The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
The New York Times describes it as such:
"Ali Bani Odeh’s wife and four young boys hadn’t seen him in a month and a half when he came home to Tammun, in the West Bank, from his construction job in Israel late on Friday to spend the last few days of Ramadan with his family.
On Saturday night, the boys persuaded him to take them out for a drive. Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, was coming, so there were new clothes to buy. The day’s fast had been broken, so there were sweets to be had, too.
They picked up fried doughnut holes in Tubas, saving them for later, but the clothing shop they went to in Nablus was closed. It was already past midnight, so they headed back to Tammun: Khaled, 11, the oldest, in the back with Mustafa, 8, and Muhammad, 5. Othman, 6, blind and incapable of walking or feeding himself, was in his mother’s lap in front.
As they rounded a corner slowly, a few minutes from home, young Khaled and Mustafa recounted on Sunday, their mother, Waad, 35, asked her husband to pull over and take Othman from her so she could get something from her bag on the floor. Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire."
The situation in the West Bank (and similar forces are at play in Gaza, too) remind me of what's wrong with American policing, at a far more extreme scale.
The people charged with enforcing the peace deploy lethal force with near impunity at the slightest "provocation" (a child throwing a stone, a car driving too fast); I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are, to operate in constant fear and perceive absolutely everything and everyone as a deadly threat to be neutralized. The soldiers themselves are raised in a culture with deeply racist undertones, making them all too ready to view any random Palestinian as a terrorist. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy that should be overseeing them works only to protect them. It's no surprise that things like this happen as often as they do.
Reform in the US is imaginable, I can and do believe, but it's much harder for me to imagine it in Israel - even much of the so-called left in Israel is too radicalized against Palestinians after 100 years of conflict, the Second Intifada, and October 7.
That's a huge problem (immediate escalation to violence becoming the norm) and:
> The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
"I feel unsafe" has become the catch-all excuse for everything in the recent decade. It's used to justify everything from Karen complaining about someone's behavior in public to people calling the cops on someone for looking at them wrong, to police officers jumping the gun and escalating to violence. When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate get-out-of-responsibility card? It's like that old "He's coming right for us" South Park joke, but instead of being a joke it has real life and death consequences.
That checks out. Although the history of "Warrior Policing" in the US predates this (going back to the 60s) and extends far beyond IDF training programs:
A certain amount of politics should/must be tolerated on HN, because you cannot compartmentalize technology, politics and morality.
No-one, not even people who say they like technology but do not care about politics, should be able to live their life wihtout knowing that we live in a world where six-year old blind children are murdered with automatic assault rifles.
(For the same reason that no-one should be able to live not knowing that jewish once were murdered in the millions in gas chambers.)
i've been on hn a long time, and if there's a prohibition against anything vaguely political if it can't be connected to technology, i've never known it.
I don't see anything shocking just extremely sad, this is war 101, every day. Anybody who cares to follow whats happening will find these stories from each conflict. Ie same stories could be found on Ukraine (especially first months, sometimes with video), I personally recall few heartbreaking ones. Its civilians who suffer the worst fate in every war, innocent, small, defenseless.
Given the uncritical support israel is getting from the political elites, plan will go on and the plan is nothing else than destruction of whole gaza, razing it down and building... whatever, I presume more settlers or maybe even a golf course with hotels on the beach. IDF will launch 'an investigation', that will drag for 2 years and nothing will be done at the end, like always.
And the worst thing - people will forget about all this rather quickly, and much more. Maybe its coping mechanism to stay sane, but stellar behavior it isn't.
The west bank isn't at war with Israel. There wasn't some conflict or event that has justified these actions.
I wish people understood this better. Even if you could manage to justify what's happening in gaza as "this is war", Gaza and the west bank are separate entities with separate governments. The west bank, in particular, is more like an Indian reservation in the US, with the Israeli government effectively exercising supremacy over all aspects of the government.
Theoretically, the IDF is supposed to be the police force for the west bank. That's why they occupy it.
