Forensic Architecture is a truly remarkable work. If anybody is unfamiliar with Eyal Weizman, I would highly recommend checking out more of his work. Including the 2014 series Rebel Architecture and some of his talks. He recently did a presentation called "Conditions of Life Calculated" at the David Graeber Memorial Lecture at CIIS that I think gives a lot of insight into why the work being done at Forensic Architecture is so remarkable. He also talks about his work with David Wengrow and the Nebelivka Hypothesis based on novel archeology of ancient Ukrainian cities
> case seems pretty clear, especially since the soldiers tried
Even if the 'soldiers' didn't, it wouldn't have mattered as the governing apparatus usually goes out of its way to protect their own militants.
Ex A:
Detainees executed, unarmed civilians killed in their sleep, a child, handcuffed and shot, all covered up by the chain of command – this is the testimony of more than 30 eyewitnesses, former members of UK Special Forces ... Panorama – Special Forces: I Saw War Crimes ... reported a series of cold-blooded murders by UK military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan over a period of ten years, followed by years of official cover-up.
I think the only defense here would be if the soldiers came up with some reasonable explanation of why they thought the vehicles were hostile. Its kind of hard to imagine, especially with shooting the follow up vehicles, but motive seems like the only unclear part where there is any potential for a defense.
One part that is really confusing, is if they knowingly intentionally targeted the ambulance because they thought they could get away with it if they destroyed the evidence, why leave witnesses alive? If you assume the motive was an intentional massacare with point blank executions, it doesn't entirely make logical sense to leave witnesses.
When the first attack on an aid convoy to provoke outrage came out, I saw someone put it best: there is a difference between "war is chaos, and no matter how hard we try, some incidents regrettably occur" and "our rules of engagement are designed in such a manner to make these incidents almost certain." And the IDF... is pretty clearly in the latter category.
> I imagine most of the armchair critics here have never been in a situation where they have to make these sorts of calls. Being in an ambush in a war with an enemy that, let's say, uses "unconventional" tactics (aka war crimes) to try and kill you while vans are approaching you.
Attempting to use this as a defense requires conceding that the default assumption is that someone is a terrorist until proven otherwise, which is something that guarantees horrific civilian casualties. It's not actually requisite that soldiers have this mindset; instilling this requires training, and the fact that it seems to be so pervasive in the IDF is a sign that it's not just a criminal failure of a few soldiers but rather a core part of the IDF strategy that needs to be addressed.
> Upon reaching the aid workers, the soldiers moved between them and the vehicles and executed some of the aid workers at point blank range, as close as one meter away." -> we know not all the aid workers were killed. I believe two were taken alive.
This is the part that gives me the most pause. The FA report makes it sound like they went on a murder spree for the hell of it and then tried to cover up the evidence (i.e. they knew it was an ambulance and intentionally targeted it). But if that was the case, and they had no qalms about killing people, why would they leave witnesses and then release said witness a month later. If the motive was some ethnic hatred fueled revenge, why leave witnesses?
> "The emergency lights and markings of the victims’ vehicles would have been clearly visible to the soldiers at the time of the attacks." -> speculative. The soldiers argued they were wearing night vision equipment and did not see either the markings or the emergency lights. This is at least plausible (as someone who has used thermal night vision equipment).
Is it plausible?
There were four ambulances and a fire truck with flashing lights on the roofs and the report says the soldiers had a clear view from the elevated sandbank. Night vision would obscure the markings, but lights still show in both thermal and image-intensified NVG. Even if they weren't sure they were ambulances, they should still be wondering about the emergency lights. And if they weren't sure, did no soldier look even briefly without night vision? This occurred during twilight, about half an hour before sunrise.
If they could see so little that they couldn't recognize 4 ambulances and a fire truck with emergency lights, and the aid workers never fired shot, why did they open fire?
It doesn't explain well why they initially said the vehicles were acting suspiciously by driving with their lights off and only changed their story after video emerged. And it doesn't explain why they shot at the "clearly marked UN vehicle" when it arrived well after sunrise.
You forgot to mention that there were two separate incidents. That's why the thing took two hours. They shoot an ambulance, I suppose you could argue that was a mistake. They check the ambulance (at that moment they had to know that there were not fighters there). Later, when more help vehicles appeared they shoot everybody in them too. That's the five minutes shooting.
You forgot to mention that they destroyed the vehicles and they buried the dead with them in the sand. And that, was not made by the same people that killed the help workers.
You forgot to mention that they lie about what happened.
You forgot to mention that, after the investigation, one of the official was demoted, and that's it.
All this seems to point, not to a mistake, but to a pattern of behavior, in my opinion. Personally, I'm done with the 'mistakes', like blocking baby formula from entering Gaza and all that.
I don't know anything about how things work in situations like this, but logic would lead me to think a convoy of aid workers wouldn't be returning fire so shooting at them with all the shots coming from the IDF side might indicate some sort of mistake quite early in the encounter. The fact they carried on shooting for 5 minutes is either a signal that they knew and just didn't care, or that they're some of the worst trained soldiers imaginable.
> We know that the soldiers lied about some of the facts and some have been disciplined and removed from command.
Removed from command for killing aid workers point blank? That seems like a light wrap on the wrist, not commensurate with the severity of the deed, no?
Do you want to comment on the point where the IDF presumably realised what happened and decided to (physically) bury the evidence, and then gaslight the world until video evidence emerged?
I think you're being a bit too forgiving to what's become a clear documented pattern of behaviour during this genocide [1]
> That the anti-Israelis are going to latch on it as proof that Israel is evil is an unfortunate side effect.
Defenders of Israel always try to put a label on us: anti-Semites, anti-Iaraelis etc. You are trying to make it seem like this was some kind of isolated incident, an unfortunate consequence of the war. It wasn't: Gaza is in ruins, Israel continues ethnic cleansing in West Bank all while gaslighting everyone who opposes it. Israel is evil.
You keep deleting and entirely rewriting your posts here, so posting something so its not lost (own your opinions and don't be ashamed of them, how else you want to discuss this?) :
> It was not any of these things. It was not an open air prison or a concentration camp. That's the truth. Both these accusations are cheap propaganda that doesn't stand the most cursory fact checking. Look into how many people traveled to and from Gaza a year. Check out the vast tunnel network and rocket arsenal Hamas manged to build. That Hamas preferred to smuggle CNC machines and lathes and explosives from Egypt instead of food for the Gazan population is on them.
> Hamas took over Gaza by force, killing their Palestinian brothers, tossing them from roof tops. Israel just responded to Hamas' war on it. You know, rockets and such. All along Gaza had a border with Egypt which Israel did not control.
> Don't defend Hamas. Just don't do it.
Its entirely possible to despise hamas and wishing them horrible death, while despising what state of israel was and is and will be doing there. Defenders of israel often bring the masacre of 2023 like its good enough excuse to perform another civilian masacre. Heck, you want to drag people who dare to speak out into automatic hamas supporters, thats a bit cheap trick. What about focusing on civilians here, on all sides, like a normal moral human being should do? What did those murdered kids and rest of civilians on both sides did to deserve any of this?
Yes it is a concentration camp, the very definition of it. Maybe you are mixing this with nazi extermination camps, those were a different category - then I suggest some reading on that topic.
Let me ask - how easy it was, even before current war for regular palestinian to lets say move to another part of the world? I don't mean som israeli farmers using/abusing them as extremely cheap labor, I mean normal travel. Stateless people, kept in utter poverty by design, almost malnourished, effectively forbidden to leave what looks like the definition of open prison or what say US did to its japanese population during WWII. Some digged tunnels don't change anything here.
> That the anti-Israelis are going to latch on it as proof that Israel is evil is an unfortunate side effect. There is never a clean war and certainly not the kind of war that has been fought in Gaza.
That and the abundant evidence of genocidal intent in Gaza and the explicit ethnic cleansing of the West Bank with full support of the Israeli society is the reason why it is evil. This incident is one of literal hundreds.
The reason your comments are being flagged is because you are defending the patently indefensible.
Do you currently serve or have you over the last two-and-a-half-years served in the IDF (or one of its supporting directorates) or do you currently work or have you over the last two-and-a-half-years worked in one of the Israeli intelligence agencies?
I ask this because you admit to having used thermal night vision equipment, you know what is being discussed in Hebrew-language Israeli media; and you call your interlocutors armchair critics implying you do more than just sit in an armchair. In the interests of full disclosure -- are you a neutral third-party or do you have skin in the game?
can you provide that history? the best I can find is a single story where they incorrectly reported four children as dead, which I can only really find being discussed in reddit comments. surely if they have a 'documented history of being wrong' you're referring to something more material?
With a specificity of the number of shots and the spatial reconstruction of the scene, there's some impressive uses of tech to bolster reporting:
>A digital reconstruction of the scene shows that the soldiers would have had an uninterrupted view of the arrival of the convoy.
>The reconstruction was jointly achieved with the two survivors of the incident, with an immersive spatial model they could walk through and amend. Together with spatial and audio analysis we established the position of the soldiers on an elevated ground with an unobstructed line of sight to the emergency vehicles.
Forensic Architecture, the people who did the spatial reconstruction, have been around for a while. You can see more examples of their investigations here: https://forensic-architecture.org/
Forensic Architecture are great. I remember their work being very hot in the international art scene around ~2018 (when they were nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize, among others - https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/turner-prize-2...).
Not sure if they're still fêted as artists or have moved away from that label. I still find their approach completely mesmerizing nevertheless.
Hospitals may have been used for retaliation [0], but it is unclear how many & in what capacity (according to accepted conventions, using a hospital to treat wounded combatants wouldn't make it a valid military target, for example; but hiding weapons or personnel would).
A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Israel did not have a habit of drastically overstating their case and quietly walking it back after they end up killing more journalists and toddlers than active combatants in hospital bombings. Also if reports didn't deliberately conflate 'armed man' with 'Hamas militant' and euphemize about the 'Hamas-run Interior Ministry' like that one does.
- Hamas is a terrorist organization that planned and executed a mass terror campaign, fully knowing and hoping for the reaction. And boasting about it continuously and repeatedly.
- Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.
Israel's response was very similar to the US's response to 9/11. 3,000 Americans were killed by terrorists (a smaller percentage of the population than Israelis killed on 10/7) and as a response the US started two wars killing at least 100 times as many Afghans and Iraqis (there are lots of debates about the total casualties there too just like Gaza). This is not a defense of Israel, just a fact that seemingly is never part of the conversation that I think can help people better understand why this is happening.
You forgot eighty years of occupation, cultural , economical and ethnical cleansing of the local indigenous people called Palestinians with help of US and Western countries mainly.
Hamas is a terror organisation funded, and quite possibly created, by far-right nationalist elements in the Israeli government to weaken the Palestinian authority and create a pretext for the occupation of Gaza.
Netanyahu is on the record funnelling money through Qatar. He said it was for "humanitarian aid" - which would be more credible if it wasn't such an extraordinary and unusual outbreak of concern for Palestinian wellbeing.
The occupation is straight out genocide, labelled as such by many Israeli scholars, as well as most of Rest of World.
This level of barbarism and entitlement has no place on a civilised planet.
There is an alternate World Peace Force that just got started recently because I believe, as regimes change, the UN will audit what happened. The issue is there will now be another international body that will argue the other way. It’s not exactly 3d chess, but, it is chess. Purchase of US TikTok (chess moves).
Never heard (and couldn't find anything) about it. That "Board of Peace" you're most likely referring to is nothing more than your usual Trump grift - each country willing to join has to pay 1 billion $, and there have been 25 countries declaring their intent to join.
Make up the math yourself, even if there will be legitimate expenses for PMCs, reconstruction and god knows what else, even skimming off 5% of that sum will still be a lot of money for Trump. And it would not be the first time he launches a multi-billion grift / money laundering scheme, remember $TRUMP and $MELANIA and I've probably forgotten about the other coins?
There was a second part to that which is "and surrender".
But there's definitely been a large reduction in violence since the hostages were returned. Most or all of it in response to violations of the ceasefire by Hamas.
