In April 2024, left-wing Israeli news magazine +972 unveiled just one of the processes by which the Israeli military has been facilitating large-scale killing in Gaza. It involves an AI program with the code-name “Lavender” that gives IDF officers recommendations on which city blocks to level. After feeding endless lists of Gaza’s residents into this program (which, like other AI models, is known to produce hallucinations and abject falsehoods), officers are ordered to treat its output as unassailable fact. What was this output? A “kill list” of Palestinians, ranked by AI.
Lavender’s database of Gazans is sorted by what the program thinks their likelihood (from 1 to 100) is of being a member of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the armed groups Israel has said are the targets of their war on Gaza. These rankings, conjured up by a notoriously error-prone technology, reportedly take into account Gazan residents’ WhatsApp records, phone number changes, and frequency of moves between addresses. But Lavender is nowhere near perfect, and is known to falsely identify civilians as militants at least 10 percent of the time.
Despite this, according to +972, Israeli officers only take an average of 20 seconds to review an AI-identified target before authorizing a strike on their residence. This time is sufficient for determining if the target is a man, but not for any other fact-checking. Considering 10 percent of these targets are false positives, this practice represents willful negligence of the highest order, and reveals a disgusting disregard for human life. All males with a high enough Lavender ranking are treated as confirmed militants, and thus are deemed deserving of death by airstrike — not just for them but for their family and neighbors.
Part of the reason Israel’s current war on Gaza has drawn so much international condemnation is that the country’s policy on collateral damage has changed since the October 7 attacks. Previously, the IDF would usually only authorize airstrikes to kill senior commanders of armed groups in Gaza. But after Hamas’ 2023 attack, everything has changed. For every Hamas foot soldier, officers now are authorized to kill up to 20 innocents. This means that rather than using more expensive guided munitions, the IDF can use “dumb,” unguided bombs to blow up potential militants’ houses. This new, massacre-tolerant paradigm — coupled with the fallibility of AI systems like Lavender — has caused senseless levels of suffering and death among Palestinian civilians. As of January 2026, over 70,000 Palestinians have died in the war on Gaza, according to the United Nations. As +972’s coverage notes, 15,000 of these deaths occurred in the first six weeks of the war, which is also when Lavender-generated kill lists and tactics like “dumb bombing” and mass home demolition were being used the most.
This policy of untargeted bombing also tracks with Israel’s general practice of treating all male residents or visitors to Gaza as “terrorists.” Innocent Palestinian citizens of the tiny territory, as well as foreigners (like aid workers — and, most of all, journalists) have been targeted and murdered by the IDF time and time again, without any repercussions for the killers. The term “fighting-age male” — in practice meaning any man or boy above the age of early puberty — is used by the Israeli military to delineate a valid target for summary killing — of shooting first without any rules of engagement or requirement that the target be armed. Even Israeli Jews are not safe from this policy. Three male Israeli hostages — who escaped Hamas captivity shirtless, unarmed, and bearing a white “SOS” banner written in Hebrew — were gunned down in December 2023 by their own countrymen while trying to seek help from the invading force. One of them, wounded by an initial wave of fire that killed his two co-hostages, hid for fifteen minutes, begging the attackers to spare his life. IDF troops coaxed him out, and shot him again in cold blood, this time fatally. All this goes to show that if you are a male who ends up on the wrong end of the rifle in the Palestinian territories (or indeed, a woman or child who happens to be nearby), your life means nothing to the Israeli government. Afterward, they won’t even bother to punish or condemn your killers — even if you’re one of the citizens they ostensibly fight for.
This exact pattern of unjustified violence, and its excusal by the state, carries over to the great power most closely tied to the small country of Israel — the United States of America.
Palantir, a “little tech” startup founded by Antichrist-obsessed billionaire Peter Thiel that has ballooned to a grotesque state-linked mass surveillance organization, has developed something similar to Lavender AI, with a slightly different use case. But in function and capability, this technology — “ImmigrationOS” — is essentially the American version of the IDF’s murder machine. And it is likely providing data for an easy-to-use app ICE agents have already tested in Oregon.
Sold to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, for $30 million, this Palantir product, like its Israeli counterpart, pulls from a variety of sources — including passport data and Automated License Plate Recognition records — to rank U.S. residents by their priority for removal (in this case, from the country rather than from this mortal coil). Supposedly, the system ranks those who overstay their visas and “violent criminals” near the top of the list.
Like Lavender, ImmigrationOS’s process for determining one’s likelihood of being a valid target of immigration enforcement is at the very least opaque, and is probably error-prone. As with the ICE-employed facial recognition app “Mobile Fortify”, which falsely identified a woman twice, it is likely that ImmigrationOS has its limitations as well.