People insist that Gaza is not a country, but Palestine is. You can't then say that the West Bank is not responsible for what the rest of Palestine did.
Gaza and the West Bank aren't countries, they have no autonomy. Palestine isn't a country, it was once where Israel now sits, but hasn't been since the 40s.
Palestinians are people, must like Jews are people. Palestinians are the indigenous inhabitants of Israel, the west bank, and gaza.
Much like all Jews aren't responsible for the actions of Israel, All Palestinians aren't responsible for the actions of Hamas. Even the residence of Gaza.
Except this situation has been going on like this for 60 years - with Israel, or the other western states having absolutely no plans to change anything about it (except making it even worse).
I have followed this conflict since Operation Cast Lead and the beginnings of the siege on Gaza.
Israel has been using enormous amounts of force against the Palestinian people since then, with death tolls of _at least_ 100 dead Palestinians for every dead Israeli.
For a very good account of life in Israel around the time of Cast Lead I recommend Guy Delisle, brilliant diary in comic form.
His partner was working for Doctors Without Borders, the Israeli Army refused to let them enter Gaza to help the people suffering under their bombardments.
As an Israeli, this is an inexcusable crime by IDF soldiers. Appallingly, I expect them to receive no punishment. My country's government is criminally racist.
> Israel's most senior military lawyer has said all charges against five soldiers accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee from Gaza have been dropped.
Don't worry, they punished someone.
> It later emerged the CCTV video had been leaked by the then-Israeli Military Advocate General, Maj Gen Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, leading to her resignation and arrest.
I am German. My government does not acknowledge the tragedy that has been unfolding in Gaza since the Hamas attack in October 2023. It’s absurd. Since then, Jewish people in Berlin who were demonstrating alongside Palestinians against the war in Gaza have been beaten down by the German police. In 2021, Esther Bejarano, the last survivor of the Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra, passed away in Hamburg. Whenever she commented on the culture of remembrance, the media was eager to report on it. Whenever she commented on the situation of the Palestinians, it was not reported in the media. People sometimes ask how it was possible that the vast majority of so-called ordinary people in this country back then could simply tolerate these crimes against Jews and look the other way. Now that should be clear to everyone. The Max Planck Institute in Rostock estimates that well over 100,000 people have been killed in Gaza. But nobody here gives a damn (at least not publicly). We’re even supplying weapons there. Everyone acts as if they’ve forgotten what was written in German newspapers about the current Israeli government when it took office, and as if there were no connection to what’s happening in Gaza right now. I am deeply and profoundly disappointed in the elected officials and public servants of my country. They have learned nothing from the atrocities committed by their grandfathers.
The last time I was in Berlin (2018), I was actually somewhat shocked by the amount of antisemitic graffiti that I saw just about everywhere (especially on lamp posts). Especially given the strictness of the laws against such speech.
It's even more insidious, I know activists in your country and they not only abhor the current support for Israel's genocide but they are terrified of their activism being criminalized under anti-nazi laws. How ironic.
I don't like the comparison with the holocaust, because this feels like opening another door to antisemitism.
What is happening in Gaza is different from the holocaust. This sort of argument is called holocaust inversion.
I am also bothered how the death of palestinian civilians somehow shadows the tactics used by Hamas and Hezbollah and how Iran helps them. So many died in Iraq, so many died in Iran by the hands of their government, so many are dying in Sudan, yet Israel is held to a higher standard, but why? Because of the holocaust, so Israel should know better? Because Israel is an US ally? Because Israel is the most democratic country in the middle east?
Maybe I am doing some whataboutism, but so is the comparison with auschwitz survivors.
I rarely allow myself to engage in arguing about this war anymore because it's just a totem now, even local politicians use it, it's ridiculous. I am just a leftist and I dislike Netanyahu as much as everybody, by the way.
And none of my arguments are meant to downplay how the Israelis engaged in war crimes. I just don't like how the holocaust is brought into that, it tries to install the narrative "jews went through a genocide, but they are taking a revenge" or something.