> Don’t forget the “all they have to do is return the hostages” line
So there's zero link whatsoever between Hamas executing 1200 civilians on Oct 7th, taking 200 hostages, and the following war (and war crimes) of Israel?
Israel literally unilaterally began a war and committed war crimes without any act of aggression?
And from the moment 200 hostages had been taken, many of whom died in captivity, everything was carved in stone and no matter what Hamas did, Israel was going anyway to war and to commit war crimes?
Or did something happen on Oct 7th that triggered all this?
I don't know why you're using the past tense here, I was still trying to talk some sense into these people barely two days ago. It's hopeless at this point.
> I was still trying to talk some sense into these people barely two days ago. It's hopeless at this point.
I don't think "sense" is the issue.
1) Are you sure you were talking to actual people and not fake personas or even bots?
2) Keep in mind that there is A LOT of money to be made working for Israeli PR. Some people will take that money regardless of what they know is the actual truth. Some examples:
- Certain social media influencers being paid up to $7000 per post [1]
- Israel boosts propaganda funding by $150m to sway global opinion against genocide [2] [3]
- "[...] a firm called Bridges Partners LLC has been hired to manage an influencer network under a project code-named the “Esther Project.” " [4]
If you have 3 hours, there's a documentary you can watch, about a man who was sanctioned by the government to kill a lot of "communists" in 1960's Indonesia: The Act of Killing (available at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q ).
It's sort of understandable why the defenders of the genocide have to keep defending it. Stopping doing so today would mean admitting that until yesterday you've been defending utter inhumanity.
A review:
> Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a challenging documentary. It is not only difficult to watch, but it also probes into one of the most grotesque aspects of human nature: the capacity for self-delusion in the face of horrific atrocities. This isn’t a film about history, facts, or statistics; it’s about the memories of the men who killed, the stories they tell themselves, and how they continue to live with the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. The film’s power lies in its ability to take the viewer beyond a surface-level understanding of evil and into the psychological abyss of those who have committed atrocities—and seemingly moved on with their lives.
This must be the definition of pedantry. The point is *Israel deliberately destroyed an unconscionable number of hospitals, killing enormous amounts of real-life civilian people, actual humans like you and I. People with daughters, husbands, friends, people who were just as valuable as anyone else.
"Even then, humanitarian considerations relating to the welfare of the wounded and sick being cared for in the facility may not be disregarded. They must be spared and, as far as possible, active measures for their safety taken."
"Notably, an attacking party remains bound by the principle of proportionality. The military advantage likely to be gained from attacking medical establishments or units that have lost their protected status should be carefully weighed against the humanitarian consequences likely to result from the damage or destruction caused to those facilities: such an attack may have significant incidental second- and third-order effects on the delivery of health care in the short, middle and long-term."
> All the Geneva protections apply only to truly civilian things, not to things pretending to be civilian.
"The First Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded field soldiers, the Second Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded sailors, the Third Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of prisoners of war, and the Fourth Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of civilians during armed conflict"
> Your video is paywalled but also irrelevant as it shows emergency symbols
That is precisely why it is relevant. Israel's initial claim was that they didn't have any.
From the article we're discussing:
"After footage from Radwan’s phone was first published by the New York Times a few days later, the Israeli military backtracked on its claims that the vehicles did not have emergency signals on when Israeli troops opened fire, saying the statement was inaccurate."
"The Israeli military then announced on April 20 that an internal inquiry into the incident had found the killings were caused by “several professional failures, breaches of orders, and a failure to fully report the incident.”"
In general Muslims are not out to exterminate Jews. Jews are "people of the book". They are followers of Moses who is one of the most revered prophets in Islam. Jews are brothers and sisters and it is even permitted to marry them.
The issue is Israel state is far removed from the teachings of Moses and out to exterminate Muslims in the middle east. So naturally you can expect violent resistance.
> I’m not sure why the Palestinians and allies are complaining. Their stated aim is the genocide of Jews and the destruction of Israel. That’s Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, Yemen. And they’ve tried but are too incompetent to succeed.
It's not like the other side is peaceful and wants to make love and fight war. Israel has been violently kicking out Palestinians from their lands for the past 70-80 years. Before that, among 'Palestinians' there were Muslims, Jews, Christians and other religions coexisting just fine. The ambition to create an ethnic state of Jews only gave rise to misery for everyone and only grew the the intrareligious hate. They could have taken a different path and give us all, the rest of the world a break.
If Serbs wanted their own ethnostate they should have spent the last century subverting the structures of power and media of the West. They didn't do that and the civilians of Beograd paid the price.
Hamas has weaponized every hospital in Gaza. By contrast, Israel has not dropped an aerial bomb on any hospital building in Gaza.
What has happened is Israel has attacked hospitals with Hamas presence using ground forces, and they have dropped bombs on hospital grounds, but not in hospitals themselves.
Israel killed UK army veterans, it was a targeted operation and a precision strike to send a message.
It was covered by UK media for a short period and they would gloss over the veterans and focus more broadly on WCK, there is lots of examples of UK media weird coverage like this which no doubt was intentional. It was also barely spoken about by UK politicians
RIP John Chapman, James Henderson, and James Kirby.
I think about this a lot re: Israel. I had a conversation once with an Israeli where he was convinced "everyone is racist," but we're all too woke to admit it or something, or have some belief that racism is wrong but work to overcome this inherent thing.
His arguments were all very zero sum, "if we didn't do it to them they'd do it to us," and from conversations with friends I'm thinking that what's happening here is the Israeli media apparatus focuses heavily on creating an "us vs them" mentality for diaspora Jewish people, which has now backfired to create a whole lot of Islamophobic and racist people.
It's interesting because one may think that people with a historical trauma of one of the worst things ever carried out in human history would be the least likely to do something like that and the most likely to see the writing on the wall if something like that was about to happen again, but sadly that was too optimistic: the opposite happened.
People with historical trauma are far more likely to inflict further wrongs than people without historical trauma. This is the case for individual trauma too. It has always been this way.
Has anyone thought much about the impact of living in a group with a strong shared mythology? That is very rare among modern people, to the extent that we may have a hard time relating to it or reasoning about the impact it has on people’s moral sentiments and behaviors. Or at least it’s hard to see the one we do live in in a “this is water” kind of way, and we may have a hard time reasoning about the differences that different “waters” produce.
Like if you grow up living inside the Star Wars mythology and suddenly you get a chance to fight The Empire, do you do it? Do you really care if people outside the Shared Mythos Group (TM) disagree with you doing it?
(Note that I’m not saying anyone in this framing is “The Empire”, I’m just using the Star Wars mythology as a familiar example of a mythic framing)
I don’t think we can truly compare the missile attacks of Hamas vs the bombing campaigns of Israel
Look at any photo of any neighborhood in Israel, is there anywhere that remotely looks similar to the pile of rocks that Gaza looks like now?
Universities, hospitals, so much infrastructure, all gone. So much of Gaza is now people living in tents. Israel destroyed so much civilian infrastructure that existed.
And this one! How often does Hamas pull the "we didn't mean it!" card for their attacks on Israel? Have they ever? Of course they mean it, they're a bunch of assholes.
If video evidence indicates IDF personnel committing these crimes also happen to be US citizens I wonder if those people could face criminal prosecution in the US. As an American I wouldn't want to live next to or do business with a serial murderer. I certainly wouldn't want them coaching my kids sports or other community involvement.
> If video evidence indicates IDF personnel committing these crimes also happen to be US citizens I wonder if those people could face criminal prosecution in the US.
I think it’s become pretty apparent that they would not face any repercussions and might even be rewarded.
You still have people defending the occupation forces even when the soldiers themselves are bragging no social media about killing kids, and how they wished they killed more.
Exceptional report. Surprised to see that much of a confusion on HN about why it is there. MH17 posts with forensics did not seem to be offtopic when they were posted. This fits.
I like Forensic Architecture’s work in general and I think this report is valuable as a micro-level reconstruction of a specific incident.
That said, I think a lot of the HN discussion is treating it as if it captures the broader complexity of the conflict and I’m not sure thats what it can realistically do, at most, it leaves a lot of room for speculations - speculations which are fed by already existing bias of the reader (or so I see in the comments).
A few gaps that matter if we’re trying to reason beyond the single event:
Framing / conclusion baked in: terms like “executions” and “concealment” may ultimately be correct, but they’re also strong legal/moral claims that can bias interpretation unless the alternative hypotheses are seriously stress-tested. Its a dead giveaway of the writers bias. From this point on it looks like most biased readers do not try to critically tackle the reports claims.
Limited “steelman” of operational context - without full access to military comms, ISR feeds, ROE, intel context, and command decisions in real time, it’s hard to evaluate what soldiers believed they were responding to (even if they were wrong, negligent, or violating orders). Its a known practice that Hamas militants travel undercover using civilian/emergency vehicles - I think its really pathetic this report does not analyze nor even addresses this claim. This is not being objective, and most of you guys here are too critical-thinking to miss this one out (or is it a bot swamp here? i really dont know).
Evidence asymmetry - open-source reconstructions can be rigorous, but they inherently rely on what’s available (videos/audio/witness accounts). That’s different from having the complete internal dataset that would settle key disputes. I know this is the best effort available, but still, it leaves a lot of room for speculation. My expectations of FA were higher than that.
Conflation risk - a brutal case study can be an important data point, but it’s not automatically a comprehensive model of the war or the incentives/constraints on both sides.
“Here’s a detailed claim about what happened at Tel al-Sultan on that night.” would be a correct title for this report.
Curious what you think: what specific pieces of primary data would most change your confidence/speculations here? (e.g., full comms logs, drone video, ROE brief for that unit, chain-of-command timeline, etc.)
> If this was happening against the west, people would care a lot more
It’s literally happening in Ukraine and, to a lesser scale but precisely the same in type, Minneapolis. On the other hand, there are conflicts across Africa and Asia which are not receiving half the attention.
You have to read pretty far into this very sympathetic piece to discover he was running over hundreds of living people with a bullzdozer:
> In a testimony to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in June, Zaken said that on many occasions, soldiers had to “run over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds.”
According to reports from locals in Asia and Europe, they are traveling and enjoying life to the fullest while harassing local communities during those trips.
Iranian here! I wish freedom for the people of Gaza and an end to their suffering and oppression. Down with all the dictators and oppressors. Be it IRGC or IDF.
I would like to know: is there even a single person here, who actually changed his opinion regarding this whole matter upon seeing this report? Not confirmed anything, but actually was forced to re-evaluate his opinion. Like, previously you thought that IDF are good guys, and all Israel does is justified self-defense measures, and now you see this as genocide of Palestinians?
Of course, I assume, the answer is — no one. (And I'm hoping somebody will tell me I'm wrong.) So, what's the point? Is somebody gonna be held accountable? Will Israel be treated differently as a country from now on? If no, what's the point?
Seems like a good question to ask imo. The lack of accountability of crimes against humanity and children and the general apathy and shrug worthy reaction to most people to these issues especially on this site seems relevant commentary.
Journalism isn't valued by how many opinions have changed, it is there to report on stories that are or have happened. You ask for consequences in your comment but how can there be consequences if there are no reports? Absolutely baffling take.
This report presents sober technical analysis combined with witness testimony, creating an extremely concincing whole. It's not biased in any direction except the truth.
Presenting evidence has a point besides getting people to change their opinion on matters.
However, peoples' opinions often change, and when that happens, it has to happen somewhere.
Mine wasn't on reading this article, but I believe when someone on HN shared the wikipedia article on journalist deaths in Gaza, maybe around January or February 2024
I can tell you that the genocide and the Epstein files have made me to completely recalibrate my world view in regards to few countries. Absolutely. I bet many normies are going through these thoughts too in their heads now.
And WW2 only has more journalist deaths because some number of the genocide casualties had been journalists before the Holocaust.
Being a journalist typically provides you some protection in times of war, but for journalists who are part of a group suffering genocide, it's a liability.
