Palestine

Israel is using the armed quadcopters to lure in civilians by playing recorded cries of babies and women before shooting them with the quadcopter

Disturbing sounds of crying infants and women were audible throughout the camp. When they went out to investigate, "Israeli quadcopters reportedly opened fire directly at them," the award-winning Palestinian journalist Maha Hussaini reported for Middle East Eye. The quadcopters – small, cheap, and disposable drones usually used for civilian photography and, more recently, military reconnaissance – had been blasting the sorrowful recordings as a lure.

Once the lure worked, it created a self-fulfilling prophecy: those who ran to help the fake victims became real ones. Residents struggled to help those real victims as the "quadcopters were firing at anything that moved," eyewitness Samira Abu al-Leil, a 49-year-old Nuseirat resident, told Middle East Eye.

Israel’s armed quadcopter innovation is not the only harbinger of future wars at work in or emanating from Gaza. Yuval Abraham, reporting for the Israeli outlets +972 and Local Call, revealed a terrifying targeting artificial intelligence, Lavender, that purports to sift through the accumulated data Israel gathers through surveillance on Gazans and predict who matches the profile of a vaguely defined "militant." Particularly at the beginning of its onslaught through Gaza, Abraham reported, the Israeli military "almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants."

In February, Euro-Med Monitor compiled a study of what they said was "systemati[c]" Israeli usage of the armed quadcopters in Gaza and corroborated accounts of quadcopters opening fire during the Jan. 11 bloodbath on al-Rashid Street. Euro-Med Monitor said it had confirmed "dozens of civilians" targeted and shot by quadcopters "fitted with machine guns and missiles from the Matrice 600 and LANIUS categories, which are highly mobile and versatile, i.e., ideal for short-term operations." Citing the Palestinian Health Ministry, the study reported that health workers in Gaza noticed corpses with "evidence of unusual gunshots," which, according to Euro-Med Monitor, indicated "not bullets fired from rifle-type weapons, but from quadcopter drones.” Hussaini's Middle East Eye colleague in Gaza, Mohammed al-Hajjar, said the quadcopter's rounds resembled nails.