The problem is that its not a simple conflict where one can take a moral side.
Its absolutely true that Israel is definitely targeting civilians, whether due to negligence or just not giving a fuck, because of a combination of anger and fear of being eliminated.
Its also absolutely true that Hamas and by extension Iran wants Israeli to target civilians because it makes them appear as the bad guys, which furthers their agenda to weaken Israel to eventually retake the land. And not only that, but the terrorist cells also are interested in carrying out attacks in countries that support or have supported Israel even in defense only.
Every single person is a product of their circumstances. If you personally were to grow up in either country, the neural network in your brain would be trained with a way different set of data compared to what you experienced, and you would be a different person.
I don't have sympathy or hated for either side, this is just a byproduct of being human.
You wouldn't understand until war has come to your doorstep. The west has simply forgot, what is rapidly approaching your way.
If the question is a Gazan child or a raped and shot Israeli kid, then I'd choose an Israeli kid. Just like I'd choose my grandfather in Auschwitz rather than your grandfather in Dresden.
It always feels it's never either/or, we could all get along. but at war it's always either/or. and unfortunately for us the palestinians political leadership has brought us all into this scenario
(The eyewitness) told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account.
I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired.
"No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
I honestly think the gaza war was largely continued as a distraction from the true atrocities Israel has been committing in the west bank. By getting all the news to focus on Gaza Israel could trot out reasoning that many people accept, but the state sponsored terrorism they are undertaking in the west bank is the kind of stuff that is truly hard for even ardent Israel supporters to overlook.
Unfortunately, even in this comment section, you see people conflating the two. People don't realize that Palestinians live in both the west bank and gaza or that there are 2 different government for the west bank and gaza.
I agree, but I'd say it's important when pointing out how horrible this is you don't let the "they deserved it" narrative fly.
How Israel acts in the west bank is a testament to how poor their behavior in gaza is. They have no real justification for their evictions and murders of west bank citizens. They have no justification for turning a blind eye to settler violence. They have no justification for not punishing IDF soldiers who break theirs and international law.
Israel's plan to confuse people about what is happening in the west bank vs gaza is so effective that even their detractors are falling for it. Truly a genius strategy
I see people saying this story doesn't belong on HN. genuine question, if this story were about a german national would it be considered as political? is palestinian existence inherently more political than other peoples' existence?
I'm saying this as someone who doesn't really care about this certain topic:
Either we allow _all_ political content or nothing.
The HN guidelines are incredibly grey and handwave-y
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
To me HN became to big for its own good since the Covid days. It's like the reddit front page except there are no subs with mods but one big flood (basically /r/all).
If I got to /r/linux, /r/selfhosted/, /r/networking/ or other tech subs I'll probably find what I saw on HN 15 years ago. But less and less here.
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
If the story was about a German national then yes, I would still say this is political and doesn't gratify my intellectual curiosity.
I'll bite: If for any reason, probably because it's neither technically interesting nor entrepreneurial in nature.
US Politics seems to get more of a pass, probably due to Silicon Valley being there (and nearly all the major tech outlets), similarly some China news gets a pass, also largely when it relates to supply chain and Taiwan.
This goes beyond US politics. The US and Israel do not exist in a bubble. This conflict can and will have big repercussions which will impact our technical and entrepreneurial institutions.
All events in the universe are connected to all others. If the rule is that anything that could affect anyone is fair game, then there simply are no rules, to subject guidelines, no filter whatsoever. It's hackernews.com without the "hacker"
Every time these sorts of articles get posted people that express a differing opinion from the standard get flagged (making it so you can't read their post at all) pretty quickly making it seem more like the intention isn't to start discussion. It seems like it's gotten to the point that the people that just get flagged into oblivion stopped trying to post.
Mainstream world news has a place on HN if it contains "significant new information", and as much as this site is primarily for curious conversation and gratifying intellectual curiosity, we don't want to pretend that horrific events like this aren't happening.