We have the loosest definition of "journalist" in history. Most of the journalists on the list worked for nobody in particular or for Hamas, Iran, the Palestinian Authority, or some other group like Hezbollah. By these standards, William Joyce would be a journalist.
From where I sit nobody is questioning that the Israelis are supposed to be the good guys in this story. But the stories coming from the region are horrific! Is it true that it is the official policy of the IDF to shoot to kill children who throw stones at them?
Plus because Israel is making serious efforts to choke off all information from the region, I understand that it takes some time before a sober accounting of an incident like this reaches the outside world. To avoid the charged rhetoric I have waited. Yet the point blank executions of humanitarian workers is still shocking to me. Such reckless hate, it must destroy a person.
I hear about IDF war crimes all the time, but this level of lying and cover-up is something new and causing me some serious cognitive dissonance right now.
On the tech side I’m wondering if any LLMs were used for the investigation, they don't seem to mention any by name at least.
Unfortunately this article and the conversation here is taken in the context of the entirety of Israel is bad, the whole military war against Hamas and its patrons was bad, and that there is a genocide in Gaza. It leaves little room to have meaningful conversations about difficult conditions in the war and whether soldiers acted incorrectly or not and if they should be tried or not with regards to this single incident.
Mods, can you look at this comment and maybe unflag it? It has some snarky language ("armchair critics") but it doesn't seem to contain anything flaggable and it provides important context, namely what I take to be the perspective from the pro-Israeli side. I for one am very curious to know what that this.
Palestine is a country under a brutal military occupation and progressive illegal colonisation that has been going on for 80 years. Before October 7, Israel had already killed many, many more civilians in Gaza than Hamas did in Israel with that attack.
> Palestine is a country under a brutal military occupation and progressive illegal colonisation that has been going on for 80 years.
If Mexico had started attacking the US across the border, what would the US do? I'm curious to hear what you think a country should do in this circumstance.
> Hamas was insane to think that Bibi would NOT BOMB the Gaza in retaliation.
My theory is that they knew this would happen and they did it because they knew it would garner support (which it did) and they also knew they had nothing to lose because this is what would have happened in the long-term anyway. They chose between a quick death and a slow death. Unfortunately, everyone else who originally chose them to protect them didn't get to choose. I doubt most would have voted for this if they had that choice.
You can't just stamp out a guerilla resistance the way Israel have tried to do. I suspect Hamas reckoned that a well-timed short term sacrifice would turn global opinion against Israel.
>My theory is that they knew this would happen and they did it because they knew it would garner support (which it did) and they also knew they had nothing to lose because this is what would have happened in the long-term anyway. They chose between a quick death and a slow death. Unfortunately, everyone else who originally chose them to protect them didn't get to choose. I doubt most would have voted for this if they had that choice.
Maybe. I actually think they didnt expect to be so successful also.
I also almost believe that top echelons of Israeli intelligence knew about the upcoming attack, but they didn't expect THAT many fatalities and that Hamas were going to take hostages alive.
> Israel ALWAYS gonna retaliate with non proportional force when it comes to security of its citizens.
This is the logic of conflicts in the middle east and many or probably most parts of the world. If you don't retaliate hard and defend yourself thoroughly, it is seen as weakness. Not much more sophisticated than how bullying works.
It's not a secret. It started in the 80s and lasted until they won the election in 2005. It's not a conspiracy theory, this is History. Official History everyone one agrees on, even israel and Hamas themselves.
In the last 3 years, many users on HN have justified Genocide constantly and openly while downvoting any dissenting opinion trying to speak up against this genocide.
And all of them, without fail, when convenient, without consequence, will lie and act like they were against it. Once the genocidaires have built waterfront property upon the fresh tiny bones once the Board of Holocaust Profiteering is done with its demonic mandate.
The entirety of the upper echelons of the tech industry, now in bed with the death industry, is that one swimming pool scene from "The Zone of Interest". Shame on all of you. And shame on the rest of us.
The problem is majority of Israeli citizens think the government isn't doing enough.
Cue the citizens that protested to stop the aid trucks from going into Gaza. The citizens that protested because the Israeli military arrested (after a lot of international pressure) soldiers that were caught raping Palestinian prisoners. They were protesting for the right of soldiers to continue to rape.
> The citizens that protested because the Israeli military arrested (after a lot of international pressure) soldiers that were caught raping Palestinian prisoners.
The people you're talking about are Israel's far-right. I don't think you can index from them onto the median Israeli's political views anymore than you could reasonably index from a member of Hamas's armed wing onto the median Palestinian.
(A recurring theme in both I/P and MENA conflicts more generally is that political minorities - WB settlers in Israel, for example, manage to wield disproportionate power and induce chaos and strife across the region.)
The good people of israel? You mean the citizen army that carried out the genocide? I am sure they really hate their government but probably because they think its not doing enough.
> Earshot used echolocation to analyze the audio on the recordings in order to arrive at precise estimates of the shooters’ locations. Echolocation is the process of locating the source of a sound based on an analysis of the sound’s echoes and the environment in which the sound travels. The Israeli military destroyed and cleared so many buildings in the Tel Al-Sultan area where the ambush of the aid workers took place that very few structures remained. This destruction actually strengthened Earshot’s ability to determine the positions and movements of Israeli soldiers, based on identifying the surfaces responsible for clearly distinguishable gunshot echoes. Rather than having multiple buildings reflecting the sound waves, there were only a few standing walls and the emergency vehicles themselves.
> “Earshot forensically analyzed over 900 gunshots fired at aid workers. It took one whole year of careful listening to reconstruct an auditory picture of what happened that dark night,” Lawrence Abu Hamdan, the director of Earshot, told Drop Site.
I'm not sure how much this was actually necessary to the eventual verdict if this is ever adjudicated, though, if "hiding the evidence" is a factor:
> Following the ambush, Israeli forces crushed all eight vehicles using heavy machinery and attempted to bury them under the sand.
> The body of Anwar al-Attar was found near the ambush site on March 27, and the bodies of the other 14 aid workers, all wearing identifying uniforms or volunteer vests of their respective organizations, were found in a mass grave near the site on March 30.
But the understanding that they were advanced upon in a walking wave of fire, and then the survivors were executed one by one at close range, may help.
Its not automatic due to bot activity. It is from people actively suppressing stories that don't want other people to see.
This is discernible by watching how long it takes stories like these to reach a flagged state on the new submissions page. It is further evident by watching which comments within those submissions get flagged based upon their upvotes and visibility.
Comparing to their own rituals and practices around corpses it really goes to show just how thoroughly they have dehumanized the Palestinian people.
Israel long since stopped using smart bombs because a)they were too expensive and b)they didn't really give a shit who died in them executing someone a black-box AI decided was a terrorist (an AI they know is wildly inaccurate.) But even the smart bombs - they didn't care if they wiped out an entire family just to kill one person.
They even have snipers focusing on children. Doctors from international aid organizations working in the hospitals noticed that they were seeing a large number of children were showing up with few injuries/wounds except nearly identical head/chest wounds, and that not many adults were coming in with such injuries.
Targeting and prioritizing killing children has only one purpose: extermination.
In https://hckrnews.com these flagged items appear listed. With https://hckrnews.com as my entry into HN I don't see the need for HackerNewsRemovals other than curiosity to see what is removed.
Mike Huckabee said yesterday that all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates should be taken by Israel. That would involve a cleansing of hundreds of millions of people.
Mike Huckabee is a clown who was more or less strategically plonked into Israel to feed soothing quotes to the settler minority. I think it'd be an error to assume that his particularly evil flavor of Christian eschatology reflects the political or military policies of Israel (which is saying a lot, since Israel's military policy is very clearly good at producing war crimes).
Hmm well I don't think it'd be an error to assume that his particularly evil flavor of Christian eschatology reflects the political or military policies of Israel.
This is commonly misconstrued as christianity, but in christian tradition it would bring about the coming of the antichrist, massive persecutions globally, and armageddon.
Keep in mind that these powerful men believe that Jewish people coming back to Israel is the first step of the Apocalypse, and the return of Christ. It is a death cult quite literally trying to bring about the end of the world, and they're ruling the world. Also, they are insanely antisemitic and believe most Jews will go to hell.
> Also, they are insanely antisemitic and believe most Jews will go to hell.
A good chunk of them are insanely pro-semitic as well, as they adopt the dual covenant belief that Jews will actually also go to heaven as well as Christians. I've actually never met anyone that adhered to the pro-zionist dispensationalist view that fully thought out the implied consequences, then proceeded to harbor a personal hatred of Jews. The vast majority of them love all things Jewish and hold them in high regard.
Did he qualify it by indicating his claim is based on centuries old religious documents that are not agreed to by any majority of the Earth's population?
I just wanna say it's nice to see more people finally waking up and smelling the ashes. I can only hope in the future this genocide will be studied to better understand the main points of failure to not repeat such a widely event covered event.
The problem is that both sides lie flagrantly with such frequency that very few claims about the war can be taken at face value.
On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket, with video from multiple angles of the failure, that it hit an empty parking lot in front of the hospital and only blew out the windows and burnt a few cars, and that no more than a handful of people had been killed.
And also the repeated claims that Israel were lying about the tunnels under Gaza Hospitals, and make videos of one such strike (a bunker buster penetrating the parking lot just outside the entrance) go viral, only for Hamas to later announce that one of the replacement leaders for Sinwar had been killed in that strike, and for excavation to find the bunkers / tunnel network underneath that very hospital.
As well as, earlier in the war, a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza.
None of that justifies genuine instances of war crimes and atrocities that Israel may have committed, but there's a reason why people tune out some of the extreme claims that fly around.
But not the video in the OP which demonstrates that the IDF were, in fact firing on aid workers and refugees as they had been accused of, and certainly not the hours of footage of the IDF brazenly taking human shields over the years while insisting they didn't, or the reports of the IDF arming settlers. Curious that you can't enumerate any of these, and you're happy to take at face value a claim the IDF makes but doesn't allow independent third parties to verify (a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza) while abjuring such behaviour.
> On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket...
> On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket,
This is an Israeli lie. Not only has Israel bombed all of the hospitals, they murdered an entire NICU of infants. I can't believe people are still trying to justify blowing up hospitals!
The media organizations and people who pushed the pro-Israel narrative already understand all of this - it's not a failure, it was their intended goal.
It’s strange to me when otherwise intelligent people call this genocide. Genocide is an attempt to exterminate an entire people. Israel is a nuclear armed nation fighting against the equivalent of Dayton, OH.
If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
Collective punishment, or a long term ethnic cleansing would be much more accurate, but you’re just repeating what you read unthinkingly if you say genocide.
This is one of the worst pro-Israel arguments; I can't believe people still make it. Israel isn't going to drop a nuke on the "holy land", where they want to start building Jewish settlements, a few dozen miles from Tel Aviv. No matter how much they hate Palestinians, people don't want to live in an irradiated wasteland.
>If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
And the retaliation from the rest of the world in those circumstances would be swift and measured in hours, and there would be a smoking pile of rubble in that particular part of the world that would be uninhabitable for centuries.
Your are using an argument similar to the repugnant logic of Holocaust deniers. They use claims that Germany could have easily killed Jews /even faster/ as an argument to claim that they didn't commit genocide /at all/.
> If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
You can't infer intent that way. Nuking Gaza isn't free, it would introduce an existential threat to Israel. They are toeing a dangerous line already, and using WMDs would align other countries against them really quickly.
Putin isn't avoiding using nukes on Ukraine because he's a nice guy.
Yes, there is a long term effort by the State of Israel to remove Palestinian life from Palestinian land.
The term "genocide" noes not mean "kill every single member of a group", it refers to the destruction of the group itself by whatever means.
> you’re just repeating what you read unthinkingly if you say genocide.
Your policy of deeming everybody who does not have the same opinion as you to be too stupid, is smug, self serving and lazy.
See, I could just also go ahead and tell you that you are too "unthinkingly" to know that "ethnic cleansing" is a euphemism for "genocide" and that "long term ethnic cleansing" is exactly congruent in meaning with "genocide" (look it up).
