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Hunters and Hunted: The Terrible Truths About AI-Assisted Manhunts in Gaza

These technologies are removing accountability from warfare and making it harder to hold individuals or governments responsible for extrajudicial killings

People are seen on a street with damaged buildings near the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, on April 1, 2024. Photo: Xinhua/Alamy

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Amidst the rubble, at first, it’s hard to see a human figure. Then, through the dust, a man becomes visible. He sits hunched on a chair, his face masked, holding only a stick, which he raises in a final, futile gesture at the drone closing in. Then the video cuts.

These are the last recorded moments of Yahya Ibrahim Hassan Sinwar, leader of Hamas in Gaza from 2017 until his death in October 2024. Captured by an Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) drone, this footage marks the end of a manhunt for one of Hamas’ key figures, responsible for orchestrating the brutal attacks of 7 October 2023.

But Sinwar’s death raises two key questions: If he was unarmed, why was he killed? And if Israel can target individuals with such precision, why has it resorted to bombing Gaza so extensively?

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Under the Geneva Conventions, particularly Article 51 of the 1977 Additional Protocol I, unarmed combatants or those hors de combat are not legitimate targets. If Sinwar was unarmed, his killing raises questions about Israel’s adherence to international humanitarian law.

Moreover, Sinwar’s precision killing draws attention to Israel’s broader military strategy. If such individuals can be located and neutralised, why has the bombing campaign led to such high civilian casualties?

International law’s principle of proportionality requires that military actions avoid excessive harm to civilians in relation to the military advantage gained. The scale of Gaza’s destruction suggests this balance may not have been maintained.

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Sinwar’s killing is not unique. Other high-profile figures on Israel’s manhunt list include Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, and senior Hezbollah commanders like Hashem Safieddine and Ali Hussein Hazima.

Few wars have seen such a relentless focus on eliminating military leadership, with targeted killings becoming the hallmark of this conflict, though civilians often bear the brunt.

This marks a shift in modern warfare. States can now track, monitor, and kill individuals with unprecedented precision—yet often rely on weapons with devastating wide-area effects, such as 2,000lb bombs. Technologies like drones, satellite imaging, and facial recognition enable this new form of manhunt, but they come at a high cost in civilian lives.

Israel has a long history of assassinations, targeting leaders of Palestinian and Hezbollah groups. Previous hits include Imad Mughniyeh (2008), Abdel Aziz Rantisi (2004), and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin (2004).

But the tempo has increased in this war. In earlier conflicts, war was a collective experience between groups. Now, individuals are the focus, and their deaths are framed as decisive victories, while “collateral damage” becomes the grim term for the civilians caught in the crossfire.

“Some people, including liberals, might argue that targeting Hamas’s leadership is preferable to engaging in a campaign that has already claimed the lives of 40,000 people in Gaza directly, with perhaps another 60,000 or more affected indirectly through starvation, lack of healthcare, clean water, and basic necessities,” says Bill Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, where he focuses on the arms industry.

“But it’s not as if the Netanyahu government is presenting that choice. They are pursuing both—collective punishment and targeted strikes. And when there’s a house with even one Hamas operative among a hundred or more civilians with no connection to Hamas, the IDF shows no hesitation in demolishing the entire building.”


How Computers are Helping Hunt man

Such a shift has been filled by technological advancements, which has transformed the very mechanics of how these manhunts are carried out.

In the past, a hunter relied on physical presence and tracking skills, but today, drones hover silently above the battlefield, equipped with facial recognition software capable of identifying targets in seconds. 

Companies like Clearview AI are providing militaries with tools that can transform a person’s face into a mathematical formula, making it possible to track and kill with frightening precision. And, as these technologies evolve, the potential for the never-ending kill lists grows. 

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Militaries have, as an IDF air force pilot explained to an Israeli newspaper in 2019, begun to focus on the quantity of targets as a measure of success. 

“The view in the Israel Defense Forces is that success is measured by how many targets you create, the number of new targets that are entered into the database,” the officer was quoted as saying. 

And artificial intelligence (AI) has put an adrenaline boost into the creation of these kill lists.

In April, a +972 Magazine investigation revealed that Israel has increasingly relied on an AI system, called “Lavender,” to rapidly generate manhunt targets for its airstrikes in Gaza.

This AI tool marked tens of thousands of individuals as potential targets. Then a supplementary AI tracking system, called “Where’s Daddy?”, pinpointed when individuals, flagged by Lavender, returned to their family homes. This tracking system reportedly automatically alerted military personnel when targets were inside their homes, meaning the inevitable strike often happened at night – a time when families are present. 

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Such AI-driven manhunt target generation, combined with minimal human oversight, has led to a significant escalation in the bombing campaign. One source told the magazine that whenever the pace of assassinations slowed, additional targets were added to systems like “Where’s Daddy?” to help boost the kill-list numbers. 

“I added something like 1,200 new targets to the [tracking] system, because the number of attacks [we were conducting] decreased,” he said. “Such decisions were not made at high levels.”