Horrific events happen almost every hour of every day. This is political, and the events that are upvoted are always from the same political perspective. If you don't see this, you're blind. But from my perspective, mods do see it, are ok with it, and that is unfortunate. There are few places left online without explicit political bias. HN used to be one of them.
Reminder that whatever you think, war, terrorism, questions of "the right/wrong target," etc are all insperable from AI and technology these days. These soldiers were where they were for concrete reasons dictated across vast automated networks; their choices of engagement are insperable from the tools either side (army and occupied population to be clear) here has or is perceived to have. War is simply many different "user stories," to put it coldly, and there is ethical and/or practical reasons, as technologists/scientists/academics, to see it that way (even if the goal is to just know thy enemy).
This is all why Anthropic is now a "supply-chain risk", why Thiel and Musk are particularly powerful persons-qua-tech-CEOs, why embedded microcontrollers getting so cheap (or whatever) enables drones instead of suicide bombs.
If you listen to the news, Israel kills innocent people on a daily basis in Palestine and Lebanon. It is a surprise that people choose to live in the West Bank despite such killings.
I think that's the point - to discourage (certain) people from living there at all. Except it turns out people are capable of never-ending suffering and persevering through it.
You would think Israelis would already know this very well.
What's surprising is how nonchalantly people like you suggest victims should just surrender and leave. Exactly the same thing was told to Ukrainians after the invasion. The fucking audacity you people have is staggering.
Given that the IDF involved were undercover agents (according to the reports), it seems unlikely that this family knew that driving fast would get them killed.
> He told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account.
I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired.
"No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
Well, right now the "better technology" is Israel's use of the "Lavender" AI to designate people to kill because they are "likely" to be hamas supporters.
And yes, probably they could have used better technology to realize that people in the car are not a danger to them. But that would immply they actually want to avoid killing civilians instead of looking for any excuse to shoot them.
It's not collateral damage in the gaza war. This was a family in the west bank, where there is no hamas and no "war", that was gunned down in cold blood for no reason. Not even presenting a threat. I hope one day you are able to find compassion.
For those wondering, it is verifiable story, it is covered as fact in Israeli newspapers:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-forces-kill-west-bank-...
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/p7mq5k5bs
The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
The New York Times describes it as such:
"Ali Bani Odeh’s wife and four young boys hadn’t seen him in a month and a half when he came home to Tammun, in the West Bank, from his construction job in Israel late on Friday to spend the last few days of Ramadan with his family.
On Saturday night, the boys persuaded him to take them out for a drive. Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, was coming, so there were new clothes to buy. The day’s fast had been broken, so there were sweets to be had, too.
They picked up fried doughnut holes in Tubas, saving them for later, but the clothing shop they went to in Nablus was closed. It was already past midnight, so they headed back to Tammun: Khaled, 11, the oldest, in the back with Mustafa, 8, and Muhammad, 5. Othman, 6, blind and incapable of walking or feeding himself, was in his mother’s lap in front.
As they rounded a corner slowly, a few minutes from home, young Khaled and Mustafa recounted on Sunday, their mother, Waad, 35, asked her husband to pull over and take Othman from her so she could get something from her bag on the floor. Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/world/middleeast/palestin...
The situation in the West Bank (and similar forces are at play in Gaza, too) remind me of what's wrong with American policing, at a far more extreme scale.
The people charged with enforcing the peace deploy lethal force with near impunity at the slightest "provocation" (a child throwing a stone, a car driving too fast); I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are, to operate in constant fear and perceive absolutely everything and everyone as a deadly threat to be neutralized. The soldiers themselves are raised in a culture with deeply racist undertones, making them all too ready to view any random Palestinian as a terrorist. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy that should be overseeing them works only to protect them. It's no surprise that things like this happen as often as they do.
Reform in the US is imaginable, I can and do believe, but it's much harder for me to imagine it in Israel - even much of the so-called left in Israel is too radicalized against Palestinians after 100 years of conflict, the Second Intifada, and October 7.