Instead of doing that, I would like you to consider that when I say that the state of Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian people, I have thought long and hard about whether that is the appropriate term, and without taking it lightly, I have for myself concluded that that is actually the correct term.
I'll give you the "party line" (i.e. best-effort understanding of HN-moderators perspective) for why articles like this are frequently flagged:
1) The entire discussion is a rehashing of the exact same points every time the topic is posted, and not very insightful
2) The participation rate for experts (or even authors) in the discussed field/topic is very low (compared to programming topics)
3) The discussion rarely stays civil and requires excessive moderation
An observation (have no verbatim quote, but believe from dang) is that there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective and exact topic (presumably for above reasons). You can certainly still blame the flagging on bots or Zionists, but it's almost certainly not only those.
You left out the parts about how and when we turn flags off, about how a certain amount of political overlap is both necessary and inevitable, but that it also can't be too much. All of those are important factors, and I've posted many explanations of them:
We can't, however, turn off flags on threads we don't know about. You guys (I don't mean you personally!) unintentionally assume that we're omniscient. We aren't, so we need people to tell us about cases like this.
In this case, no one told us; I ran across it randomly. Randomness is only good for partial results. For reliable message delivery, someone needs to email hn@ycombinator.com, and please remember that it takes time to work through that (er) rather active inbox.
> there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective
I'm always sceptical of this given it doesn't happen to similar posts about Iran.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
The forensic reconstruction to this level of detail is novel and interesting, both for the methods deployed and for the likelihood that the half-life of unsolved war crimes appears to be decreasing.
No. Your message is. A lot of people commit mortal sin of logical fallacy by extending the responsibility for actions of certain group of people to everyone sharing with them ethnicity or religion. It‘s the stupidity worth of the strongest condemnation given the context.
It‘s not jews committing war crimes in Gaza, it‘s zionists. It‘s not muslims or Palestinians planning and executing terrorist attacks, it‘s religious extremists and far right nationalists. When there will be common understanding of this simple truth, fighting the root causes will be much easier.
Oh no, we shouldn't talk about war crimes because the iPhone I'm tapping my words into has some tech from the nation committing those war crimes. I should be more THANKFUL!
Isn't mass murder of civilians the most Israeli thing ever? For those out of the loop, this isn't an anomaly.
It's a societal-level policy: 47% of Israeli Jews want all Palestinians killed; 82% want all Palestinians forcefully expelled (i.e., ethnically cleansed) [0] which would constitute genocide. 56% want the same for all Israeli Arabs.
So, it's pathetic when Westerners act surprised at Israel's antics: you can't support a genocidal state and then be shocked when it does genocidal stuff. This is just Tuesday for them.
Once you understand this, Israel's actions are not an anomaly. It's the natural expression of people who consider their neighbors beneath them, and barely even human.
I wouldn’t point to Epstein, but there is a very powerful lobby that will protect the image of any Israeli government. A lot of Evangelicals also consider Israel important in bringing about the apocalypse, without which they can’t access eternal life. I wish I was kidding on that last one, but there are people actively trying to bring down civilisation so they can go to heaven.
I think when people say "West", they automatically think US and UK - and given their war crimes in recent history, you do get this sentiment, yes. I suspect, however, that this view has exacerbated and now includes other "western" countries that are silent/complicit in current horrific war crimes.
People in places like this generally don't feel the need to condemn Hamas because it's understood that they are bad. Hamas is not an ally of the United States, it's troops and police force don't train with the United States military, it does not buy weapons from United States factories, and it does not receive government aid from the United States. If you feel the need to, you can add a condemnation of Hamas to basically every post here and it'll be accurate. Hell if you want to add a condemnation to the Iranian and North Korean governments too while you're there, that'd be fine too.
Irish siding with a colonial terrorist power which flounders its genocidal ambitions freely financed by a petro state which also flounders its genocidal ambitions freely instead of the indigenous people of a land who's artefacts and scriptures are in the name of the land as well as dug up from the ground has to be the biggest moral confusion of the 21st century.
I find that a good sniff-test in politics is to change the actor in a claim to be Jewish and then consider if that make the claim an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Works surprisingly well.
For example:
> facing an enemy [Hamas] who does everything they can to get their own people killed to make you look bad
Imagine the "enemy" in that sentence was not "Hamas", but "The Jews" - that would be a very antisemitic narrative, and in a similar way that antisemitism has nothing really to do with Jews, but rather with antisemites what you are writing here just shows your hatred.
> does everything to get their own people killed
for the purposed of making the killer look bad, is such a naïve take on this.
Do you think netanyahu and his cronies care about "looking bad" ? To whom ? That ship has sailed since at least the 90ies.
> Imagine the "enemy" in that sentence was not "Hamas", but "The Jews" - that would be a very antisemitic narrative,
Your substitution turns a true statement into a false statement; this mechanism is at best meaningless. Yes, making false claims about Jews is antisemitic, but that has no bearing on statements that aren't false.
>If you go around accusing Israel of genocide, deliberately omitting the little detail of facing an enemy who does everything they can to get their own people killed to make you look bad
Easy to make that enemy look bad when you are an impoverished country that has no food, no old people (they were all killed) or modern weapons, that enemy is starving you, killing your women and children, bombing schools and hospitals.....and oh yeah that nation has nuclear weapons.
This is answered in many of the past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... and the links they include. If you read some of those and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
The short answer is (1) most, but not all political stories are off topic here, (2) a certain amount of political overlap is inevitable, and (3) we try to moderate this question in a principled way, although consistency is impossible in practice. You'll find many descriptions of the principles we try to follow at the link I just mentioned.
Unfortunately there is a type of person who thinks there should be no places where politics is absent, and these people will endlessly spam non-tech politics articles like this one in the hopes of a few making it to the front page and surviving being flagged.
You'll notice that posts like these don't have actual, logical discussion underneath and in their stead have repetitive slogan comments.
The real question is: why is this on hacker news with 4 digits upvotes and why has Gaza been on Hacker News non-stop while there's been hardly any coverage of the islamist republic of Iran slaughtering tens of thousands of unarmed civilians in a matter of days.
And I already know that although there's been very little coverage so far of what's happened in Iran, where islamists have been executing people inside hospitals, there's going to be non-stop coverage of Iran if the US decides to strike Iran to topple the islamist regime / prevent them from getting the atomic bomb. Then we'll have detective work to find innocents killed and upvoting of stories about how the evil west is committing war crimes on innocent islamists.
But tens of thousands of unarmed civilians --who want sharia law to stop and who are protesting for a regime change-- being executed by an islamist regime?
Very little coverage on HN.
There's an ongoing inquiry led by several members or parliament in the UK about mass rapes that happened on UK soil, complete with a cover-up attempt by the government, involvement of police officers, as much, in some cities, as 30% of all men from one particular community involved, descriptions of killings (according to the testimony of some victims), of victims having their tongue nailed to the table and being ass-raped by several men, etc.
And no coverage on HN.
But the IDF firing for four minutes on the Toyota Hilux'es from Gaza aid workers: more than 1000 upvotes.
> The real question is: why is this on hacker news with 4 digits upvotes and why has Gaza been on Hacker News non-stop while there's been hardly any coverage of the islamist republic of Iran slaughtering tens of thousands of unarmed civilians in a matter of days.
(And this one, at least, has the interesting little bit about echolocation from a cell phone video being used to verify events. I find that neat, technologically.)
For sure there will be coverage if the Epstein class decides to go to war with Iran on behalf of Israel who obviously holds the blackmail on this, surprisingly few mentions on mainstream media about the Mossad honeypot that the Epstein setup was btw.
North Korea has nukes now and the threats to them have surprisingly gone quiet, I wonder why? Trump is instead writing love letters to Kim Jong-un.. Apparently having nukes is quite a good insurance policy.
Read the article. This is an incredible feat of science and technology. The "forensic architecture" done here uses genuinely innovative and groundbreaking technologies and techniques. Even if you somehow have no sympathy for the conflict it is undeniably fascinating work
> Earshot used echolocation to analyze the audio on the recordings in order to arrive at precise estimates of the shooters’ locations. Echolocation is the process of locating the source of a sound based on an analysis of the sound’s echoes and the environment in which the sound travels. The Israeli military destroyed and cleared so many buildings in the Tel Al-Sultan area where the ambush of the aid workers took place that very few structures remained. This destruction actually strengthened Earshot’s ability to determine the positions and movements of Israeli soldiers, based on identifying the surfaces responsible for clearly distinguishable gunshot echoes. Rather than having multiple buildings reflecting the sound waves, there were only a few standing walls and the emergency vehicles themselves.
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not the IDF's fault.
And if it was, they didn't mean it.
And if they did, Gaza deserved it.
Echolocation based on audio from a cell phone video, with the reports echoing off flat walls in the area, establishes 3D troop movement during the massacre, and the eventual close-range executions. Including of the person whose cell phone it was.
Eyewitness accounts may be dismissed for any number of biases by the motivated reasoner, but echoes are echoes.
There are plenty of people on HN who are active in protecting human rights, and this particular incident is a clear example of the amount of work still left to do in the world by those of us who care about each other more than we cling to national identities - especially those national identities with a long track record of human rights violations.
Hacker News is not solely news about hacking. "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."
> The Israeli military was forced to change its story about the ambush several times, following the discovery of the bodies in a mass grave, along with their flattened vehicles, and the emergence of video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers. An internal military inquiry ultimately did not recommend any criminal action against the army units responsible for the incident.
Unfortunately, the takeaway here will be "be better at destroying the evidence". The video is quite damning against their initial claims; it includes an uninterrupted view of their arrival, in marked emergency vehicles with lights on and uniformed personnel, and the gunfire beginning: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
That's literally the opposite of how the media game around this genocide has played out. And Forensic Architecture has proven to be a reliable source thoughout the conflict.
Don't do what? Point out that "TFA' is selectively reporting on an (admittedly undeniably tragic and dystopian, as war inherently is) situation that has been weaponized by powerful, unfathomably wealthy “news” (”real” news can be framed such that it is “propaganda”) organizations?
Analysis of Potential Anti-Israel Bias
Bias in journalism is best assessed through criteria such as language tone, source selection and balance, contextual framing, omissions, and factual selectivity. This article exhibits several hallmarks of anti-Israel bias in its presentation, while reporting on verifiable elements of a tragic incident that has drawn international scrutiny.
Loaded and emotive language: Terms like "massacre," "executed," "execution-style killings," "ambushed," "point-blank range," and "deliberately" dominate descriptions of Israeli actions. Palestinian victims are consistently portrayed as unarmed, clearly identifiable "aid workers" with "emergency lights" and markings visible. Israeli forces are depicted as advancing methodically to kill survivors without provocation. By contrast, the article does not use neutral phrasing such as "incident," "exchange of fire," or "alleged." A quoted Forensic Architecture official explicitly links the event to "genocide," which the piece endorses without qualification.
One-sided sourcing and lack of balance: The core narrative relies on PRCS (a Palestinian organization), two named survivors, and Forensic Architecture/Earshot—entities whose prior work has frequently focused on alleged Israeli violations. A single supportive quote comes from a Center for Constitutional Rights attorney. The Israeli military's response is relegated to a brief paragraph near the end, presented without detailed rebuttal or independent corroboration of its claims (e.g., that the convoy was uncoordinated or posed a perceived threat in an active combat zone). No interviews with IDF personnel, Israeli forensic experts, or neutral third-party analysts appear.
Selective contextual framing and omissions: The article opens by noting Israel's "abandonment" of a January 2025 ceasefire and resumption of "scorched earth bombing," implying unprovoked aggression. It provides no discussion of the broader operational context in Rafah (an area of ongoing military activity post-ceasefire violations by both sides), Hamas's documented history of embedding in civilian and medical infrastructure, or any potential misidentification of vehicles/personnel in pre-dawn conditions. Claims of a "rescue convoy" responding to an airstrike omit whether movements were coordinated with Israeli forces (a point raised in Israeli accounts). Post-incident military engineering (the "Morag Corridor") is framed solely as evidence concealment rather than standard security measures. Autopsy details from PRCS/Guardian sources alleging "intent to kill" are accepted without cross-examination.
