens of civilian deaths per strike grossly violates the proportionality rule.

An attack is illegal if incidental civilian loss is “excessive” in relation to military gain. For example, one source noted that each kill-list target came with an allowed “collateral damage degree” (often 15–20) regardless of the specific context. Allowing such broad civilian loss per target contradicts IHL’s core balancing test (ICRC Rule 14).

The AI-driven process has eliminated normal safeguards (verification, warnings, retargeting). IHRL continues to apply alongside IHL in armed conflict contexts. In particular, the right to life (ICCPR Article 6) obliges states to prevent arbitrary killing.

The International Court of Justice has held that while the right to life remains in force during war, an “arbitrary deprivation of life” must be assessed by reference to the laws of war. In practice, this means that IHL’s rules become the benchmark for whether killings are lawful.

However, even accepting lex specialis (law overriding general law), the reported AI strikes raise grave human rights concerns especially the Right to Life (ICCPR Art. 6) and Right to Privacy (ICCPR Art. 17).

Ethics of war, called 'jus in bello' in the legal parlance, based on the principles of proportionality (anticipated moral cost of war) and differentiation (between combatants and non-combatants) has also been violated. Article 51(5) of Additional Protocol I of the 1977 Geneva Convention said that “an attack is disproportionate, and thus indiscriminate, if it may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and military advantage”.

The Israel Defense Forces have been indiscriminately using AI to target potential targets. These targets though aimed at targeting militants have been extended to the non-military targets also, thus causing casualties to the civilians and non-combatants. Methods used in a war is like a trigger which once warded off is extremely difficult to retract and reconcile. Such unethical action creates more fault lines and any alternate attempt at peace resolution and mediation becomes extremely difficult.

The documented features of systems like Lavender and Where’s Daddy, based on automated kill lists, minimal human oversight, fixed civilian casualty “quotas” and use of imprecise munitions against suspects in homes — appear to contravene the legal and ethical principles.

Unless rigorously constrained, such tools risk turning warfare into arbitrary slaughter of civilians, undermining the core humanitarian goals of IHL and ethics of war. Therefore, it is extremely important to streamline the unregulated use of AI in perpetuating war crimes as it undermines the legal and ethical considerations of humanity at large.