Researcher Luna Lahamd wrote in her study on AI ethics: “Artificial intelligence requires an ethical system commensurate with its capabilities; when these ethics are absent, it turns from a tool of progress into a means of creating uncontrollable disasters.” This academic warning has become a stark reality in the Gaza Strip, where AI is now a killing tool operated by cold algorithms that know no mercy. What remains of our humanity when life-and-death decisions are made through algorithms? Where does ethics end when wars become digital and massacres can be triggered by a button? The Israeli war on Gaza has surpassed traditional weapon technologies and reached the stage of “smart killing,” where algorithms determine targets, classify bodies, and set “bombing priorities” based on massive data processed in real-time.

The decision is no longer in the hands of a nervous military commander but in an automated system that executes killing without accountability. Israel promotes AI as a “security innovation,” but in reality, it is a new form of digital colonialism that hides crime behind technology. This use does not aim to reduce casualties as claimed but to reduce the cost of war for the aggressor and intensify it on the weaker side. Machine learning is used to identify “high-value targets,” a vague term that may include homes, schools, and hospitals. Data is collected from phones, drones, surveillance cameras, and even social media to make killing decisions within minutes. War is no longer a painful human act but a technical-colonial practice stripped of all human consideration.

This ethical tragedy goes beyond Gaza’s borders and poses a question to the world: What remains of our humanity when life-and-death decisions are made through algorithms? Where does ethics end when wars become digital and massacres can be triggered by a button? Resistance is not limited to weapons but extends to knowledge, writing, imagery, and law. Transforming pain into testimony, images into documents, and loss into a cry against the algorithm makers is a form of resistance. Even if intelligence is artificial, conscience must remain human.