Publication context: Drop Site News, founded by journalists with records of critical coverage of Israel and U.S. policy, is rated left-biased by independent evaluators, with a tendency toward one-sided narratives on conflict issues. The timing aligns precisely with the Forensic Architecture/Earshot report release, functioning more as advocacy amplification than detached analysis.
Counterpoints and Broader Context
Independent reporting and Israeli statements acknowledge a serious incident involving the deaths of protected aid personnel, with autopsies indicating close-range upper-body wounds and an internal IDF probe admitting a "professional error" while denying executions. The audio-visual evidence cited (gunshot counts, shooter positioning via echolocation, lack of return fire) appears methodologically rigorous and has been cross-verified in allied outlets. However, Israeli accounts describe an ambush setup in a high-threat environment where the convoy's approach was deemed suspicious, with no coordination notified. The event occurred amid resumed hostilities following ceasefire breakdowns, and Palestinian Civil Defense has been alleged by Israel to have militant ties in other contexts. These elements receive minimal or no engagement in the article, limiting its analytical depth.
Overall Assessment
The article demonstrates clear anti-Israel bias through its adversarial framing, selective emphasis, emotive terminology, and near-exclusive reliance on sources critical of Israel, while marginalizing the Israeli perspective and relevant conflict context. It advances a narrative of deliberate, unprovoked executions as established fact, rather than a contested interpretation of evidence from a chaotic combat zone. That said, the underlying forensic reconstruction raises substantive questions about proportionality and accountability that merit transparent investigation by credible international bodies—not dismissal. A more balanced treatment would integrate diverse viewpoints, test competing hypotheses (e.g., misidentification versus intent), and avoid presuming genocidal motive. Readers seeking a fuller picture should consult primary sources, including the full Earshot/Forensic Architecture report, Israeli military statements, and contemporaneous coverage from multiple outlets.
Full report: https://content.forensic-architecture.org/wp-content/uploads...
Forensic Architecture is a truly remarkable work. If anybody is unfamiliar with Eyal Weizman, I would highly recommend checking out more of his work. Including the 2014 series Rebel Architecture and some of his talks. He recently did a presentation called "Conditions of Life Calculated" at the David Graeber Memorial Lecture at CIIS that I think gives a lot of insight into why the work being done at Forensic Architecture is so remarkable. He also talks about his work with David Wengrow and the Nebelivka Hypothesis based on novel archeology of ancient Ukrainian cities
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfD1y7WZLpM
alternative FE: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=bfD1y7WZLpM
The last time I came across Forensic Architecture was their report on the Beirut Port Explosion, someone posted it here on HN.
Mind blowing analysis.
https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/beirut-port-...
This is very thorough. Thanks for the direct link.
The case seems pretty clear, especially since the soldiers tried to hide all evidence.
> case seems pretty clear, especially since the soldiers tried
Even if the 'soldiers' didn't, it wouldn't have mattered as the governing apparatus usually goes out of its way to protect their own militants.
Ex A:
https://www.counterfire.org/article/cold-blooded-murder-and-...
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I think the only defense here would be if the soldiers came up with some reasonable explanation of why they thought the vehicles were hostile. Its kind of hard to imagine, especially with shooting the follow up vehicles, but motive seems like the only unclear part where there is any potential for a defense.
One part that is really confusing, is if they knowingly intentionally targeted the ambulance because they thought they could get away with it if they destroyed the evidence, why leave witnesses alive? If you assume the motive was an intentional massacare with point blank executions, it doesn't entirely make logical sense to leave witnesses.
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When the first attack on an aid convoy to provoke outrage came out, I saw someone put it best: there is a difference between "war is chaos, and no matter how hard we try, some incidents regrettably occur" and "our rules of engagement are designed in such a manner to make these incidents almost certain." And the IDF... is pretty clearly in the latter category.
> I imagine most of the armchair critics here have never been in a situation where they have to make these sorts of calls. Being in an ambush in a war with an enemy that, let's say, uses "unconventional" tactics (aka war crimes) to try and kill you while vans are approaching you.
Attempting to use this as a defense requires conceding that the default assumption is that someone is a terrorist until proven otherwise, which is something that guarantees horrific civilian casualties. It's not actually requisite that soldiers have this mindset; instilling this requires training, and the fact that it seems to be so pervasive in the IDF is a sign that it's not just a criminal failure of a few soldiers but rather a core part of the IDF strategy that needs to be addressed.
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> Upon reaching the aid workers, the soldiers moved between them and the vehicles and executed some of the aid workers at point blank range, as close as one meter away." -> we know not all the aid workers were killed. I believe two were taken alive.
This is the part that gives me the most pause. The FA report makes it sound like they went on a murder spree for the hell of it and then tried to cover up the evidence (i.e. they knew it was an ambulance and intentionally targeted it). But if that was the case, and they had no qalms about killing people, why would they leave witnesses and then release said witness a month later. If the motive was some ethnic hatred fueled revenge, why leave witnesses?
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> "The emergency lights and markings of the victims’ vehicles would have been clearly visible to the soldiers at the time of the attacks." -> speculative. The soldiers argued they were wearing night vision equipment and did not see either the markings or the emergency lights. This is at least plausible (as someone who has used thermal night vision equipment).
Is it plausible?
There were four ambulances and a fire truck with flashing lights on the roofs and the report says the soldiers had a clear view from the elevated sandbank. Night vision would obscure the markings, but lights still show in both thermal and image-intensified NVG. Even if they weren't sure they were ambulances, they should still be wondering about the emergency lights. And if they weren't sure, did no soldier look even briefly without night vision? This occurred during twilight, about half an hour before sunrise.
If they could see so little that they couldn't recognize 4 ambulances and a fire truck with emergency lights, and the aid workers never fired shot, why did they open fire?
It doesn't explain well why they initially said the vehicles were acting suspiciously by driving with their lights off and only changed their story after video emerged. And it doesn't explain why they shot at the "clearly marked UN vehicle" when it arrived well after sunrise.
You forgot to mention that there were two separate incidents. That's why the thing took two hours. They shoot an ambulance, I suppose you could argue that was a mistake. They check the ambulance (at that moment they had to know that there were not fighters there). Later, when more help vehicles appeared they shoot everybody in them too. That's the five minutes shooting.
You forgot to mention that they destroyed the vehicles and they buried the dead with them in the sand. And that, was not made by the same people that killed the help workers.
You forgot to mention that they lie about what happened.
You forgot to mention that, after the investigation, one of the official was demoted, and that's it.
All this seems to point, not to a mistake, but to a pattern of behavior, in my opinion. Personally, I'm done with the 'mistakes', like blocking baby formula from entering Gaza and all that.
I don't know anything about how things work in situations like this, but logic would lead me to think a convoy of aid workers wouldn't be returning fire so shooting at them with all the shots coming from the IDF side might indicate some sort of mistake quite early in the encounter. The fact they carried on shooting for 5 minutes is either a signal that they knew and just didn't care, or that they're some of the worst trained soldiers imaginable.
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> We know that the soldiers lied about some of the facts and some have been disciplined and removed from command.
Removed from command for killing aid workers point blank? That seems like a light wrap on the wrist, not commensurate with the severity of the deed, no?
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Do you want to comment on the point where the IDF presumably realised what happened and decided to (physically) bury the evidence, and then gaslight the world until video evidence emerged?
I think you're being a bit too forgiving to what's become a clear documented pattern of behaviour during this genocide [1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide
> That the anti-Israelis are going to latch on it as proof that Israel is evil is an unfortunate side effect.
Defenders of Israel always try to put a label on us: anti-Semites, anti-Iaraelis etc. You are trying to make it seem like this was some kind of isolated incident, an unfortunate consequence of the war. It wasn't: Gaza is in ruins, Israel continues ethnic cleansing in West Bank all while gaslighting everyone who opposes it. Israel is evil.
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You keep deleting and entirely rewriting your posts here, so posting something so its not lost (own your opinions and don't be ashamed of them, how else you want to discuss this?) :
> It was not any of these things. It was not an open air prison or a concentration camp. That's the truth. Both these accusations are cheap propaganda that doesn't stand the most cursory fact checking. Look into how many people traveled to and from Gaza a year. Check out the vast tunnel network and rocket arsenal Hamas manged to build. That Hamas preferred to smuggle CNC machines and lathes and explosives from Egypt instead of food for the Gazan population is on them.
> Hamas took over Gaza by force, killing their Palestinian brothers, tossing them from roof tops. Israel just responded to Hamas' war on it. You know, rockets and such. All along Gaza had a border with Egypt which Israel did not control.
> Don't defend Hamas. Just don't do it.
Its entirely possible to despise hamas and wishing them horrible death, while despising what state of israel was and is and will be doing there. Defenders of israel often bring the masacre of 2023 like its good enough excuse to perform another civilian masacre. Heck, you want to drag people who dare to speak out into automatic hamas supporters, thats a bit cheap trick. What about focusing on civilians here, on all sides, like a normal moral human being should do? What did those murdered kids and rest of civilians on both sides did to deserve any of this?
Yes it is a concentration camp, the very definition of it. Maybe you are mixing this with nazi extermination camps, those were a different category - then I suggest some reading on that topic.
Let me ask - how easy it was, even before current war for regular palestinian to lets say move to another part of the world? I don't mean som israeli farmers using/abusing them as extremely cheap labor, I mean normal travel. Stateless people, kept in utter poverty by design, almost malnourished, effectively forbidden to leave what looks like the definition of open prison or what say US did to its japanese population during WWII. Some digged tunnels don't change anything here.
> That the anti-Israelis are going to latch on it as proof that Israel is evil is an unfortunate side effect. There is never a clean war and certainly not the kind of war that has been fought in Gaza.
That and the abundant evidence of genocidal intent in Gaza and the explicit ethnic cleansing of the West Bank with full support of the Israeli society is the reason why it is evil. This incident is one of literal hundreds.
The reason your comments are being flagged is because you are defending the patently indefensible.
Do you currently serve or have you over the last two-and-a-half-years served in the IDF (or one of its supporting directorates) or do you currently work or have you over the last two-and-a-half-years worked in one of the Israeli intelligence agencies?
I ask this because you admit to having used thermal night vision equipment, you know what is being discussed in Hebrew-language Israeli media; and you call your interlocutors armchair critics implying you do more than just sit in an armchair. In the interests of full disclosure -- are you a neutral third-party or do you have skin in the game?
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Nausea inducing attempt at whitewashing.
Soldiers vs aid workers, and you're defending the murderers, and propagating a particular stereotype, thus further hindering your cause.
Can't tell if this is due to a lack of self insight, institutionalised delusion or cold hearted intentional weaponisation in a self declared war.
The team involved in this analysis, Forensic Architecture, have a pretty decent youtube channel showing how they do things: https://www.youtube.com/@forensicarchitecture1967/videos
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can you provide that history? the best I can find is a single story where they incorrectly reported four children as dead, which I can only really find being discussed in reddit comments. surely if they have a 'documented history of being wrong' you're referring to something more material?
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With a specificity of the number of shots and the spatial reconstruction of the scene, there's some impressive uses of tech to bolster reporting:
>A digital reconstruction of the scene shows that the soldiers would have had an uninterrupted view of the arrival of the convoy.
>The reconstruction was jointly achieved with the two survivors of the incident, with an immersive spatial model they could walk through and amend. Together with spatial and audio analysis we established the position of the soldiers on an elevated ground with an unobstructed line of sight to the emergency vehicles.
Forensic Architecture, the people who did the spatial reconstruction, have been around for a while. You can see more examples of their investigations here: https://forensic-architecture.org/
What a depressing portfolio...
Their reconstruction of the Beirut Port explosion was incredible though: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/beirut-port-...
