By Vahid Razavi — Author of Ethics in Tech and Lack Thereof, Producer of Forever Peace Now Documentary, ParentsPlea.com
Vahid Razavi is a Silicon Valley technology veteran turned human rights advocate, author of “Ethics in Tech and Lack Thereof,” and founder of ForeverPeaceNow.com and ParentsPlea.com. He is dedicated to documenting the human cost of AI-enabled warfare and working to build a global movement to hold war profiteers accountable before the courts.
This week at the Antalya Diplomacy Forum in Türkiye (#ADF2026), global leaders from every corner of the world are gathered in annual and serious conversation. Türkiye, a country I love and whose people and culture I hold in deep respect, is being a generous host to this gathering. I am here in Antalya but not important enough to attend in person. I will be watching online, as millions of people around the world tune in to hear what these leaders have to say. The question I am holding is simple: what will they actually do?
Humanity is navigating a genuinely dangerous moment. The United Nations Security Council has become structurally incapable of responding to atrocities with any moral authority. Five permanent members hold veto power while the Global South — India, Africa, Latin America — holds no permanent seat and no ability to check the paralysis that has allowed genocide to continue in plain sight. This is not a flaw in the system. It is the system working exactly as those who designed it intended.
Two Weekends. Two Desecrations.
Into this fractured landscape, President Donald Trump managed in the course of two weekends to assault both the Catholic and Orthodox Christian faiths of the world.
On Catholic Easter Sunday, his message was to threaten the erasure of an entire civilization — a statement so reckless it would have provoked international outrage from any other head of state. On Orthodox Easter Sunday, he went further, using AI-generated imagery to portray himself in the likeness of Jesus Christ, and placed his bruised hand on the deceased Jeffrey Epstein in a grotesque simulation of resurrection. He then turned his attention to Pope Leo, the newly elected leader of the Catholic Church and the spiritual shepherd of over 1.3 billion Catholics worldwide — over 70 million of them Americans — and attacked him with the casualness of a social media troll.
I am not a Catholic. I was raised Shia Muslim and have spent my life in mosques, churches, Buddhist temples and houses of worship across many traditions. Wherever I have traveled, I have found my connection to God. I hold Pope Leo and the late Pope Francis in the highest regard not for their institution but for their message — a message centered on peace, justice and the righteous defense of human dignity. While Pope Leo calls for an end to war and for global peace, we have a US Secretary of War weaponizing scripture to justify genocide. These two impulses are not competing interpretations of Christianity. One is the teaching of Jesus Christ. The other is its desecration.
Gaza: The Laboratory of AI-Enabled Killing
For over thirty months we have witnessed a genocide being conducted in Gaza. This is not a contested description. The International Court of Justice has ruled it plausible. The UN Special Committee on Palestinian Rights has used the word genocide formally. Human rights organizations across the world have documented it.
The toll as of this writing: over 78,000 documented deaths, more than 30,000 of them children, and 1.9 million people displaced from their homes. The healthcare system has been deliberately dismantled. Famine is not a side effect — it is a documented tool of the campaign.
But Gaza has also served another function that the world has been slow to reckon with. It has been a testing ground for a new generation of AI weapons systems — deployed on a captive civilian population and used to refine the technology before it is exported and normalized globally.
The three primary systems are called Gospel, Lavender and Where’s Daddy. Gospel, developed by Israel’s Unit 8200, functions as a mass target generation engine. It ingests surveillance data — intercepted communications, satellite imagery, electronic signals — and recommends buildings and structures for bombing. Before Gospel, Israeli intelligence analysts could produce approximately 50 targets in Gaza per year. With Gospel active, that number climbed to 100 targets per day. In the first weeks of the current war, the IDF claimed over 22,000 strikes in Gaza, with up to 250 targets struck per day. The humans in this process were not decision-makers. They were, as one former Israeli intelligence officer put it to +972 Magazine, rubber stamps — reviewing targets in as little as twenty seconds before authorizing a strike.
Lavender operates differently and more chillingly. Where Gospel targets locations, Lavender targets people. It assigned a probability score from 1 to 100 to virtually every one of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, rating the likelihood that each individual belonged to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. At the outset of the war, Lavender had flagged up to 37,000 Palestinians as potential assassination targets. The system’s own architects admitted it carried a 10 percent error rate — meaning thousands of people marked for death were identified incorrectly. That error rate was considered acceptable. Officers testified that when Lavender’s recommendation landed, they treated it as they would a human decision. Independent verification was not required. At times during the first weeks of the war, the only corroborating criterion needed was that the target was male.
Where’s Daddy completed the system. It was designed specifically to track individuals on the Lavender kill list and alert operators when those individuals entered their family homes at night — so that strikes could be timed to hit them while surrounded by their families. The name itself tells you everything about the moral universe in which this technology was conceived.
Blue Wolf and Red Wolf are deployed in the occupied West Bank as AI-powered facial recognition systems — building a biometric database of Palestinians at military checkpoints and automating surveillance at a population-wide scale. These are not defensive systems. They are tools of control, identification and eventually targeting.