That's a huge problem (immediate escalation to violence becoming the norm) and:
> The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
"I feel unsafe" has become the catch-all excuse for everything in the recent decade. It's used to justify everything from Karen complaining about someone's behavior in public to people calling the cops on someone for looking at them wrong, to police officers jumping the gun and escalating to violence. When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate get-out-of-responsibility card? It's like that old "He's coming right for us" South Park joke, but instead of being a joke it has real life and death consequences.
> I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are
IDF trains them.
https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/with-whom-are-many-u-s-polic...
That checks out. Although the history of "Warrior Policing" in the US predates this (going back to the 60s) and extends far beyond IDF training programs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrior_policing
A certain amount of politics should/must be tolerated on HN, because you cannot compartmentalize technology, politics and morality.
No-one, not even people who say they like technology but do not care about politics, should be able to live their life wihtout knowing that we live in a world where six-year old blind children are murdered with automatic assault rifles.
(For the same reason that no-one should be able to live not knowing that jewish once were murdered in the millions in gas chambers.)
Considering this news article has absolutely nothing to do with technology, yes I think this doesn't belong here.
i've been on hn a long time, and if there's a prohibition against anything vaguely political if it can't be connected to technology, i've never known it.
I don't see anything shocking just extremely sad, this is war 101, every day. Anybody who cares to follow whats happening will find these stories from each conflict. Ie same stories could be found on Ukraine (especially first months, sometimes with video), I personally recall few heartbreaking ones. Its civilians who suffer the worst fate in every war, innocent, small, defenseless.
Given the uncritical support israel is getting from the political elites, plan will go on and the plan is nothing else than destruction of whole gaza, razing it down and building... whatever, I presume more settlers or maybe even a golf course with hotels on the beach. IDF will launch 'an investigation', that will drag for 2 years and nothing will be done at the end, like always.
And the worst thing - people will forget about all this rather quickly, and much more. Maybe its coping mechanism to stay sane, but stellar behavior it isn't.
> this is war 101
The west bank isn't at war with Israel. There wasn't some conflict or event that has justified these actions.
I wish people understood this better. Even if you could manage to justify what's happening in gaza as "this is war", Gaza and the west bank are separate entities with separate governments. The west bank, in particular, is more like an Indian reservation in the US, with the Israeli government effectively exercising supremacy over all aspects of the government.
Theoretically, the IDF is supposed to be the police force for the west bank. That's why they occupy it.
> The west bank isn't at war with Israel.
People insist that Gaza is not a country, but Palestine is. You can't then say that the West Bank is not responsible for what the rest of Palestine did.
> You can't then say that the West Bank is not responsible for what the rest of Palestine did.
Collective punishment is a war crime.
Wrong.
Gaza and the West Bank aren't countries, they have no autonomy. Palestine isn't a country, it was once where Israel now sits, but hasn't been since the 40s.
Palestinians are people, must like Jews are people. Palestinians are the indigenous inhabitants of Israel, the west bank, and gaza.
Much like all Jews aren't responsible for the actions of Israel, All Palestinians aren't responsible for the actions of Hamas. Even the residence of Gaza.
> Palestine isn't a country, it was once where Israel now sits, but hasn't been since the 40s.
In the 40s, the British were ruling Palestine as a mandate, I wouldn’t really call that a country.
> this is war 101, every day.
Except this situation has been going on like this for 60 years - with Israel, or the other western states having absolutely no plans to change anything about it (except making it even worse).
completely deranged way of thinking that calls for a hard self-reflection.
I don’t think anyone is going to forget about this
> this is war 101
genocide 101
I have followed this conflict since Operation Cast Lead and the beginnings of the siege on Gaza.
Israel has been using enormous amounts of force against the Palestinian people since then, with death tolls of _at least_ 100 dead Palestinians for every dead Israeli.
For a very good account of life in Israel around the time of Cast Lead I recommend Guy Delisle, brilliant diary in comic form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem:_Chronicles_from_the...