Forensic Architecture are great. I remember their work being very hot in the international art scene around ~2018 (when they were nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize, among others - https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/turner-prize-2...).
Not sure if they're still fêted as artists or have moved away from that label. I still find their approach completely mesmerizing nevertheless.
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> They took a witness…
And the satellite photos showing the scene, and the cell phone video showing the shooting...
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Awesome technicalities aside, it is really hard to watch the non-sensical violence and destructions when nobody is held accountable.
I remember when folks here were shilling the "Israel promises they'd never bomb a hospital" and "Hamas is lying about the death toll" lines.
All the hospitals are now rubble, and the IDF quietly let it slip that the death toll is legit recently. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-01-29/ty-article/.p...
There's damning video of this specific incident, recovered from the dead. I suspect subsequent massacres made a policy of finding and destroying all the phones. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
> All the hospitals are now rubble
Hospitals may have been used for retaliation [0], but it is unclear how many & in what capacity (according to accepted conventions, using a hospital to treat wounded combatants wouldn't make it a valid military target, for example; but hiding weapons or personnel would).
[0] One such recent report: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Israel did not have a habit of drastically overstating their case and quietly walking it back after they end up killing more journalists and toddlers than active combatants in hospital bombings. Also if reports didn't deliberately conflate 'armed man' with 'Hamas militant' and euphemize about the 'Hamas-run Interior Ministry' like that one does.
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Not sure I understand the mass downvotes on this one. I didn't take it as endorsing the action but summarizing the rationale.
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> according to accepted conventions
Who accepted those? And did they have a right to do so on behalf of _all_ of humanity?
The conventions are a guideline. To use them as a blanket moral justification for your actions after the fact is extremely disingenuous.
Two things are valid at once:
- Hamas is a terrorist organization that planned and executed a mass terror campaign, fully knowing and hoping for the reaction. And boasting about it continuously and repeatedly.
- Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.
Israel's response was very similar to the US's response to 9/11. 3,000 Americans were killed by terrorists (a smaller percentage of the population than Israelis killed on 10/7) and as a response the US started two wars killing at least 100 times as many Afghans and Iraqis (there are lots of debates about the total casualties there too just like Gaza). This is not a defense of Israel, just a fact that seemingly is never part of the conversation that I think can help people better understand why this is happening.
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You forgot eighty years of occupation, cultural , economical and ethnical cleansing of the local indigenous people called Palestinians with help of US and Western countries mainly.
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You can call hamas whatever you'd like, but it's certainly not hamas doing most of the terrorizing in palestine....
I am entirely behind this take.
> and it quickly grew beyond any reason
Why did it quickly grow?
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Hamas is a terror organisation funded, and quite possibly created, by far-right nationalist elements in the Israeli government to weaken the Palestinian authority and create a pretext for the occupation of Gaza.
Netanyahu is on the record funnelling money through Qatar. He said it was for "humanitarian aid" - which would be more credible if it wasn't such an extraordinary and unusual outbreak of concern for Palestinian wellbeing.
The occupation is straight out genocide, labelled as such by many Israeli scholars, as well as most of Rest of World.
This level of barbarism and entitlement has no place on a civilised planet.
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You didn't actually address the actual point. Israel and it's defenders have been lying about the death toll this entire time and Hamas was not.
> - Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.
This is also an extreme understatement. It's literally a genocide.
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> and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.
you still refuse to call it a crime against humanity? shame on you.
There is an alternate World Peace Force that just got started recently because I believe, as regimes change, the UN will audit what happened. The issue is there will now be another international body that will argue the other way. It’s not exactly 3d chess, but, it is chess. Purchase of US TikTok (chess moves).
Never heard (and couldn't find anything) about it. That "Board of Peace" you're most likely referring to is nothing more than your usual Trump grift - each country willing to join has to pay 1 billion $, and there have been 25 countries declaring their intent to join.
Make up the math yourself, even if there will be legitimate expenses for PMCs, reconstruction and god knows what else, even skimming off 5% of that sum will still be a lot of money for Trump. And it would not be the first time he launches a multi-billion grift / money laundering scheme, remember $TRUMP and $MELANIA and I've probably forgotten about the other coins?
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It's important to note that the official death toll, acknowledged by the IDF, are of those whose bodies have been recovered.
Nor has the genocide stopped.
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Don’t forget the “all they have to do is return the hostages” line
There was a second part to that which is "and surrender".
But there's definitely been a large reduction in violence since the hostages were returned. Most or all of it in response to violations of the ceasefire by Hamas.
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> Don’t forget the “all they have to do is return the hostages” line
So there's zero link whatsoever between Hamas executing 1200 civilians on Oct 7th, taking 200 hostages, and the following war (and war crimes) of Israel?
Israel literally unilaterally began a war and committed war crimes without any act of aggression?
And from the moment 200 hostages had been taken, many of whom died in captivity, everything was carved in stone and no matter what Hamas did, Israel was going anyway to war and to commit war crimes?
Or did something happen on Oct 7th that triggered all this?
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> Don’t forget the “all they have to do is return the hostages” line
Did the ceasefire not coincide with the return of the hostages? What am I missing?
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I don't know why you're using the past tense here, I was still trying to talk some sense into these people barely two days ago. It's hopeless at this point.
> I was still trying to talk some sense into these people barely two days ago. It's hopeless at this point.
I don't think "sense" is the issue.
1) Are you sure you were talking to actual people and not fake personas or even bots?
2) Keep in mind that there is A LOT of money to be made working for Israeli PR. Some people will take that money regardless of what they know is the actual truth. Some examples:
- Certain social media influencers being paid up to $7000 per post [1]
- Israel boosts propaganda funding by $150m to sway global opinion against genocide [2] [3]
- "[...] a firm called Bridges Partners LLC has been hired to manage an influencer network under a project code-named the “Esther Project.” " [4]
[1] https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-influencers-netanya...
[2] https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/isr...
[3] https://jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com/israel-has-spent-m...
[4] https://www.jta.org/2025/09/30/united-states/israels-secret-...
If you have 3 hours, there's a documentary you can watch, about a man who was sanctioned by the government to kill a lot of "communists" in 1960's Indonesia: The Act of Killing (available at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q ).
It's sort of understandable why the defenders of the genocide have to keep defending it. Stopping doing so today would mean admitting that until yesterday you've been defending utter inhumanity.
A review:
> Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a challenging documentary. It is not only difficult to watch, but it also probes into one of the most grotesque aspects of human nature: the capacity for self-delusion in the face of horrific atrocities. This isn’t a film about history, facts, or statistics; it’s about the memories of the men who killed, the stories they tell themselves, and how they continue to live with the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. The film’s power lies in its ability to take the viewer beyond a surface-level understanding of evil and into the psychological abyss of those who have committed atrocities—and seemingly moved on with their lives.
From: https://docthisway.com/2024/09/23/the-act-of-killing-review/
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You saw pictures of a hospital.
This must be the definition of pedantry. The point is *Israel deliberately destroyed an unconscionable number of hospitals, killing enormous amounts of real-life civilian people, actual humans like you and I. People with daughters, husbands, friends, people who were just as valuable as anyone else.
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> All the hospitals are rubble?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_d...
"By February 2024, it was reported that "every hospital in Gaza is either damaged, destroyed, or out of service due to lack of fuel.""
> And it's irrelevant anyway as hospitals lose their protected status when used for military purposes.
A lie.
https://www.icrc.org/en/document/protection-hospitals-during...
"Even then, humanitarian considerations relating to the welfare of the wounded and sick being cared for in the facility may not be disregarded. They must be spared and, as far as possible, active measures for their safety taken."
"Notably, an attacking party remains bound by the principle of proportionality. The military advantage likely to be gained from attacking medical establishments or units that have lost their protected status should be carefully weighed against the humanitarian consequences likely to result from the damage or destruction caused to those facilities: such an attack may have significant incidental second- and third-order effects on the delivery of health care in the short, middle and long-term."
> All the Geneva protections apply only to truly civilian things, not to things pretending to be civilian.
This is an outright lie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions
"The First Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded field soldiers, the Second Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded sailors, the Third Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of prisoners of war, and the Fourth Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of civilians during armed conflict"
> Your video is paywalled but also irrelevant as it shows emergency symbols
That is precisely why it is relevant. Israel's initial claim was that they didn't have any.
From the article we're discussing:
"After footage from Radwan’s phone was first published by the New York Times a few days later, the Israeli military backtracked on its claims that the vehicles did not have emergency signals on when Israeli troops opened fire, saying the statement was inaccurate."
"The Israeli military then announced on April 20 that an internal inquiry into the incident had found the killings were caused by “several professional failures, breaches of orders, and a failure to fully report the incident.”"
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In general Muslims are not out to exterminate Jews. Jews are "people of the book". They are followers of Moses who is one of the most revered prophets in Islam. Jews are brothers and sisters and it is even permitted to marry them.
The issue is Israel state is far removed from the teachings of Moses and out to exterminate Muslims in the middle east. So naturally you can expect violent resistance.
> I’m not sure why the Palestinians…
> That’s Hezbollah, Hamas…
Sleight of hand happening here.
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> I’m not sure why the Palestinians and allies are complaining. Their stated aim is the genocide of Jews and the destruction of Israel. That’s Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, Yemen. And they’ve tried but are too incompetent to succeed.
It's not like the other side is peaceful and wants to make love and fight war. Israel has been violently kicking out Palestinians from their lands for the past 70-80 years. Before that, among 'Palestinians' there were Muslims, Jews, Christians and other religions coexisting just fine. The ambition to create an ethnic state of Jews only gave rise to misery for everyone and only grew the the intrareligious hate. They could have taken a different path and give us all, the rest of the world a break.
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The old, they had it coming defence of genocide.
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> Haaretz is not an official Israeli newspaper, certainly not an IDF one.
No such claim was made.
Other papers back up the statement. https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-kill...
> Deliberately hiding in buildings and institutions that are supposed to be strictly civilian.
Yes, this is not allowed.
The rules of law still say you can’t do whatever you like as a result.
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> There was a seperate hospital that the IDF did bomb…
There was more than "a" hospital. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_d...
"By February 2024, it was reported that "every hospital in Gaza is either damaged, destroyed, or out of service due to lack of fuel.""
Are the satellites lying, too? https://www.nbcnews.com/world/gaza/satellite-images-destruct...
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Yes. You can't blow up entire hospitals and kill patients just because someone's storing stuff in the basement.
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You're absolutely right, only 95% of health services were crippled. Thanks, that changes the meaning of GP entirely.
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> So "all hospitals are now rubble" is a incorrect
Sorry, you're right. Some have partially resumed operations with the (sorta) ceasefire. My bad.
You should try to find a spelling or grammar error in his post, too.
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It should be reminding you of something which happened a few decades earlier and was much, much worse than Serbia.
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If Serbs wanted their own ethnostate they should have spent the last century subverting the structures of power and media of the West. They didn't do that and the civilians of Beograd paid the price.
Serbia wasn’t on a good terms with Big Genocide lobby
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Hamas has weaponized every hospital in Gaza. By contrast, Israel has not dropped an aerial bomb on any hospital building in Gaza.
What has happened is Israel has attacked hospitals with Hamas presence using ground forces, and they have dropped bombs on hospital grounds, but not in hospitals themselves.
> By contrast, Israel has not dropped an aerial bomb on any hospital building in Gaza.
An oddly specific claim. Hamas hasn't killed any Israeli with a turtle, either.
I'm not sure why destroying hospitals with tanks, missiles, and sappers is better than "aerial bombs". Could you elaborate?
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Hamas didn't "weaponize every hospital in Gaza."
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Israel killed UK army veterans, it was a targeted operation and a precision strike to send a message.
It was covered by UK media for a short period and they would gloss over the veterans and focus more broadly on WCK, there is lots of examples of UK media weird coverage like this which no doubt was intentional. It was also barely spoken about by UK politicians
RIP John Chapman, James Henderson, and James Kirby.
Accountability has gone out of the window a long time. The only way it will come back is when the people fight back.
Many of us are waiting for the people in the US to start taking their responsibility seriously.
