By Mohamed El Mokhtar
The convergence of military occupation, corporate power, and technological advancement has created something monstrous. In Gaza, the future is already here.
What is unfolding in Gaza is not simply war. It is the deliberate, algorithmically managed erasure of a people. Entire families are exterminated. Hospitals, schools, mosques, and cemeteries are reduced to ash. And behind the smokescreen of “self-defense,” the full weight of a military-tech complex descends upon a population rendered voiceless by both bomb and byte.
This is not collateral damage—it is architecture. A systematic destruction executed with chilling efficiency, where precision strikes mask a broader purpose: the annihilation of Palestinian presence, history, and memory.
The violence is no longer only material. It is performative. Israeli soldiers film themselves on TikTok while looting homes in Khan Younis and Gaza City, grinning beside wreckage, parading stolen belongings like trophies.
Videos show them laughingly demolishing homes, bulldozing orchards, torching libraries, mocking the dead, sometimes urinating in sacred spaces. Gravestones shattered. Olive groves uprooted. Heritage sites obliterated. The violence is not just genocidal; it is desecratory. It seeks not only to kill, but to humiliate, to erase any trace of continuity, dignity, or return.
The tools of this destruction are not merely tanks and rifles. They are satellites, databases, and machine learning models. Artificial intelligence systems sift through terabytes of metadata to produce “kill lists.” Targeting decisions—once the domain of military intelligence—are now generated through predictive algorithms.
This is not a futuristic nightmare; it is a present-day operational reality, revealed in reports by +972 Magazine and The Guardian, confirming Israel’s use of an AI platform known as “Lavender.” The system compiles profiles based on vague behavioral patterns—number of SIM cards used, calls to flagged regions, proximity to suspected individuals. In many cases, the result is death-by-algorithm, with a “human review” lasting barely seconds.
And who enables this machinery? American and Western tech giants.
Google and Amazon, through their $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government under Project Nimbus, provide cloud computing power to the IDF, facilitating real-time data processing for surveillance and military operations. Despite internal dissent, including resignations and an open letter by over 500 employees, both companies pressed forward, prioritizing strategic partnership over human lives.
Microsoft has invested in Israeli AI and cyber firms like AnyVision, accused of providing facial recognition tech used to monitor Palestinians in the West Bank. After public outcry and an internal audit, Microsoft announced it would divest. But only from that specific project. The broader cooperation continues. Profit remains untarnished.
Meta (Facebook) actively censors Palestinian content. Independent watchdogs, including Human Rights Watch, have documented the systematic removal of posts, accounts, and hashtags related to Gaza. While Israeli officials disseminate state-sanctioned justifications, Palestinians are shadow-banned or erased. Truth, too, becomes collateral.
X (formerly Twitter), under Elon Musk’s erratic stewardship, has further tilted toward silence. Palestinian journalists report sudden drops in engagement, unexplained suspensions, or outright bans. One voice silenced is no accident. Ten thousand is a strategy.
This is the biopolitics of the twenty-first century. It is not just about controlling borders—it is about controlling meaning. Gaza is not only under siege by tanks but by platforms. Its dead are not only denied justice; they are denied visibility.
Language itself collapses under this weight. The Israeli army does not destroy homes; it “removes infrastructure.” It does not kill children; it “neutralizes threats.” The obliteration of hospitals is rebranded as “precision targeting.” Through such antiseptic phrasing, mass violence becomes managerial. Genocide becomes logistics.
What is perhaps most obscene is that even within the Arab world, capital flows into this machinery of erasure. Gulf investments in Israeli high-tech firms—including those developing surveillance, cybersecurity, and drone technologies—have quietly increased since the Abraham Accords. In January 2025, the UAE’s state-owned defense conglomerate, EDGE Group, invested $10 million for a 30% stake in Israel’s Thirdeye Systems, a company specializing in AI-based targeting tools used by the Israeli military.
The Abu Dhabi Investment Office has even opened a branch in Tel Aviv to facilitate further joint ventures. These technologies—battle-tested on Palestinians—are then exported across the globe. Arab wealth, once imagined as a force for regional solidarity, is now leveraged to fuel the very systems that algorithmically track, target, and kill Palestinians. Collaboration has replaced conscience. Profit has replaced principle.
The convergence of military occupation, corporate power, and technological advancement has created something monstrous. In Gaza, the future is already here. A war waged with drones, cameras, code, and narrative control. Soldiers loot homes for content. Tech firms filter the screams. The world scrolls past.
And yet, resistance endures—not only through protests or political statements, but through the sheer refusal to vanish. Every child who clings to life, every farmer who returns to a scorched field, every mother who buries her dead with dignity—each is an act of defiance against erasure.
To name this violence for what it is—genocide—is not rhetorical excess. It is a moral imperative. Gaza is not a battlefield. It is the site of a civilization under attempted deletion. And the companies who power this erasure—who code it, fund it, optimize it—must be held accountable.
Genocide in the age of AI does not wear the face of a tyrant. It wears a badge. It signs contracts. It updates its software.
And it dances and smiles for TikTok.
Bio: Mohamed El Mokhtar Sidi Haiba is a social and political analyst, whose research interest is focused on African and Middle Eastern Affairs. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
(Originally published in The Palestine Chronicle)