His partner was working for Doctors Without Borders, the Israeli Army refused to let them enter Gaza to help the people suffering under their bombardments.
As an Israeli, this is an inexcusable crime by IDF soldiers. Appallingly, I expect them to receive no punishment. My country's government is criminally racist.
See also: raping a detainee with a knife.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2xrz71zm3o
> Israel's most senior military lawyer has said all charges against five soldiers accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee from Gaza have been dropped.
Don't worry, they punished someone.
> It later emerged the CCTV video had been leaked by the then-Israeli Military Advocate General, Maj Gen Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, leading to her resignation and arrest.
https://www.haaretz.com/west-bank/2026-03-16/ty-article/.pre...
I am German. My government does not acknowledge the tragedy that has been unfolding in Gaza since the Hamas attack in October 2023. It’s absurd. Since then, Jewish people in Berlin who were demonstrating alongside Palestinians against the war in Gaza have been beaten down by the German police. In 2021, Esther Bejarano, the last survivor of the Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra, passed away in Hamburg. Whenever she commented on the culture of remembrance, the media was eager to report on it. Whenever she commented on the situation of the Palestinians, it was not reported in the media. People sometimes ask how it was possible that the vast majority of so-called ordinary people in this country back then could simply tolerate these crimes against Jews and look the other way. Now that should be clear to everyone. The Max Planck Institute in Rostock estimates that well over 100,000 people have been killed in Gaza. But nobody here gives a damn (at least not publicly). We’re even supplying weapons there. Everyone acts as if they’ve forgotten what was written in German newspapers about the current Israeli government when it took office, and as if there were no connection to what’s happening in Gaza right now. I am deeply and profoundly disappointed in the elected officials and public servants of my country. They have learned nothing from the atrocities committed by their grandfathers.
I live in DE too, it's terrifying. I didn't realize the extent of the armaments shipped to Israel from Germany until recently.
The Israeli navy ships were built in German shipyards and subsidized 30%...
> Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra
Is this something from the post-war or did that really exist?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Orchestra_of_Auschwi...
“The Germans wanted a propaganda tool for [SS] visitors and camp newsreels and a tool to boost camp morale.”
There were also several men’s orchestras.
The last time I was in Berlin (2018), I was actually somewhat shocked by the amount of antisemitic graffiti that I saw just about everywhere (especially on lamp posts). Especially given the strictness of the laws against such speech.
It's even more insidious, I know activists in your country and they not only abhor the current support for Israel's genocide but they are terrified of their activism being criminalized under anti-nazi laws. How ironic.
I don't like the comparison with the holocaust, because this feels like opening another door to antisemitism.
What is happening in Gaza is different from the holocaust. This sort of argument is called holocaust inversion.
I am also bothered how the death of palestinian civilians somehow shadows the tactics used by Hamas and Hezbollah and how Iran helps them. So many died in Iraq, so many died in Iran by the hands of their government, so many are dying in Sudan, yet Israel is held to a higher standard, but why? Because of the holocaust, so Israel should know better? Because Israel is an US ally? Because Israel is the most democratic country in the middle east?
Maybe I am doing some whataboutism, but so is the comparison with auschwitz survivors.
I rarely allow myself to engage in arguing about this war anymore because it's just a totem now, even local politicians use it, it's ridiculous. I am just a leftist and I dislike Netanyahu as much as everybody, by the way.
And none of my arguments are meant to downplay how the Israelis engaged in war crimes. I just don't like how the holocaust is brought into that, it tries to install the narrative "jews went through a genocide, but they are taking a revenge" or something.
[flagged]
The problem is that its not a simple conflict where one can take a moral side.
Its absolutely true that Israel is definitely targeting civilians, whether due to negligence or just not giving a fuck, because of a combination of anger and fear of being eliminated.