By buying US products, using US-based media, and adopting US narratives? That's a part of the problem. This world is lacking multilateralism.
> The Israeli soldiers remained on the sandbank while firing continuously at the aid workers for four minutes.
Damn…
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>Israeli soldiers fired over 900 bullets at the aid workers
That is a LOT of shooting.
A normal mag holds 30 rounds, that's 30 full magazines worth of bullets they dumped into these people.
They were really trying to make sure there were no survivors.
Shot, execution-style, then dumped in a mass grave. The ambulances were then buried to try and hide evidence of the attack.
What is the appropriate term to describe something that would do such a thing to a human being?
What should be done with it?
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In case you wished to support legal efforts against Israeli soldiers accused of war crimes. https://www.hindrajabfoundation.org/donate
What can we individually do to help the people in Gaza, but even more broadly with human rights issues. Basically, to whom give our money to?
https://gaza-verified.org/
Any risk of being accused of funding terrorism by the US if I donate there?
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The downtrodden have become the oppressor.
I think about this a lot re: Israel. I had a conversation once with an Israeli where he was convinced "everyone is racist," but we're all too woke to admit it or something, or have some belief that racism is wrong but work to overcome this inherent thing.
His arguments were all very zero sum, "if we didn't do it to them they'd do it to us," and from conversations with friends I'm thinking that what's happening here is the Israeli media apparatus focuses heavily on creating an "us vs them" mentality for diaspora Jewish people, which has now backfired to create a whole lot of Islamophobic and racist people.
It's interesting because one may think that people with a historical trauma of one of the worst things ever carried out in human history would be the least likely to do something like that and the most likely to see the writing on the wall if something like that was about to happen again, but sadly that was too optimistic: the opposite happened.
People with historical trauma are far more likely to inflict further wrongs than people without historical trauma. This is the case for individual trauma too. It has always been this way.
> "if we didn't do it to them they'd do it to us,"
And he didn’t think that Hamas could use the same lame excuse for their terror?
As is often the case.
I've never seen a topic I couldn't upvote before?
I can upvote just fine. Perhaps you’ve already upvoted it, so the (already used) upvote button is now missing?
Nope, unvote is missing as well.
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nope. I cant upvote it either. @dang
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Has anyone thought much about the impact of living in a group with a strong shared mythology? That is very rare among modern people, to the extent that we may have a hard time relating to it or reasoning about the impact it has on people’s moral sentiments and behaviors. Or at least it’s hard to see the one we do live in in a “this is water” kind of way, and we may have a hard time reasoning about the differences that different “waters” produce.
Like if you grow up living inside the Star Wars mythology and suddenly you get a chance to fight The Empire, do you do it? Do you really care if people outside the Shared Mythos Group (TM) disagree with you doing it?
(Note that I’m not saying anyone in this framing is “The Empire”, I’m just using the Star Wars mythology as a familiar example of a mythic framing)
What is the HN community doing to use tech to combat terrorism and defend civilian security and freedom?
Well, you could join Palantir and fight terrorism: https://www.palantir.com/careers/
Well, you could join Palantir and f̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶t̶e̶r̶r̶o̶r̶i̶s̶m̶ help develop Israel's terrorism in Gaza.
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not the IDF's fault.
And if it was, they didn't mean it.
And if they did, Gaza deserved it.
and if you don't agree, you're antisemitic
I actually got accused of being racist for saying that anti-zionism and anti-semitism are not the same thing.
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I don’t think we can truly compare the missile attacks of Hamas vs the bombing campaigns of Israel
Look at any photo of any neighborhood in Israel, is there anywhere that remotely looks similar to the pile of rocks that Gaza looks like now?
Universities, hospitals, so much infrastructure, all gone. So much of Gaza is now people living in tents. Israel destroyed so much civilian infrastructure that existed.
How’s that similar to you?
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> That didn't happen.
Hamas brags even about their failed attacks.
Your comparison fails at the first step.
> And if it was, we didn't mean it.
And this one! How often does Hamas pull the "we didn't mean it!" card for their attacks on Israel? Have they ever? Of course they mean it, they're a bunch of assholes.
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If so many comments are going to be flagged, why even bother having a comment section?
The mods need an excuse to shut this one down.
Because Attent-fueled truth-deniers might get downvoted or flagged by reasonable people.
The place where humanity dies. Only a terrorist organization does this.
Created a new account just to comment on this biased report. Either you a bot or you can't read
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/09/the-gaza-famil...
Read that and tell me that Israel is acting proportionally...
If video evidence indicates IDF personnel committing these crimes also happen to be US citizens I wonder if those people could face criminal prosecution in the US. As an American I wouldn't want to live next to or do business with a serial murderer. I certainly wouldn't want them coaching my kids sports or other community involvement.
> If video evidence indicates IDF personnel committing these crimes also happen to be US citizens I wonder if those people could face criminal prosecution in the US.
I think it’s become pretty apparent that they would not face any repercussions and might even be rewarded.
Israel doesn’t extradite to the US. Hence why so many pedos escape to there
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They certainly could be prosecuted; see https://www.cair.com/press_releases/cair-chicago-urges-doj-t....
But at this point the DoJ acts more like Trump's personal law firm.
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It just shows how degenerate the indoctrination really is, its just out in the open now.
Acting proportionally would make no sense though.
You still have people defending the occupation forces even when the soldiers themselves are bragging no social media about killing kids, and how they wished they killed more.
Exceptional report. Surprised to see that much of a confusion on HN about why it is there. MH17 posts with forensics did not seem to be offtopic when they were posted. This fits.
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I like Forensic Architecture’s work in general and I think this report is valuable as a micro-level reconstruction of a specific incident. That said, I think a lot of the HN discussion is treating it as if it captures the broader complexity of the conflict and I’m not sure thats what it can realistically do, at most, it leaves a lot of room for speculations - speculations which are fed by already existing bias of the reader (or so I see in the comments).
A few gaps that matter if we’re trying to reason beyond the single event:
Framing / conclusion baked in: terms like “executions” and “concealment” may ultimately be correct, but they’re also strong legal/moral claims that can bias interpretation unless the alternative hypotheses are seriously stress-tested. Its a dead giveaway of the writers bias. From this point on it looks like most biased readers do not try to critically tackle the reports claims.
Limited “steelman” of operational context - without full access to military comms, ISR feeds, ROE, intel context, and command decisions in real time, it’s hard to evaluate what soldiers believed they were responding to (even if they were wrong, negligent, or violating orders). Its a known practice that Hamas militants travel undercover using civilian/emergency vehicles - I think its really pathetic this report does not analyze nor even addresses this claim. This is not being objective, and most of you guys here are too critical-thinking to miss this one out (or is it a bot swamp here? i really dont know).
Evidence asymmetry - open-source reconstructions can be rigorous, but they inherently rely on what’s available (videos/audio/witness accounts). That’s different from having the complete internal dataset that would settle key disputes. I know this is the best effort available, but still, it leaves a lot of room for speculation. My expectations of FA were higher than that.
Conflation risk - a brutal case study can be an important data point, but it’s not automatically a comprehensive model of the war or the incentives/constraints on both sides.
“Here’s a detailed claim about what happened at Tel al-Sultan on that night.” would be a correct title for this report.
Curious what you think: what specific pieces of primary data would most change your confidence/speculations here? (e.g., full comms logs, drone video, ROE brief for that unit, chain-of-command timeline, etc.)
Anyone else notice the "lorem ipsum" on page 13?
If this was happening against the west, people would care a lot more. Unfortunately, nothing seems to be happening to Israel.
> If this was happening against the west, people would care a lot more
It’s literally happening in Ukraine and, to a lesser scale but precisely the same in type, Minneapolis. On the other hand, there are conflicts across Africa and Asia which are not receiving half the attention.
> On the other hand, there are conflicts across Africa and Asia which are not receiving half the attention.
Because the West doesn't fund and shield the perpetrators unlike Israel.
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> It’s literally happening in Ukraine
Ukraine isn't part of the West.
> to a lesser scale but precisely the same in type, Minneapolis
What was happening in Minneapolis is not only much smaller in scale than what's happening in Palestine, it's also just a completely different thing.
I doubt it is helpful to compare these conflicts because they all have an entirely different source of conflict.
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Imagine being one of those soldiers. How could you live with yourself? How could you look anyone in the eye, your comrades, your family?
This soldier couldn't
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/21/middleeast/gaza-war-israe...
You have to read pretty far into this very sympathetic piece to discover he was running over hundreds of living people with a bullzdozer:
> In a testimony to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in June, Zaken said that on many occasions, soldiers had to “run over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds.”
> “Everything squirts out,” he added.
According to reports from locals in Asia and Europe, they are traveling and enjoying life to the fullest while harassing local communities during those trips.
I'm surprised such news and we have to read it from "dropsitenews.com"
Iranian here! I wish freedom for the people of Gaza and an end to their suffering and oppression. Down with all the dictators and oppressors. Be it IRGC or IDF.
Hello friend.
From Palestine I want to send you all the best wishes for freedom in Iran. It's time.
And to my Jewish sisters and brothers and siblings in general I want to send a wish for for freedom and end of this stupid hatred..
There is not actually a good reason for all this violence.
Thank you for this sane comment.
As someone raised as a Jew in America, this is beautifully said. Thank you.
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"Stop hitting yourself", good old bully logic
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I would like to know: is there even a single person here, who actually changed his opinion regarding this whole matter upon seeing this report? Not confirmed anything, but actually was forced to re-evaluate his opinion. Like, previously you thought that IDF are good guys, and all Israel does is justified self-defense measures, and now you see this as genocide of Palestinians?
Of course, I assume, the answer is — no one. (And I'm hoping somebody will tell me I'm wrong.) So, what's the point? Is somebody gonna be held accountable? Will Israel be treated differently as a country from now on? If no, what's the point?
Seems like you’re asking “what’s the point of investigating crimes against humanity?”
And if that’s a question you have to ask, then clearly something is very wrong.
Seems like a good question to ask imo. The lack of accountability of crimes against humanity and children and the general apathy and shrug worthy reaction to most people to these issues especially on this site seems relevant commentary.
Journalism isn't valued by how many opinions have changed, it is there to report on stories that are or have happened. You ask for consequences in your comment but how can there be consequences if there are no reports? Absolutely baffling take.
This report is too biased for a critical thinker to change their mind.
This report presents sober technical analysis combined with witness testimony, creating an extremely concincing whole. It's not biased in any direction except the truth.
Presenting evidence has a point besides getting people to change their opinion on matters.
However, peoples' opinions often change, and when that happens, it has to happen somewhere.
Mine wasn't on reading this article, but I believe when someone on HN shared the wikipedia article on journalist deaths in Gaza, maybe around January or February 2024
This is a kind of inverted-retrograde of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.
Gell-Mann: 1) disbelieve a bogus story, then 2) turn the page and blithely believe the next story
You: 1) believe bona fide investigative journalism, then 0) ask what the point of journalism even is.
I can tell you that the genocide and the Epstein files have made me to completely recalibrate my world view in regards to few countries. Absolutely. I bet many normies are going through these thoughts too in their heads now.
There's plenty of live footage of IDF forces targeting international aid workers and journalists.
"fun" fact: more journalists died in the Gaza than in every conflict since ww2 combined.
And WW2 only has more journalist deaths because some number of the genocide casualties had been journalists before the Holocaust.
Being a journalist typically provides you some protection in times of war, but for journalists who are part of a group suffering genocide, it's a liability.
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The slaughter of journalists is documented throughout modern history - by the very people those journalists worked for.
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We have the loosest definition of "journalist" in history. Most of the journalists on the list worked for nobody in particular or for Hamas, Iran, the Palestinian Authority, or some other group like Hezbollah. By these standards, William Joyce would be a journalist.
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From where I sit nobody is questioning that the Israelis are supposed to be the good guys in this story. But the stories coming from the region are horrific! Is it true that it is the official policy of the IDF to shoot to kill children who throw stones at them?
