The world stood idly by for nearly three years to witness the genocide in Gaza, and now Israel is exporting the “Gaza model” to the rest of the Middle East. In addition to the illegal war waged against Iran, which has already caused the destruction of 42,900 civilian buildings, 12,000 injuries and 1,300 deaths (underestimated, given the carpet bombings in Tehran alone), the same treatment is being meted out to Lebanon with ever-increasing ferocity. This is not hyperbole: the “Gaza model” – that is, indiscriminate destruction – to be applied to Beirut and southern Lebanon was announced by the Israeli Defense Minister, Israel Katz. Finance Minister Smotrich was equally clear: “Very soon, Dahieh (a neighborhood in Beirut, ed) will look like Khan Younis.” Since the start of the new wave of bombings (March 2), at least 886 people have already been killed in the Land of Cedars, most of them civilians, including 67 women and 111 children.

Hospitals bombed, doctors killed

The “Gaza model” also emerges from the way Israeli fighter jets and drones target Lebanese health workers and hospitals. There have already been 31 doctors and paramedics killed in two weeks, while 51 have been injured. The most brutal crime occurred last Saturday, when the IDF bombed a hospital in Burj Qalaouiyah, causing 12 deaths. For the Jewish State, however, this “practice” is not new even in Lebanon: from 8 October 2023 to the ceasefire with Hezbollah on 27 November 2024, there were over 200 deaths among medical personnel. In Iran the situation is very similar: according to the World Health Organization, 18 direct attacks on hospitals have been recorded since February 28, with 8 victims among healthcare workers.

Professors and intellectuals in the crosshairs

Civilians, women, children, doctors and paramedics massacred; intellectuals could not be missing. Last Thursday two professors were killed in Beirut: the bombing directly hit the Lebanese University, the only public one in the country. The victims are the director of the science faculty of the Hadath campus, Hussein Bazzi, and the physics professor Mortada Srour. In a joint statement, the Ministry of Education and the university presidency described the double murder, which occurred while the teachers carried out their academic duties, as a “true war crime” and a “blatant attack on the mission of science, the mind and the collective memory of nations”. Here too the parallel with the Strip is evident, where the best academics and writers were exterminated.

You kill with AI

During the Gaza genocide, the IDF used an artificial intelligence-based database to identify targets and “enemies” with minimal or totally non-existent human supervision, as demonstrated by several investigations also by the Israeli press, including those by +972 Magazine and Local Call. Thousands of Palestinians have been located via a system called Lavender. One of the investigations, based on the testimony of six Israeli intelligence officers employed in the extermination campaign, reports that the army “relied almost entirely on Lavender, who classified up to 37,000 Palestinians – and their homes – as suspected militants, marking them as possible targets for airstrikes.”

Then there is Alex Karp and Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies, a US company specializing in data processing software, which has signed a strategic partnership since January 2024 with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, to which it provides AI analysis tools that integrate data from numerous (very diversified) sources to monitor and identify; To end up in the “wrong” database and be classified as a threat by the system, all it takes is constant activity on social media that an algorithm processes as dangerous and incriminating. Although Palantir has always denied it, it is clear that this service in a war context is used to automate attacks. Amnesty International has denounced how these practices, once deprived of human verification, have already led to indiscriminate bombings and many thousands of innocent victims.

Democratic Congressman Pete Aguilar talks about the use of AI in the war in Iran

The same is happening now in Iran, as Pete Aguilar, sitting member of the US Congress and one of the leaders of the Democratic Party, declared: “I could never imagine that an administration (that of Trump, ed) could only want to use AI to identify and kill people, without there being human beings in the decision-making chain”. The lack of control emerged in Tehran in the bombing of the “Police Park”, public gardens equipped with children’s games, skateboard ramps and picnic tables: the name “police” put the green area on a list of sensitive targets, and missiles were launched without any verification. Nobody cares if teenagers or children then died, especially since the “decision” was taken by a computer. Another example is what happened on March 12 in Beirut, where a tent city of displaced people in front of the beach was bombed: presumably alleged “enemies” were located among the displaced people, without anyone caring that the place was full of civilians and families. An algorithm certainly did not, and never will.

Millions of homeless people

Finally, the displaced. The Lebanese forced to leave their homes are already 800,000: “Forced displacements are increasing very rapidly. At this moment, hundreds of thousands of people have left their homes. Many leave with very little, only with the clothes they were wearing”, declared the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator, Imran Riza. The Netanyahu government has ordered the eviction of 14% of Lebanon: this is the southern suburb of Beirut called Dahieh (Hezbollah’s stronghold), which is home to over 500,000 people, and the territory south of the Zahrani river. The new invasion of the Israeli army will therefore extend much further north than the usual limit of the Litani river: the objective, as always, is to occupy new strips of land, speaking of a “buffer zone”. In reality, Israel continues to expand its “living space”, as did that other nation which – starting from Europe – led the world to the Second World War: “We must conquer territories in southern Lebanon, destroy the villages there and annex the territory to the State of Israel”, declared Zvi Sukkot, member of the Knesset belonging to Smotrich’s party.

As for Iran, however, the United Nations refugee agency said that around 3.2 million people have been evacuated since the start of the conflict: “This figure is likely to continue to grow as hostilities persist, marking a worrying escalation of humanitarian needs,” reads the UNHCR statement. Also considering the two million displaced Gazans, at this moment there are – throughout the Middle East – around 6 million people who have lost their homes or have been reduced to the most extreme conditions of poverty, due to the war machine of the Jewish State. The “Gaza model” is spreading like wildfire, and we all know how far it will go.