- By: Mohsin Mumtaz
A year of unflinching hostilities between the Israeli forces and the ‘Axis of Resistance’ has yielded an unstoppable massacre in the Middle-East. Given the course of time, the dynamics of the conflict have seen a continuous state of flux, with the war crimes of Israel continuing apace.
The simmering tensions between the ‘Axis of Resistance’ and US-succoured Israeli forces have demonstrated a little rest in the proliferation of full-scale war in the Middle-East, spurring an array of overlapping challenges for the whole global fraternity. In the midst of all the rudderless campaign of fire exchange, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) has intensified the gravity of the matter and marked a paradigm shift in the patterns of unhampered war.
Within the given context, one could relate to the assassinations of the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah. The Israeli operations to assassinate the mentioned leaders were a confident product of the AI-elicited war tool ‘Where’s daddy?’, which has been infested in the warfare for the surveillance of anti-Zionist resistance outfits. The use of satellite tracking and network effect through ‘Where’s daddy?’ to navigate the targeted leaders speaks volumes of the AI-infested military capabilities of Israel to carry out such crucial operations. Aligned with the strategic tool of ‘where’s daddy?’, another AI generated potent weapon named ‘Gospel’ has been incorporated into the war to target the infrastructure in the besieged strip of Gaza. The ‘Gospel’ technology blows explosive arsenal into the targeted buildings, reducing them to tons of rubble. The targeting of Hassan Nasrallah’s safe haven in Beirut is a pertinent example in this context.
To say nothing of the aforementioned AI-guided military attacks, the explosion of thousands of pager devices at the same time is another prominent AI-led war action in this backslide. The unusual war technique of the ‘unit 8200’ which is an information system of cyberwar, used by the Israeli forces to collapse the radio frequency-based network of Hezbollah’s pagers, will stand out in the history of the conflict for a long haul.In contradiction, the ‘Axis of Resistance’ spearheaded by revolutionary Iran, has secured slim success in ramping up an AI-inclusive war policy to override Israel’s coercive control over AI military capabilities. Nonetheless, this dearth of comparative countermeasures must not let Iran be conceived as a forerunner in this terse game of flames. It must not be sidelined that Iran’s arsenal experts are looking forward to thriving its ballistic missile program. Having said that, the retaliatory attack of October 2nd, which was on the anvil for months, proved all the preconceived assumptions myopic as Israel’s ‘Iron-Dome’ faced a shameful backlash in the battleground.
From most accounts, the Gaza conflict is excessively tarred with the digital disinformation that is an abysmal side of Artificial Intelligence. Primarily, the Israeli alliance has adapted the AI tools to spiral out deep fake opinions and surreal political agendas to cast a contradictory narrative about the victimized Palestinians.It is against the backdrop of AI algorithms that the Western media has been overshadowing the brutal bloodshed in Gaza and Beirut by promulgating the interviews of the families of Israeli hostages. In the meantime, Israel’s alleged agendas of gaslighting the global populace in favor of the Zionist state are relentlessly armed and backed by Western media platforms vis-a-vis Meta applications. This nexus of digital media with artificial intelligence is pushing the combatants to the edge of broad-based warfare.
To put things in perspective, participants of the Gaza conflict have heavily encroached toward instating the AI apparatus in their military strategies. This AI-driven mode of conflagration has not solely increased the uncertainty of war actions but also blurred the circumstances of an unlikely deadlock in the broad-based confrontation between the hostile groups. The egregious coming of age of AI-lead war techniques being applied to scale up the impact of war tactics has progressively abated the possibility of a plausible solution to the festering crisis. Instead, this rise in artificial intelligence-based warfare poses unwarranted consequences for the whole world and the Middle East in particular. Considering the gravity of the situation the global community must extend its much-needed mediatory role to bring down the regional temperatures of the Middle East. There should be an impasse in the escalation of war and a permanent ceasefire must be presented fore-with.
- The writer is an independent analyst and a student of English Literature at University of the Punjab.