By TIA GOLDENBERG, JACK JEFFERY and WAFAA SHURAFA (Associated Press)

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Three sons of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh were killed Wednesday in an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip, relatives and official Hamas media said, with Haniyeh accusing Israel of acting in “the spirit of revenge and murder.”

Haniyeh confirmed the deaths Wednesday in an interview with the Al Jazeera satellite channel, saying his sons “were martyred on the road to liberating Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli army.

“The criminal enemy is driven by the spirit of revenge and murder and does not value any standards or laws,” he said in the phone interview.

Ismail Haniyeh lives in exile in Qatar, where Al Jazeera is based.

He said the killings would not pressure Hamas into softening its positions. The two sides have been involved in months of cease-fire talks. Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.

“The enemy believes that by targeting the families of the leaders, it will push them to give up the demands of our people,” he said. “Anyone who believes that targeting my sons will push Hamas to change its position is delusional.”

Hamas’ Al-Aqsa TV station said Hazem, Ameer and Mohammed Haniyeh were killed with family members in the strike near the Shati refugee camp in Gaza City. Ismail Haniyeh is originally from Shati.

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The brothers were traveling with family members in a single vehicle targeted by an Israeli drone, Al-Aqsa TV said. It said a total of six people were killed, including a daughter of Hazem Haniyeh, and a son and daughter of Ameer.

The strike comes as international mediators have been trying to broker a new cease-fire agreement. It was not immediately clear what effect the strike would have on those talks.

Earlier, Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz claimed Hamas has been defeated militarily, although he also said Israel will fight against it for years to come.

“From a military point of view, Hamas is defeated. Its fighters are eliminated or in hiding” and its capabilities “crippled,” Gantz said in a statement to the media in Sderot.

But, he added: “Fighting against Hamas will take time. Boys who are now in middle school will still fight in the Gaza Strip.”

Gantz reiterated the Israeli’s government commitment to go into Rafah, the city in the far southern tip of the Gaza Strip where more than half the territory’s population is now sheltering. “Wherever there are terrorist targets – the IDF will be there,” he said.

The strike came as Palestinians in Gaza marked a muted Eid al-Fitr holiday ending the holy fasting month of Ramadan, visiting the graves of loved ones killed in the war. In the Jabaliya refugee camp near Gaza City, people sat quietly by graves surrounded by buildings destroyed by Israel’s offensive in response to the deadly Hamas attack on Oct. 7.

Separately, U.S. President Joe Biden called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the war in Gaza a mistake and called for his government to flood the beleaguered territory with aid, ramping up pressure on Israel to reach a cease-fire and widening a rift between the staunch allies.

Biden has been an outspoken supporter of Israel’s war against Hamas. But in recent weeks his patience with Netanyahu has appeared to wane and his administration has taken a more stern line with Israel, rattling the countries’ decades-old alliance and deepening Israel’s international isolation over the war.

The most serious disagreement has been over Israel’s plans for an offensive in the southernmost Gaza city of Rafah. The rift was worsened by an Israeli airstrike last week on an aid convoy that killed seven workers with the World Central Kitchen charity, most of them foreigners. Israel said the deaths were unintentional but Biden was outraged.

Biden’s latest comments, made in an interview that aired late Tuesday and recorded two days after the WCK strike, highlight the differences between Israel and the U.S. over humanitarian aid to people in Gaza, where the war has led to warnings of imminent famine for more than a million people.

“What he’s doing is a mistake. I don’t agree with his approach,” Biden told Spanish-language broadcaster Univision when asked if Netanyahu was prioritizing his political survival over Israel’s interest.

Israel halted aid deliveries to Gaza in the early days of the war, but under U.S. pressure has slowly increased trucks allowed to enter the territory. Still, aid groups say supplies are not reaching desperate people quickly enough, blaming Israeli restrictions and noting that thousands of trucks are waiting to enter Gaza. Countries have attempted less efficient ways to deliver aid including airdrops and by sea.

Israel says its has opened up more entry points for trucks to enter and reach especially hard-hit areas like northern Gaza, an early target of Israel in the war. Israel also accuses aid groups of being too slow to deliver aid once it’s inside Gaza.

Aid groups say logistical issues and the precarious security situation — underscored by the WCK strike — complicate deliveries.

Israel and Hamas are engaged in talks meant to bring about a cease-fire in exchange for the release of hostages captured by Hamas and others on Oct. 7. But the sides remain far apart on key issues, including the return of Palestinians to northern Gaza. Netanyahu’s Security Cabinet met late Tuesday to discuss the hostage negotiations but did not appear to make any decisions.

Netanyahu has vowed to achieve “total victory,” pledging to destroy Hamas’ military and governing capabilities to prevent a repeat of the Oct. 7 attacks and to return the hostages. He says that victory must include an offensive in Rafah, which Israel says is Hamas’ last major stronghold, but more than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are currently seeking shelter there.

Six months into the war, Israel is growing ever more isolated, with even its closest partner increasingly vocal about its discontent in the war’s direction and longtime trading partners like Turkey taking potentially painful economic steps to express dismay.

Netanyahu, who is on trial for alleged corruption, is under pressure to decide on a postwar vision for Gaza. But critics say he is delaying because he doesn’t want to anger his ultranationalist governing partners, who support resettling the Gaza Strip, which Israel withdrew from in 2005 and an idea Netanyahu has ruled out.