However, the program might have already found its way into the data used for a new ICE app called “ELITE” (Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement) which, according to 404 Media, was developed by Palantir as a user-friendly “targeting tool” for federal agents. The app includes a map feature in which ICE can track immigrants and where they live. Like ImmigrationOS and Lavender, ELITE also includes an AI-generated ranking system — in this case, of how certain it is a listed immigrant lives at the address attached to them on the app’s map. ELITE pulls from multiple sources, which could include ImmigrationOS in addition to official U.S. records. But like Lavender’s admitted 10 percent error rate, ELITE might falsely mark people for deportation. An ICE agent said as much in a court testimony: “There’s no such thing as 100 percent.” They went on to clarify that federal agents should always do their “due diligence on each target to confirm removability prior to action.” But are ICE agents really doing this?
Minneapolis is currently a battlefield. Described by DHS as the “largest immigration operation ever,” Operation Metro Surge, a wave of ICE and U.S. Border Patrol incursions and abuses within the Minnesota city and beyond, has already led to the arrest of 3,000 people. It has also led to protests, altercations, riots, and death.
These AI-assisted encroachments on the Twin Cities have recently resulted in the killing of a disarmed, beaten and already-bloody man by United States federal agents. Minneapolis VA nurse Alex Pretti was a politically active man who had already been injured by ICE agents less than two weeks before his death. On January 24, 2026, Pretti tried to help two women being harassed by a group of masked Border Patrol agents. Pretti filmed the federal agents as they shoved the women before placing himself between these aggressors and their victims. This seemed to enrage one of the agents, who promptly pepper-sprayed Pretti.
In a scene straight out of a dictatorial police state, the agents shoved Pretti to the ground, beat him brutally with a pepper spray canister, and shot him to death. Footage shows that the federal agent who killed Pretti was fully able to see his fellow agent disarm the protestor. He then drew his service pistol and repeatedly shot Pretti in the back, knowing full well he presented no deadly threat.
Pretti was carrying a holstered, licensed pistol before his disarmament and death — legal in Minnesota. After the shooting, agents were filmed frantically searching his body for a gun to justify the unlawful killing. This was very much a “bad shooting” — not just from a moral but from a law-enforcement perspective. Gun-rights activists, Republican members of Congress, and disgruntled conservatives alike joined anti-Trump voices in rightly decrying it. But there still exists a subset of shameless, manifestly dishonest, corrupt Trumpists who continue to defend Pretti’s murder. Stephen Miller — Trump’s fanatically xenophobic deputy chief of staff — branded Pretti a “domestic terrorist” whose possession of a gun could only mean he was trying to “assassinate” federal agents, only hours after Pretti’s body had cooled. With his willingness to deploy this sort of despicable rhetoric, it is not surprising that Miller once proposed suspending habeas corpus for students detained for criticizing U.S. military aid to Israel.
JD Vance (who rose to power with help from his “mentor” Peter Thiel) used similar, if less extreme, rhetoric to excuse Pretti’s killing on the day of his tragic death. In a post on Elon Musk’s X, the vice president claimed that the cause of the “chaos” in Minneapolis was the “direct consequence of far left agitators”, rather than being the fault of the ICE agents who started the altercation that claimed Pretti’s life.
The commander-in-chief himself, the unhealthy 79-year-old Donald Trump, weighed in several days after Pretti’s death in a perplexing statement in which he seemed to attack the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. “You can’t have guns,” the president said of the killing. “You can’t walk in with guns.” According to Politico, he later claimed to be ignorant of Miller’s fiery attacks on Pretti’s character.
What is most striking about this rhetoric is the accusation of “terrorism.” This is wholly un-American. It is foreign to the United States and ought to remain that way.
And yet senior Trump administration officials nevertheless said these sickening things that remind one of the worst atrocities our ally Israel commits. The “total immunity” championed by JD Vance after the January 7 killing of Renée Good (which itself occurred following a spate of ICE killings in 2025) has striking parallels with the “impunity” IDF and Israeli border police personnel enjoy when engaging in violence against Palestinians, according to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. The knee-jerk defamation of Alex Pretti by top Trump officials mirrors the way Israeli politicians, like Itamar Ben-Gvir, defend killers in their ranks. It is no coincidence that U.S. Customs and Border Protection executives have received guidance on “best practices” from IDF officers at a seminar in Israel, and that American law enforcement agencies routinely send police chiefs to the country to study their “counter-terrorism” tactics. And with converging systems of AI-assisted governmental mass surveillance, perhaps the U.S. and Israel will become even more like each other in this regard.
But Trump needs to remember he is president of the United States, not Israel. The majority of this nation’s people don’t want IDF-style defamation of murder victims here. And indeed, the response to Alex Pretti’s killing has largely been outrage, even among Republicans. Massive popular protests in solidarity with Minneapolis have swept U.S. cities. Even Stephen Miller — in his own cowardly way — has admitted that perhaps Border Patrol agents “may not have been following” correct protocol when they killed Pretti. But we cannot forget how officials slandered this murdered citizen. One can only hope that this country is freed of the Trumpist yoke sooner or later, and that the current Israelification of the American state’s use and justification of violence, is stopped before it is too late.
Featured Image Source: Chad Davis