A new "open letter" calling for a ceasefire in Gaza (from the group that produced this earlier letter).

Israel's AI-supported "mass assassination industry" in Gaza (thanks to Daniel Star for the pointer):  

Compared to previous Israeli assaults on Gaza, the current war…has seen the army significantly expand its bombing of targets that are not distinctly military in nature. These include private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks, which sources say the army defines as “power targets” (“matarot otzem”).  The bombing of power targets, according to intelligence sources who had first-hand experience with its application in Gaza in the past, is mainly intended to harm Palestinian civil society: to “create a shock” that, among other things, will reverberate powerfully and “lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas,” as one source put it….The Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed.  In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single to Hamas military commander.

Haaretz published an analysis by Yagil Levy, a sociology professor at the Open University of Israel, which found that in three earlier campaigns in Gaza, in the period from 2012-22, the ratio of civilian deaths to the total of those killed in airstrikes hovered at about 40%. That ratio declined to 33% in a bombing campaign earlier this year, called Operation Shield and Arrow. 

 

In the first three weeks of the current operation, Swords of Iron, the civilian proportion of total deaths rose to 61%, in what Levy described as “unprecedented killing” for Israeli forces in Gaza. The ratio is significantly higher than the average civilian toll in all the conflicts around the world during the 20th century, in which civilians accounted for about half the dead, according to Levy.

 

“The broad conclusion is that extensive killing of civilians not only contributes nothing to Israel’s security, but that it also contains the foundations for further undermining it,” Levy concluded. “The Gazans who will emerge from the ruins of their homes and the loss of their families will seek revenge that no security arrangements will be able to withstand.”