remote killing machines, which have been deployed to murder Palestinians
and Afghans and are being aggressively marketed throughout the world.
It is called Spot and Shoot. Operators sit in front of a TV monitor
from which they can control the action with a PlayStation-style
joystick.
The aim: to kill terrorists.
Played by: young women serving in the Israeli army.
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Spot and Shoot, as it is called by the Israeli military, may look 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 on the joystick.
The female soldiers, located far away in an operations room, are responsible for aiming and firing remote-controlled machine-guns mounted
on watch-towers every few hundred metres along an electronic fence that
surrounds Gaza.
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 and now a separate governmental firm.
According to Giora Katz, Rafael’s vice-president, remote-controlled
military hardware such as Spot and Shoot is the face of the future. He
expects that within a decade at least a third of the machines used by
the Israeli army to control land, air and sea will be unmanned.
The demand for such devices, the Israeli army admits, has been partly
fuelled by a combination of declining recruitment levels and a
population less ready to risk death in combat.
“PlayStation mentality to killing”
Oren Berebbi, head of its technology branch, recently told an American newspaper: “We’re trying to get to unmanned vehicles everywhere on the
battlefield... We can do more and more missions without putting a
soldier at risk.”
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Rapid progress with the technology has raised alarm at the United Nations. Philip Alston, its special rapporteur on extrajudicial
executions, warned last month of the danger that a “PlayStation
mentality to killing” could quickly emerge.
According to analysts, however, Israel is unlikely to turn its back on hardware that it has been at the forefront of developing – using the
occupied Palestinian territories, and especially Gaza, as testing
laboratories.
Remotely controlled weapons systems are in high demand from repressive
regimes and the burgeoning homeland security industries around the
globe.
“These systems are still in the early stages of development but there
is a large and growing market for them,” said Shlomo Brom, a retired
general and defence analyst at the Institute of National Security
Studies at Tel Aviv University.
The Spot and Shoot system – officially known as Sentry Tech – has
mostly attracted attention in Israel because it is operated by 19- and
20-year-old female soldiers, making it the Israeli army’s only weapons
system operated exclusively by women.
Female soldiers are preferred to operate remote killing devices because
of a shortage of male recruits to Israel’s combat units. Young women
can carry out missions without breaking the social taboo of risking
their lives, said Mr Brom.
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The women are supposed to identify anyone suspicious approaching the fence around Gaza and, if authorized by an officer, execute them using
their joysticks.
The Israeli army, which plans to introduce the technology along Israel’s other confrontation lines, refuses to say how many Palestinians
have been killed by the remotely controlled machine-guns in Gaza.
According to the Israeli media, however, it is believed to be several
dozen.
The system was phased-in two years ago for surveillance, but operators
were only able to open fire with it more recently. The army admitted
using Sentry Tech in December to kill at least two Palestinians several
hundred metres inside the fence.
The Ha’aretz newspaper, which was given rare access to a
Sentry Tech control room, quoted one soldier, Bar Keren, 20, saying:
“It’s very alluring to be the one to do this. But not everyone wants
this job. It’s no simple matter to take up a joystick like that of a
Sony PlayStation and kill, but ultimately it’s for defence.”
Audio sensors on the towers mean that the women hear the shot as it
kills the target. No woman, Ha'aretz reported, had failed the
task of shooting what the army calls an “incriminated” Palestinian.
The Israeli military, which enforces a so-called “buffer zone” – an
unmarked no-man’s land – inside the fence that reaches as deep as 300
metres into the tiny enclave, has been widely criticized for opening
fire on civilians entering the closed zone.
In separate incidents in April, a 21-year-old Palestinian demonstrator
was shot dead and a Maltese solidarity activist wounded when they took
part in protests to plant a Palestinian flag in the buffer zone. The
Maltese woman, Bianca Zammit, was videoing as she was hit.
It is unclear whether Spot and Shoot has been used against such
demonstrations.
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The Israeli army claims Sentry Tech is “revolutionary”. And that will make its marketing potential all the greater as other armies seek out
innovations in “remote killing” technology.
Rafael is reported to be developing a version of Sentry Tech that will fire long-range guided missiles.
Another piece of hardware recently developed for the Israeli army is
the Guardium, an armoured robot-car that can patrol territory at up to
80 kilometres per hour, navigate through cities, launch “ambushes” and
shoot at targets. It now patrols the Israeli borders with Gaza and
Lebanon.
Its Israeli developers, G-Nius, have called it the world’s first “robot
soldier”. It looks like a first-generation version of the imaginary
“robot-armour” worn by soldiers in the popular recent sci-fi movie
Avatar.
Rafael has produced the first unmanned naval patrol boat, the
“Protector”, which has been sold to Singapore’s navy and is being
heavily marketing in the US. A Rafael official, Patrick Bar-Avi, told
the Israeli business daily Globes: “Navies worldwide are only now
beginning to examine the possible uses of such vehicles, and the
possibilities are endless.”
Israeli drones “widely used in Afghanistan”
But Israel is most known for its role in developing “unmanned aerial vehicles” – or drones, as they have come to be known. Originally
intended for spying, and first used by Israel over south Lebanon in the
early 1980s, today they are increasingly being used for extrajudicial
executions from thousands of feet in the sky.
In February Israel officially unveiled the 14-metre-long Heron TP
drone, the largest ever. Capable of flying from Israel to Iran and
carrying more than a ton of weapons, the Heron was tested by Israel in
Gaza during Operation Cast Lead in winter 2008, when some 1,400
Palestinians were killed.
More than 40 countries now operate drones, many of them made in Israel,
although so far only the Israeli and US armies have deployed them as
remote-controlled killing machines. Israeli drones are being widely used
in Afghanistan.
Smaller drones have been sold to the German, Australian, Spanish,
French, Russian, Indian and Canadian armies. Brazil is expected to use
the drone to provide security for the 2014 World Cup championship, and
the Panamanian and Salvadoran governments want them too, ostensibly to
run counter-drug operations.
Despite its diplomatic crisis with Ankara, Israel was reported last
month to have completed a deal selling a fleet of 10 Herons to the
Turkish army for 185 million US dollars.
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