Netanyahu’s governing partners also oppose making significant concessions to Hamas and have threatened to exit the government — a step that would cause the ruling coalition to collapse and trigger new elections.

Israel launched the war in response to Hamas’ cross-border assault, where terrorists killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took roughly 250 people hostage, according to Israeli authorities.

More than 33,400 Palestinians have been killed in the relentless fighting, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry which doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants in its count but says most of the dead are women and children. Israel says it has killed some 12,000 fighters, without providing evidence.

The war has ignited a humanitarian catastrophe. Most of the territory’s population has been displaced and with vast swaths of Gaza’s urban landscape leveled in the fighting, many areas are uninhabitable.

Shurafa reported from Deir al-Balah and Jeffery reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writer Josef Federman in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

Ben Sargent

To see more political cartoons from Ben Sargent, visit our Loon Star State section, or find Observer political reporting here.

Soon, personal artificial intelligence agents will streamline and automate processes that range from buying your groceries to selling your home. You’ll tell it what you want, and it will do the research and legwork, log into your personal accounts and execute transactions in milliseconds.

It is a technology with extraordinary potential, but also significant new dangers, including financial fraud. As Gail Ennis, the Social Security Administration’s inspector general, recently wrote: “Criminals will use AI to make fraudulent schemes easier and faster to execute, the deceptions more credible and realistic, and the fraud more profitable.”

The story of cyberfraud has always been a technological arms race to innovate faster between criminals and those they’re trying to rob. In banking, AI’s advent both supercharges that competition and raises its stakes.

When scammers used an AI-powered audio deepfake to convince the CEO of a British utility to transfer $243,000 to a Hungarian bank account in 2019, it was called “an unusual case” because it involved AI. That is not the case anymore.

Earlier this year, criminals made headlines when they used deepfake technology to pose as a multinational company’s chief financial officer and tricked one of the company’s employees in Hong Kong into paying the scammers $25 million.

Globally, 37% of businesses have experienced deepfake-audio fraud attempts, according to a 2022 survey by identity verification solutions firm Regular, while 29% have encountered video deepfakes. And that doesn’t include individuals who receive realistic-sounding calls purportedly from hospitalized or otherwise endangered family members seeking money.

As these AI-enabled fraud threats proliferate, financial institutions such as BMO, where I lead the financial crimes unit, are working to continually innovate and adapt to outpace and outsmart the criminals.

With an estimated annual tab of $8.8 billion in 2022, fraud was a festering problem even before the COVID-19 pandemic, which sparked a dramatic increase in online financial activity. According to TransUnion, instances of digital financial fraud increased by 80% globally from 2019 to 2022, and by 122% for U.S.-originating transactions. LexisNexis Risk Solutions calculated in 2022 that every dollar lost to fraud costs $4.36 in total as a result of associated expenses such as legal fees and the cost of recovering the stolen money.

Generative AI, by its very nature, doesn’t require high-tech skills to get benefits — a fact criminals are leveraging to find and exploit software and hardware vulnerabilities. They also use AI to improve the tailoring of their phishing attacks through enhanced social media and other publicly available information searches.

Then there’s synthetic fraud, one of the fastest-growing categories of cyberfraud, in which the AI fabricates identities from real and made-up details and uses them to open new credit accounts. In one instance, criminals created roughly 700 synthetic accounts to defraud a San Antonio bank of up to $25 million in COVID-19 relief funds. TransUnion last year estimated that synthetic account balances reached $4.6 billion in 2022 while a previous Socure report projected the cost of this fraud would reach$5 billion this year.

When it comes down to rolling out new technology solutions before security controls are well in place, we’ve been down this road before. For example, when businesses rushed headlong to embrace the transformative power of cloud computing, security was a bolt-on to which they paid attention only after suffering the sorts of massive data breaches that have become all too frequent, such as those suffered by Yahoo in 2013, in which the personal data of 3 billion people was exposed; Equifax in 2017, 147 million; and Marriott in 2018, 500 million.

As the international affairs think tank Carnegie Endowment noted in 2020, “Despite various efforts to contain these risks over the past 25 years, the costs of cyber-attacks continue to increase, not decrease, and most organizations — governments and companies — struggle to effectively protect themselves.”

The good news is that financial institutions are moving to combat AI fraud with the best tool available: AI. Nearly three-quarters of respondents to a 2022 Bank of England survey said that they were developing machine-learning models to fight financial fraud. Other next-generation defenses are also in the works: Passkeys are replacing passwords, and quantum key distribution is becoming more widespread.

It’s a good start, but it’s just that, a start.

Along with more and better technological and AI advances to protect information and funds, we actually need to lean back into the human element. Companies, financial institutions, regulators and consumers must collaborate to produce and adopt secure, resilient and robust controls for handling this threat. This means education — between institutions and consumers, and among families and friends. It means following protective online practices to keep access information secure. It means pulling all of the tools available — both online and off and at the government, organizational and individual levels to shore up our defenses like a shield.

The alternative — a patchwork series of solutions — will have exploitable seams. And the problem is going to roll downhill, hitting medium- and small-sized businesses and individuals the hardest as they won’t have multinational corporations’ ability to afford sophisticated defenses.

Artificial intelligence is speeding everything up. We cannot afford to let this accelerated clock tick too long without developing a global, industrywide security standard to harden us against the coming fraud storm.

If we don’t act, the money we already have lost to fraud will seem like small change.

Lawrence K. Zelvin is the head of the financial crimes unit at BMO. He wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.

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