Comment by Qem

The report that I saw said that there were 70 vehicles completely destroyed by RPG or Helicopter and the Israeli military did not go into specifics(although they undoubtedly have more data about the event than they have released)

“A few… A very small fraction” is a conspiracy theory actually

You can't post like this to HN, regardless of who you have a problem with. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

We have to ban accounts that post this way, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not post this way, we'd appreciate it.

> It is absolutely not "true both legally and morally." It all depends on scale and purpose of the operation.

Well I wasn't making a general statement - I was talking in this specific case.

Let's give an analogy - if a bunch of bank robbers have taken hostages and are threatening to kill them, and if the police is reasonably certain there is no way of actually getting them out - the police is morally justified in sending in SWAT to try and rescue as many hostages as possible. Even if they know that many hostages will die.

The moral fault is with the bank robbers, not the police.

> If [I]sraeli military acted with disregard to the lives of non combatants, that would account to war crimes, against their own population.

I think that's a totally valid internal matter for debate within Israel. Should this kind of doctrine be the rule? Is it appropriate to attempt to stop militants by any means necessary, including possibly at the cost of your own population? This is in the same vein as "we don't negotiate with terrorists", a principled position that theoretically cuts down on terror, but that has brutal immediate ramaficiations in specific cases.

That all said, I don't think this doctrine amounts to war crimes (I'm not sure how it possibly could amount to war crimes). And I think it's an internal matter for debate inside the country, but don't really see how it matters to anyone else.

In fact, it kind of proves the opposite of what many people think - that the IDF is specifically trying to kill Gazan civilians. I'm often asked "what would the IDF do if the innocent civilians around a Hamas militant were Jews, not Palestinians, would you still bomb them even though it might cause collateral damage?". And while I think that question has a lot of answers, I think the "Hannibal directive", if implemented on October 7th (as appears likely), is actually proof that the IDF acts consistently, if terribly brutally - civilians are sometimes collateral damage, even if they're Israelis.

EDIT: Mis-wrote something, see further comments for details.

I went down the rabbit-hole trying to find out exactly what was said and meant. I don't consider Electronic Intifada a credible source (I mean, the bias is in the name!), but they are citing specific statements made by an Israeli army reporter.

That said, I think they (and you) are making things seem very different by the way in which you're quoting the statements. I wrote there are only a few known cases of friendly fire on civilians, and you wrote that the army thinks the number is "immense", which contradicts what I said.

Except, if you look at the context of that statement from the article, I think it doesn't actually contradict it. Here's the whole paragraph:

> Casualties fell as a result of friendly fire on October 7, but the IDF believes that beyond the operational investigations of the events, it would not be morally sound to investigate these incidents due to the immense and complex quantity of them that took place in the kibbutzim and southern Israeli communities due to the challenging situations the soldiers were in at the time.

The "immense and complex quantity" statement here refers to why the army says it's not morally sound to investigate the incidents. There could've been 100 incidents - e.g. 100 cases of cars bombed trying to cross back into Gaza, which may or may not have had hostages in them (which is I believe where the IDF supposedly invoked the "Hannibal doctrine").

A hundred potential incidents to investigate could absolutely qualify as someone saying there are an "immense number", while still only representing a tiny fraction of victims compared to the numbers we know for certain were killed by Hamas.

I honestly think that if your case hinges on the specific phrasing used to describe what someone from the IDF said, and which doesn't even necessarily prove anything - then your case is incredibly weak. This could've been a translation error (I couldn't find the original Hebrew version of this article), this could've been the reporter slightly exaggerating what they heard (even unknowingly), etc.

Do you have any other sources except for this? I'd love to see them.

Though again, let's be clear - there are already hundreds (possibly over a thousand?) known victims of Hamas that are verified. There might be some friendly-fire incidents too, but there are an incredibly large number that are absolutely known to have been killed by Hamas, many of which were captured on video by Hamas itself!

Trying to claim otherwise is just completely ignoring all real evidence in favor of conspiracy.