As Israel's assaults on Gaza and southern Lebanon have served as testing grounds for AI weapons innovations, these systems have in turn increased and optimized Israel's killing capacity to match both its available firepower and its genocidal intent. Under the guise of "precision," mass surveillance, data collection, and algorithmic processing have translated the entire population of Gaza into datapoints and determined who is rendered killable. On our screens, we witness journalists targeted, entire families erased, and landscapes scorched - all precise targets in the pursuit of ‘militants’. These AI warfare, predictive targeting and surveillance technologies operate at exponential speeds (e.g. partially or near-fully automated "targeting decisions" per day or hour) and scales (e.g. scope of their reach, as well as amounts of information collected, processed and leveraged).
The rollout of such technologies relies on vast networks of physical and digital infrastructures, supply chains, inter-organisational agreements, and finance - including from Europe and Belgium. These are the webs of connections that undergird militarised applications of AI; perhaps most visibly - data centres that aggregate, store and process the data that feeds their calculations (while also taking up and consuming public resources and infrastructures; not least land, water and electricity). In this sense, data centres act as material nodes that connect and enable erasure, harm and violence in varied forms, across borders and temporalities; yet they face little public scrutiny of their operations and - crucially - their implications under international humanitarian law. All the while, more and more data centre construction projects are underway.
This reiterates the imperative of viewing the automation of violence not as a discrete phenomenon, but as a co-constituent part of underlying structures of violent colonialism and settler colonialism, domination, and global capital. To better understand the role of such technologies, this panel follows the thread from AI-enabled surveillance, targeting and massive bombing campaigns in Gaza, to the headquarters of the organisations that develop and deploy these technologies - and finally, to the data centres in other people's backyards, in countries such as Belgium. It asks:
- What do militaries mean when they call their weapons “precise”? How do the technologies that tell them what to target work, and what does the claim of precision erase from view?
- How is Big Tech complicit in the genocide - albeit in the design or storage of these AI technologies of surveillance and capture? What does the political economy of these technologies say about today's wider 'webs of complicity'?
- How are military and surveillance AI technologies enmeshed with (and alter) the legal, sociopolitical, institutional and economic architectures that underpin erasure, violence, and domination? What implications does this have for resistance and solidarity?
Invited Speakers
Anan Quzmar
Anan Quzmar is a Palestinian human rights researcher from the West Bank. He has worked with the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, Independent Commission for Human Rights, and Right to Education Campaign at Birzeit University. Since October 2023, he has documented the targeted killing of journalists in Gaza and researched the use of AI-assisted weapons systems in the genocide. In the summer of 2026, he helped organise a gathering in Europe bringing together journalists and writers from Gaza to develop community-led approaches to documenting the stories of their colleagues and profession. He holds a master’s in development studies from SOAS and recently completed an LL.M. in human rights at Nova Law School.
Martine Jaarsma
Martine Jaarsma is a PhD researcher in the Department of Political Science at the University of Antwerp. Her research looks at how the principle of distinction, the rule of international humanitarian law that requires armed forces to distinguish between civilians and combatants, is shaped in practice by legal debate, by the technologies militaries use to identify targets, and by military decision-making. Her research centers on NATO’s adoption of the Maven Smart System, a platform built by the US technology company Palantir that combines data from many sources and uses AI to help military staff identify and select targets. She is a lawyer with a military background and an LL.M. in Public International Law and an MA in Conflict Studies from Utrecht University.
Moderated by
Valensiya Akamme
Valensiya Akamme is a doctoral researcher at University of Antwerp. Her work focuses on the politics of knowledge circulation and (in)visibilisations surrounding socio-ecological harms and environmental policy-making, as well as struggles for reparative justice. Her background is in political science, and her past work focused on the governance of information and digital technologies.