Such an AI-enabled process may well have fuelled the decision to bomb a home in southern Lebanon‘s village of Teffahta earlier this week. At least 19 people, including six women and five children, were killed in that Israeli airstrike, just one of thousands.

As Anna Stavrianakis, Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex told Byline Times, this new technology, despite being part of a wider continuum of Israeli surveillance and control, has recently supercharged “the Israeli military’s ability to target Palestinians, allowing them to both kill and maim a greater number of fighters but also bystanders, and adding to the relentless surveillance and fear of everyday life in Palestine.”


What Does This do to war?

The combination of the manhunt with new, lethal technology raises critical ethical questions. How do we ensure that the right targets are identified? Who calls for restraint when AI systems identify more and more targets in their relentless push for solutions? And what are the consequences when the ability to kill becomes as simple as programming a drone? 

These technologies risk removing accountability from warfare, making it harder to hold individuals or governments responsible for extrajudicial killings or violations of human rights.


Man as Animal to be Hunted

A distinctive feature of modern manhunts is the alignment of the hunted with the animal world – casting them as animals that need to be killed, much as society has done with foxes or tigers or elephants. 

Such framing, especially in places like Gaza, seems deliberate. The British Empire, famed for their big-game expeditions, saw these pursuits as performances of power – expressions of dominance over nature, animals, and, by extension, human beings.

And so it is with modern day Israel over Palestine. As Hannah Arendt noted, totalitarianism begins when man is dominated to the point where “he becomes a specimen of the animal-species man.” In this way, the enemy is transformed into the ‘animal other,’ a being that can be hunted with impunity. 

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This is not hyperbole. The dehumanisation was evident when Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told his troops, “We are fighting against animals,” and when other Israeli politicians called on making Gaza a “slaughterhouse”, referring to its people as “human animals.” 

This dehumanisation carries serious consequences. As Judith Butler writes in Frames of War: “If violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated.”

In other words, the manhunt does not deliver the killer blow. It does not serve to be a symbol of justice.  More deaths are needed. And, similarly, for many of us the death of someone like Sinwar is no longer acutely perceived as the end of a life, but as content to be consumed—a fleeting image seen on our phones, there between TikTok clips of cats falling off tables or viral dessert videos.

The distinction between hunter and hunted also reinforces national and racial boundaries, creating a world where violence against the hunted seems justified. In today’s conflicts, this dynamic extends beyond individuals to entire communities, framing the violent killing of these subjects—and all associated with them—as inevitable.

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There is an undeniable cruel irony here: the Jewish people, perhaps more than any group in history, have been the most hunted. From the 1320 Pastoureaux Crusade in Languedoc, where mobs invaded Jewish quarters and framed Jews as a deicidal people, to Kristallnacht in 1938, where anti-Semitic violence was bureaucratised and orchestrated by the state, Jewish people have been the targets of hunts motivated by religious zeal or racial ideology. 

Yet, in the context of modern-day Gaza and Lebanon, a chilling parallel emerges. Nimrod, the biblical figure often seen as the first hunter of men, shares his name with a long-range air-to-surface missile developed by Israel Aerospace Industries. 

The long hunted have, in Gaza, now become the hunters.


Manhunts and Witch Hunts

One other outcome of this age of manhunts is that the very militaries engaged with such personal tasks are, themselves, claiming they have been ‘witch-hunted’ in return.  

The British press is filled with the concern that lawyers, armed with human rights legislation, are prosecuting former servicemen for dark deeds conducted in night raids and targeted killings. 

As The Sun reported on 13 October, “SAS troops have lost faith in commanders to protect them from legal witch hunts, their Colonel Commandant says.” 

General Sir Mark Carleton-Smith and others are under scrutiny by the Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan, review of extrajudicial killings that took place on manhunts conducted in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013.


Why This Matters

Overall, the modern day framing of the enemy as the one who is to be hunted, fuelled by AI and technological advances, risks three things. 

First, the urge for the hunt is never sated. Like an Earl on a grouse moor, the takings of the day becomes the primary aim, where the numbers culled are never high enough. War in this framing cannot be waged with restraint.

Second, the hunted are never given space to lobby for peace. As Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), the “persecuted man who is forever dreaming of becoming the persecutor… that violence against the coloniser is the only way to release his oppression.” 

The only outcome from Israel demeaning Palestinians and Lebanese as animals to be hunted, is that it will make the path to peace all the harder. Nobody expects an animal to forgive their would-be slaughterer.

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Third, is the nature of complicity. In an age of social media, we – the consumer – are increasingly drawn into the hunt.  We are given the bird’s eye view of the drone that captures the final act of a life.

We are the ones encouraged to be there, witnessing intimate death, in a terrible proximity that, historically, has rarely been shared by civilians in war. 

In this way, we too become the hunter and, simultaneously, the traumatised. 

And what this is doing to our souls is far, far from clear.


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