Its also absolutely true that Hamas and by extension Iran wants Israeli to target civilians because it makes them appear as the bad guys, which furthers their agenda to weaken Israel to eventually retake the land. And not only that, but the terrorist cells also are interested in carrying out attacks in countries that support or have supported Israel even in defense only.
"I killed your family because Iran wants me to do it to prove a point!"
Hasbara troll. Your ilk always have the same templated comments: feign some sympathy, then both-sides this and get into victim blaming.
Every single person is a product of their circumstances. If you personally were to grow up in either country, the neural network in your brain would be trained with a way different set of data compared to what you experienced, and you would be a different person.
I don't have sympathy or hated for either side, this is just a byproduct of being human.
You wouldn't understand until war has come to your doorstep. The west has simply forgot, what is rapidly approaching your way.
If the question is a Gazan child or a raped and shot Israeli kid, then I'd choose an Israeli kid. Just like I'd choose my grandfather in Auschwitz rather than your grandfather in Dresden.
It always feels it's never either/or, we could all get along. but at war it's always either/or. and unfortunately for us the palestinians political leadership has brought us all into this scenario
An eyewitness account from the article:
(The eyewitness) told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account. I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired. "No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
I honestly think the gaza war was largely continued as a distraction from the true atrocities Israel has been committing in the west bank. By getting all the news to focus on Gaza Israel could trot out reasoning that many people accept, but the state sponsored terrorism they are undertaking in the west bank is the kind of stuff that is truly hard for even ardent Israel supporters to overlook.
Unfortunately, even in this comment section, you see people conflating the two. People don't realize that Palestinians live in both the west bank and gaza or that there are 2 different government for the west bank and gaza.
The people being oppressed and exterminated belong to the same group.
It's not even wrong to conflate atrocities in both regions as part of the same genocidaire campaign.
I agree, but I'd say it's important when pointing out how horrible this is you don't let the "they deserved it" narrative fly.
How Israel acts in the west bank is a testament to how poor their behavior in gaza is. They have no real justification for their evictions and murders of west bank citizens. They have no justification for turning a blind eye to settler violence. They have no justification for not punishing IDF soldiers who break theirs and international law.
Israel's plan to confuse people about what is happening in the west bank vs gaza is so effective that even their detractors are falling for it. Truly a genius strategy
That's a good point actually.
I see people saying this story doesn't belong on HN. genuine question, if this story were about a german national would it be considered as political? is palestinian existence inherently more political than other peoples' existence?
I'm saying this as someone who doesn't really care about this certain topic:
Either we allow _all_ political content or nothing.
The HN guidelines are incredibly grey and handwave-y
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
To me HN became to big for its own good since the Covid days. It's like the reddit front page except there are no subs with mods but one big flood (basically /r/all).
If I got to /r/linux, /r/selfhosted/, /r/networking/ or other tech subs I'll probably find what I saw on HN 15 years ago. But less and less here.
bingo
From the guidelines:
What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
If the story was about a German national then yes, I would still say this is political and doesn't gratify my intellectual curiosity.
I'll bite: If for any reason, probably because it's neither technically interesting nor entrepreneurial in nature.
US Politics seems to get more of a pass, probably due to Silicon Valley being there (and nearly all the major tech outlets), similarly some China news gets a pass, also largely when it relates to supply chain and Taiwan.
> US Politics seems to get more of a pass,
This goes beyond US politics. The US and Israel do not exist in a bubble. This conflict can and will have big repercussions which will impact our technical and entrepreneurial institutions.
All events in the universe are connected to all others. If the rule is that anything that could affect anyone is fair game, then there simply are no rules, to subject guidelines, no filter whatsoever. It's hackernews.com without the "hacker"
All events are connected, but the only superpower is a little more connected.
Nothing exists in total isolation, you have to draw lines anyway.
Every time these sorts of articles get posted people that express a differing opinion from the standard get flagged (making it so you can't read their post at all) pretty quickly making it seem more like the intention isn't to start discussion. It seems like it's gotten to the point that the people that just get flagged into oblivion stopped trying to post.
