The Israeli campaign in Gaza has attained a new stage—one not only marked by sheer force but by a conscious, technology-driven strategy of target selection and collateral damage. This effort is differentiated from others by the conscious broadening of what the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) consider legitimate civilian losses, accompanied by the use of artificial intelligence systems that have accelerated and amplified destruction exponentially.
Since the beginning of hostilities following the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7, the IDF has tremendously broadened its definition of who or what constitutes an acceptable target. No longer limited to strategic military objectives like arms caches, rocket sites, or terrorist groups, the campaign increasingly includes “power targets”—tall residential apartment towers, public facilities, universities, banks, and governmental offices. They are not chosen for their direct military usefulness, but to create a “shock” among Palestinian civilian society, hoping to force civilians to rise against Hamas.
The tactical theory that directs these missions is tied to the so-called Dahiya Doctrine, whose tenets promote the application of disproportionate force against civilian and governmental infrastructure to deter. This policy has been honed through repeated campaigns, but the current war poses a new level of escalation. As per +972 Magazine and Local Call, “the granting of greater leeway by the Israeli military to bomb non-military targets, the easing of limits on projected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence program to generate more possible targets than ever in the past in history, appear to have imparted to the damaging nature of the initial phases of Israel’s current war with the Gaza Strip.”
Centered on this process is the Habsora (“The Gospel”) system, a computerized artificial intelligence system with the capacity to generate scores of new targets daily. The system works its way through massive intelligence reports, recommending automatically target sites—usually residential homes in most instances in which suspected Hamas employees, sometimes lower-ranking, are believed to live. The final product is a “mass assassination factory,” in the words of a retired intelligence officer, where quantity trumps quality. Human oversight is still restricted, with officers “ranked according to the number of targets we can think up.”
The implications are enormous. Today’s IDF officially approves attacks on homes, where the expected collateral casualties—the civilian deaths—are weighed ahead of time and deemed permissible. During past operations, the threshold for collateral casualty was much lower; with today’s approval process, strikes that will kill dozens or hundreds of civilians if the target is deemed valuable enough are approved. In one incident that has been documented, the military leadership openly ordered the murder of scores of civilians to kill one of the top Hamas commanders.
This change is not abstract. The statistics speak for themselves. “55,104 have been killed since the start of the war and 127,394 have been wounded,” women and children making up over half of the casualties, said the Gaza Health Ministry. The United Nations has reported that over 1.7 million Palestinians have been displaced, and hundreds of families have had ten or more members killed in one strike. The destruction doesn’t end in the north; even in so-called “safe zones” in the south, residential high-rise buildings and shelters are bombed indiscriminately, burying entire families under the rubble.
Survivor testimonies reveal the human cost behind these statistics. Families are being destroyed in seconds, oftentimes without notice. In one of the testimonies, a young woman named Nour explained that her whole family was killed by an airstrike while they slept, and she was left by herself. There is another story of a young boy, Noor, who escaped death by an airstrike that claimed the lives of his parents and siblings because a fight had prompted him to sleep a few meters from the others. Such stories are not the norm; they are characteristic of a wider pattern where civilian life is targeted and intentionally eradicated.
The psychological impact of this campaign runs profound and long-lasting. According to clinical research, war exposure leads to PTSD in up to 50% of the civilian population, with the population of Gaza most likely experiencing far worse psychological damage daily and immense helplessness. Children are especially vulnerable, with long-term dangers of PTSD, anxiety, depression, and chronic illness. The trauma is not just for the directly affected, but is transmitted to succeeding generations, both physically and epigenetically, such that this war will be felt as a wound for decades to come.
Psychotherapists and aid workers are faced with a Himalayan task in addressing these needs. Wreckage of health centers, absence of trained personnel, and ongoing violence make it virtually impossible to provide adequate care. Innovative alternatives like telemedicine and home care offer some hope, but the magnitude of the crisis surpasses available resources. The World Health Organization mentions that “the war in Gaza has imposed a substantial mental health burden on individuals, disrupting community wellbeing.
From the strategic studies perspective, the Israeli action in Gaza is an evolutionary phenomenon in the use of airpower and intelligence.”. Blending AI into target selection, the deliberate relaxation of restrictions on civilian casualty damage, and methodical assault on civilian infrastructure are all novel compared to previous standards on proportionality and discrimination. While the stated goal is the destruction of Hamas, the tactical reality on the battlefield is the comprehensive leveling of Palestinian civil society, without much evidence that these tactics have meaningfully weakened the military capabilities of Hamas.
Its implications for military doctrine are enormous. The Gaza campaign makes clear how advances in technology can enable—and even tempt—mass casualty warfare, and shift the moral and legal calculus of war. It raises urgent questions about the shape of future war in cities, the role of AI in decision-making, and the responsibility of political and military leaders. As the world witnesses the chaos on TV screens, the Gaza lessons will echo beyond the Middle East for years to come, shaping arguments on strategy, ethics, and the conduct of war.