These systems do not merely assist human decision-making. They have effectively displaced it. The human has been removed from the kill chain and replaced with a machine whose reasoning cannot be interrogated, whose errors cannot be audited in real time, and whose outputs are treated as authoritative. As a former intelligence officer described the Gospel system — this is a mass assassination factory. The machine decides. The human signs off. The bomb falls.
The technology companies that built the foundational infrastructure enabling these systems — Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Palantir — are not neutral vendors. Amazon and Google hold a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government known as Project Nimbus, providing the real-time data storage and AI processing power that underpins military targeting. Palantir integrates intelligence streams from drones, satellites and signals into a single operational picture used for precise targeting decisions. Oracle provides the database backbone for mass surveillance data management. Microsoft powers the cloud systems through which this intelligence is processed and coordinated. These companies built the engine. They knew what it would be used for. Complicity is not an allegation. It is a description of the contractual relationship.
Lebanon: The Next Chapter, Written in Blood
What was refined in Gaza is now being deployed in Lebanon.
On what Lebanese media described as Black Wednesday, Israel launched what its own military called its largest coordinated strike of the current war. In the span of ten minutes, Israeli forces struck more than 100 targets across Beirut, southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley simultaneously. At least 182 people were killed and 890 wounded in a single assault — the deadliest single day in the latest Israel-Hezbollah war. This attack took place in commercial and residential neighborhoods, in the middle of the afternoon, hours after a ceasefire between the United States and Iran had been publicly announced. Lebanon was told it was not included.
Black smoke rose over the seaside capital where more than a million displaced people had sought shelter. Charred bodies were found in vehicles and on the ground at one of Beirut’s busiest intersections. Apartment buildings were struck. Rescue workers used forklifts to dig through smoldering debris. Lebanon’s Minister of Social Affairs described the strikes as a very dangerous turning point — because the people being killed were not combatants. They were the displaced civilians of a country already broken by its own decades of crisis.
That Israel could strike more than 100 coordinates in ten minutes without any meaningful human deliberation between the identification of each target and the authorization of each strike tells you something fundamental about what this technology has made possible. Speed at that scale is not precision. It is the mechanization of destruction.
The over 1.2 million Lebanese civilians who have been displaced in this campaign are not collateral damage. They are the target. The aim is not tactical. It is demographic and civilizational — the systematic dismantling of a society.
Over 80,000 civilians, including journalists and aid workers have been killed across occupied Palestine and Lebanon. My team and I have documented their lives on ParentsPlea.com — their names, their biographies, their final days and the testimony of their surviving families. The universal demand of every family we have documented is the same. It is not revenge. It is justice. They want the people who planned, authorized and enabled these killings brought before a court of law.
Accountability Belongs to Every Nation
Sadly the International Court of Justice has its limitations. In thirty months of documented genocide, only two arrest warrants have been issued — against Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. That is not accountability. That is a gesture.
Which is why alongside Roots Action and World Beyond War I have initiated a petition calling on the Spanish Government and Prosecutor’s Office to investigate and prosecute executives at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Palantir for complicity in genocide and crimes against humanity under the principle of universal jurisdiction. You can sign and read the full petition here.
Spain is the right jurisdiction for this. It has a documented history of pursuing universal justice regardless of nationality or geography — most famously in the prosecution of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Spain has a direct national link through the killing of aid workers connected to World Central Kitchen, founded by Spanish citizen José Andrés. And all five technology companies maintain a significant commercial presence, offices, assets and executive travel within Spanish territory. The legal framework is established. The precedent exists. What is needed now is the political will.
But Spain need not carry this alone. Türkiye and every nation in this forum can initiate their own investigations. Canada can pursue charges. African nations can pursue charges. Any country in which these transnational corporations hold data centers, assets or infrastructure has jurisdiction and leverage. These companies are not sovereign entities. Their executives cross borders. Their assets can be frozen. Interpol red notices can prevent travel. The pressure of simultaneous multinational legal action would not merely expose these companies — it would force the structural breakup that regulatory processes alone have failed to achieve.
Please read the two supporting legal arguments for the petition: Investigate and Prosecute the Genocide Enablers of Silicon Valley and Holding Genocidal Big Tech Companies and Their Executives to Account — Why Spain Must Prosecute Genocidal Big Tech.
Another site that has been profiling individual tech executives and companies at BigTechSellsWar.com. The days of the Silicon Valley boys and the PayPal Mafia treating warfare as a market opportunity must come to an end. These companies and their executives are not too big to fail. They are not too powerful to be held accountable. They are simply too deprived of empathy and humanity to stop themselves.
That is why the rest of us must stop them.
To the global leaders gathered in Antalya: the world is watching. Not for statements — for action. History will not remember who attended this forum. It will remember who had the courage to act when faith, civilization and humanity were under direct assault.
— Vahid Razavi EthicsInTech.com | ParentsPlea.com | ForeverPeaceNow.com | MyAWSStory.com