- You are here :
- Home >
- Vigil >
- "End the occupation !" PAJU Vigil # 492, July 16, 2010: Israel's deadly new video game: Killing by remote control
"End the occupation !" PAJU Vigil # 492, July 16, 2010: Israel's deadly new video game: Killing by remote control
Publication date : 2010-07-17
Young Israeli women soldiers chosen to kill from afar
Israel is a world leader in the development of ‘remote killing’ technology and its rapid progress in this field has raised alarms at the United Nations. Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, recently warned that a “PlayStation mentality to killing” could quickly emerge. Despite these concerns, Israel is unlikely to turn its back on hardware it has developed while using the occupied Palestinian territories - and especially Gaza - as testing laboratories.
Young Israeli women soldiers chosen to kill from afar
Israel is a world leader in the development of ‘remote killing’ technology and its rapid progress in this field has raised alarms at the United Nations. Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, recently warned that a “PlayStation mentality to killing” could quickly emerge. Despite these concerns, Israel is unlikely to turn its back on hardware it has developed while using the occupied Palestinian territories - and especially Gaza - as testing laboratories.
The Israeli army calls it ‘Spot and Shoot’. Operators sit in front of TV monitors and control distant machine guns using PlayStation-style joysticks. It looks like a video game, but the figures on the screen are real people, Palestinians in Gaza who can be killed with the press of a button.
The female soldiers who operate ‘Spot and Shoot’ are located in an operations room far from Gaza. They are responsible for aiming and firing remote-controlled machine-guns mounted on watchtowers every few hundred metres along an electronic fence that surrounds the Gaza Strip.
The system is one of the latest “remote killing” devices developed by Israel’s Rafael armaments company, the former weapons research division of the Israeli army that is now a separate governmental firm.
Female soldiers are preferred to operate remote killing devices because of a shortage of male recruits for Israel’s combat units. Young women can carry out missions without breaking the social taboo of risking their lives. They are supposed to identify anyone suspicious approaching the fence around Gaza and, if authorised by an officer, execute them using their joysticks.
Israel refuses to say how many Palestinians have been killed by the remotely controlled machine-guns in Gaza. According to the Israeli media, however, several dozen Palestinians have been killed in this way, some while standing deep inside Gaza, several hundred metres away from the ‘security fence’.
Adapted from “Israel paves the way for killing by remote control”, written by Jonathan Cook and published in The National on July 13th 2010. Full text at: http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100713/FOREIGN/707129834&SearchID=73396918390540
Distributed by PAJU (Palestinian and Jewish Unity)
WWW.PAJUMONTREAL.ORG