FWIW, you can read flagged posts and comments by turning on showdead in your profile.
News not connected to technology or VC doesn't belong on HN.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19627524 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42968430 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40404446
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Mainstream world news has a place on HN if it contains "significant new information", and as much as this site is primarily for curious conversation and gratifying intellectual curiosity, we don't want to pretend that horrific events like this aren't happening.
Horrific events happen almost every hour of every day. This is political, and the events that are upvoted are always from the same political perspective. If you don't see this, you're blind. But from my perspective, mods do see it, are ok with it, and that is unfortunate. There are few places left online without explicit political bias. HN used to be one of them.
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> The same reason your inane question is on HN.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If anything, it's refreshing to see something that isn't about the latest apple / llm / current techbro trend bullshit
I can go to Reddit for that.
You can go to Reddit for everything. There’s even r/hackernews.
Reminder that whatever you think, war, terrorism, questions of "the right/wrong target," etc are all insperable from AI and technology these days. These soldiers were where they were for concrete reasons dictated across vast automated networks; their choices of engagement are insperable from the tools either side (army and occupied population to be clear) here has or is perceived to have. War is simply many different "user stories," to put it coldly, and there is ethical and/or practical reasons, as technologists/scientists/academics, to see it that way (even if the goal is to just know thy enemy).
This is all why Anthropic is now a "supply-chain risk", why Thiel and Musk are particularly powerful persons-qua-tech-CEOs, why embedded microcontrollers getting so cheap (or whatever) enables drones instead of suicide bombs.
If you listen to the news, Israel kills innocent people on a daily basis in Palestine and Lebanon. It is a surprise that people choose to live in the West Bank despite such killings.
I think that's the point - to discourage (certain) people from living there at all. Except it turns out people are capable of never-ending suffering and persevering through it.
You would think Israelis would already know this very well.
What's surprising is how nonchalantly people like you suggest victims should just surrender and leave. Exactly the same thing was told to Ukrainians after the invasion. The fucking audacity you people have is staggering.
* * *
My understanding if you read the Israeli news articles is that the justification is that the car was going fast:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-forces-kill-west-bank-...
Given that the IDF involved were undercover agents (according to the reports), it seems unlikely that this family knew that driving fast would get them killed.
From the article, an eyewitness account:
> He told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account. I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired. "No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
Indeed. Often one of the key details omitted is that Israel has been illegally occupying the west bank since 1967 as part of an apartheid regime.
The BBC had a literal Israeli officer as the head of their Middle East department. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/high-court-rules-favour-j...
It’s hard not to wonder whether better technology could someday help stop tragedies like this.
No. Better technology is only making it more efficient. We need better humanity, better morals, better policing of criminals in power.
The israeli army are famous for their tech?
Well, right now the "better technology" is Israel's use of the "Lavender" AI to designate people to kill because they are "likely" to be hamas supporters.
And yes, probably they could have used better technology to realize that people in the car are not a danger to them. But that would immply they actually want to avoid killing civilians instead of looking for any excuse to shoot them.
The Holocaust was built on IBM, the genocide in Gaza is built on Azure. Technology won't be on the side of stopping these tragedies.
nothing has changed https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
Collateral damage is inevitable in any war. We don't need a HN post every time an innocent person dies in one of the wars in the middle east.
It's not collateral damage in the gaza war. This was a family in the west bank, where there is no hamas and no "war", that was gunned down in cold blood for no reason. Not even presenting a threat. I hope one day you are able to find compassion.
Which war? This happened in the West Bank!
> Collateral damage is inevitable in any war.
"Collateral damage" is when "they" die. "Tragedy" is when "we" die.
Or, in other words: "Some of you might die. That's a sacrifice I am willing to make."
This isn't a war, though. This is an extermination. This is an army with effectively limitless power against unarmed civilians.
This is not a war.
This is a genocide conducted by a government of an apartheid state against a group of people it considers to be subhuman.
Not the first time it happened, that's why we have actual words for what is happening there.