Plus because Israel is making serious efforts to choke off all information from the region, I understand that it takes some time before a sober accounting of an incident like this reaches the outside world. To avoid the charged rhetoric I have waited. Yet the point blank executions of humanitarian workers is still shocking to me. Such reckless hate, it must destroy a person.
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I hear about IDF war crimes all the time, but this level of lying and cover-up is something new and causing me some serious cognitive dissonance right now.
On the tech side I’m wondering if any LLMs were used for the investigation, they don't seem to mention any by name at least.
Unfortunately this article and the conversation here is taken in the context of the entirety of Israel is bad, the whole military war against Hamas and its patrons was bad, and that there is a genocide in Gaza. It leaves little room to have meaningful conversations about difficult conditions in the war and whether soldiers acted incorrectly or not and if they should be tried or not with regards to this single incident.
How does the fact that Israel is committing a genocide prevent anyone from discussing prosecuting the soldiers?
That makes no sense.
Mods, can you look at this comment and maybe unflag it? It has some snarky language ("armchair critics") but it doesn't seem to contain anything flaggable and it provides important context, namely what I take to be the perspective from the pro-Israeli side. I for one am very curious to know what that this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47147359
My stance is Mossad reading:
- Likud is an evil political party
- Natanyahu is a wanted war criminal
- IDF committed many atrocities
- Hamas was insane to think that Bibi would NOT BOMB the Gaza in retaliation.
- Hamas was the first to cast the stone.
- Israel ALWAYS gonna retaliate with non proportional force when it comes to security of its citizens.
> Hamas was the first to cast the stone.
Palestine is a country under a brutal military occupation and progressive illegal colonisation that has been going on for 80 years. Before October 7, Israel had already killed many, many more civilians in Gaza than Hamas did in Israel with that attack.
> Palestine is a country under a brutal military occupation and progressive illegal colonisation that has been going on for 80 years.
If Mexico had started attacking the US across the border, what would the US do? I'm curious to hear what you think a country should do in this circumstance.
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> Israel had already killed many, many more civilians in Gaza than Hamas did in Israel with that attack.
And how does it justify Hamas killing unarmed civilians? How does it justify Hamas lobbing grenades at Nepali students?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0kllzqk1vo
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When you know what father of Israel did during WW2 to fund the current Israel.
Uhg, too bad its not taught in school coz history is written by winners and you have to search for it yourself.
Yes Israel commits an ongoing genocide.
And I look at this only by lens of history.
> Hamas was insane to think that Bibi would NOT BOMB the Gaza in retaliation.
My theory is that they knew this would happen and they did it because they knew it would garner support (which it did) and they also knew they had nothing to lose because this is what would have happened in the long-term anyway. They chose between a quick death and a slow death. Unfortunately, everyone else who originally chose them to protect them didn't get to choose. I doubt most would have voted for this if they had that choice.
Let's also not forget that Hamas still exists and is regaining numbers and territory: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98g1klxnpxo
You can't just stamp out a guerilla resistance the way Israel have tried to do. I suspect Hamas reckoned that a well-timed short term sacrifice would turn global opinion against Israel.
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Most people in Gaza now aren't old enough to have voted for Hamas. Median age is estimated to be under 20.
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> They chose between a quick death and a slow death.
It continues to be strange to me that "not choosing death" was apparently never an option.
>My theory is that they knew this would happen and they did it because they knew it would garner support (which it did) and they also knew they had nothing to lose because this is what would have happened in the long-term anyway. They chose between a quick death and a slow death. Unfortunately, everyone else who originally chose them to protect them didn't get to choose. I doubt most would have voted for this if they had that choice.
Maybe. I actually think they didnt expect to be so successful also.
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I also almost believe that top echelons of Israeli intelligence knew about the upcoming attack, but they didn't expect THAT many fatalities and that Hamas were going to take hostages alive.
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> Hamas was the first to cast the stone.
That is ignoring many decades of history.
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> Israel ALWAYS gonna retaliate with non proportional force when it comes to security of its citizens.
This is the logic of conflicts in the middle east and many or probably most parts of the world. If you don't retaliate hard and defend yourself thoroughly, it is seen as weakness. Not much more sophisticated than how bullying works.
Sounds as if you're defending genocide style killing civilians.
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Reminds me of Tiananmen square in regard to how stubbornly westerners insist that NOTHING happened in Gaza before 7/23
The point isn't that nothing happened, it is that nothing _that justifies_ the attack happened.
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- Hamas is well-funded by Israel (to false flag?).
It's not a secret. It started in the 80s and lasted until they won the election in 2005. It's not a conspiracy theory, this is History. Official History everyone one agrees on, even israel and Hamas themselves.
> Hamas was the first to cast the stone.
HAMAS is an entity formed by refugees having fled the nakba and been stored on top of each other in an open air prison.
Israel is a spying and killing machine. At this point it feels like they serve no other purpose.
People are tired of the endless violations to every single right a human has.
This is reductive. All kinds of other countries do the same and the purpose is crystal clear. It isnt spying and killing without purpose.
I dont like it either and i didnt like back when it wasnt trendy to not like it. But it isnt pointless. They know what they are about.
The arab states offered a peace plan in 2002 that would include full recognition in exchange of an end of the occupation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Peace_Initiative
At some point it becomes obvious that Israel (under the current government and political climate) doesn't want peace.
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In the last 3 years, many users on HN have justified Genocide constantly and openly while downvoting any dissenting opinion trying to speak up against this genocide.
And all of them, without fail, when convenient, without consequence, will lie and act like they were against it. Once the genocidaires have built waterfront property upon the fresh tiny bones once the Board of Holocaust Profiteering is done with its demonic mandate.
The entirety of the upper echelons of the tech industry, now in bed with the death industry, is that one swimming pool scene from "The Zone of Interest". Shame on all of you. And shame on the rest of us.
We have failed as a peoples in history.
Of course, the Epsteinists have woken up and are now in a downvote spree.
Disgusted by this, I hope that the good people of Israel realize what their hideous regime is doing and stop it. I know for sure that
The problem is majority of Israeli citizens think the government isn't doing enough.
Cue the citizens that protested to stop the aid trucks from going into Gaza. The citizens that protested because the Israeli military arrested (after a lot of international pressure) soldiers that were caught raping Palestinian prisoners. They were protesting for the right of soldiers to continue to rape.
> The citizens that protested because the Israeli military arrested (after a lot of international pressure) soldiers that were caught raping Palestinian prisoners.
The people you're talking about are Israel's far-right. I don't think you can index from them onto the median Israeli's political views anymore than you could reasonably index from a member of Hamas's armed wing onto the median Palestinian.
(A recurring theme in both I/P and MENA conflicts more generally is that political minorities - WB settlers in Israel, for example, manage to wield disproportionate power and induce chaos and strife across the region.)
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Only 5% of Israelis believe that IDF used too much violence in Gaza..
That's surprising low given 21% of the population are Israeli Arabs.
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Damn, the IDF got this guy mid-sentence...
WHAT DOES HE KNOW FOR SURE???
> I hope that the good people of Israel realize what their hideous regime is doing and stop it.
There’s a small but courageous peace movement in Israel. They don’t have the kind of sway it would take to stop anything.
The good people of israel? You mean the citizen army that carried out the genocide? I am sure they really hate their government but probably because they think its not doing enough.
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Why was this flagged? Automatically / without review? This is a novel tech story, albeit one without a lot of technical detail.
https://www.earshot.ngo/what-we-do/audio-ballistics
https://forensic-architecture.org/
https://content.forensic-architecture.org/wp-content/uploads...
> Earshot used echolocation to analyze the audio on the recordings in order to arrive at precise estimates of the shooters’ locations. Echolocation is the process of locating the source of a sound based on an analysis of the sound’s echoes and the environment in which the sound travels. The Israeli military destroyed and cleared so many buildings in the Tel Al-Sultan area where the ambush of the aid workers took place that very few structures remained. This destruction actually strengthened Earshot’s ability to determine the positions and movements of Israeli soldiers, based on identifying the surfaces responsible for clearly distinguishable gunshot echoes. Rather than having multiple buildings reflecting the sound waves, there were only a few standing walls and the emergency vehicles themselves.
> “Earshot forensically analyzed over 900 gunshots fired at aid workers. It took one whole year of careful listening to reconstruct an auditory picture of what happened that dark night,” Lawrence Abu Hamdan, the director of Earshot, told Drop Site.
I'm not sure how much this was actually necessary to the eventual verdict if this is ever adjudicated, though, if "hiding the evidence" is a factor:
> Following the ambush, Israeli forces crushed all eight vehicles using heavy machinery and attempted to bury them under the sand.
> The body of Anwar al-Attar was found near the ambush site on March 27, and the bodies of the other 14 aid workers, all wearing identifying uniforms or volunteer vests of their respective organizations, were found in a mass grave near the site on March 30.
But the understanding that they were advanced upon in a walking wave of fire, and then the survivors were executed one by one at close range, may help.
Any posts linked to the IDF committing crimes are automatically flagged on this site (and others). Many bots are at play here.
Its not automatic due to bot activity. It is from people actively suppressing stories that don't want other people to see.
This is discernible by watching how long it takes stories like these to reach a flagged state on the new submissions page. It is further evident by watching which comments within those submissions get flagged based upon their upvotes and visibility.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443
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I didn’t flag. But the top comments are nothing to do with the tech, and aren’t dissimilar from any Gaza War commentary online.
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Comparing to their own rituals and practices around corpses it really goes to show just how thoroughly they have dehumanized the Palestinian people.
Israel long since stopped using smart bombs because a)they were too expensive and b)they didn't really give a shit who died in them executing someone a black-box AI decided was a terrorist (an AI they know is wildly inaccurate.) But even the smart bombs - they didn't care if they wiped out an entire family just to kill one person.
They even have snipers focusing on children. Doctors from international aid organizations working in the hospitals noticed that they were seeing a large number of children were showing up with few injuries/wounds except nearly identical head/chest wounds, and that not many adults were coming in with such injuries.
Targeting and prioritizing killing children has only one purpose: extermination.
I reached this post via https://github.com/vitoplantamura/HackerNewsRemovals
I recommend any hackernews users to check that site frequently, plenty of interesting posts on hackernews that get flagged and hidden daily.
You can just click on your username in the upper right and change "showdead" from "no" to "yes".
ok I just found out about /active a few weeks ago and now this? stop humiliating me please
They also appear on https://hn.algolia.com/
In https://hckrnews.com these flagged items appear listed. With https://hckrnews.com as my entry into HN I don't see the need for HackerNewsRemovals other than curiosity to see what is removed.
Mike Huckabee said yesterday that all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates should be taken by Israel. That would involve a cleansing of hundreds of millions of people.
Mike Huckabee is a clown who was more or less strategically plonked into Israel to feed soothing quotes to the settler minority. I think it'd be an error to assume that his particularly evil flavor of Christian eschatology reflects the political or military policies of Israel (which is saying a lot, since Israel's military policy is very clearly good at producing war crimes).
Hmm well I don't think it'd be an error to assume that his particularly evil flavor of Christian eschatology reflects the political or military policies of Israel.
Huckabee is a Christian Zionist.
I'm sure he sees the death and displacement of millions as a small price to pay to bring about the Rapture in his lifetime.
This is commonly misconstrued as christianity, but in christian tradition it would bring about the coming of the antichrist, massive persecutions globally, and armageddon.
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Huckabee is some official spokesperson of the Israeli government? Or holds some other role in it?
He's the US Ambassador to Israel.
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Keep in mind that these powerful men believe that Jewish people coming back to Israel is the first step of the Apocalypse, and the return of Christ. It is a death cult quite literally trying to bring about the end of the world, and they're ruling the world. Also, they are insanely antisemitic and believe most Jews will go to hell.
https://religiondispatches.org/2025/12/04/mike-huckabee-trie...
> Also, they are insanely antisemitic and believe most Jews will go to hell.
A good chunk of them are insanely pro-semitic as well, as they adopt the dual covenant belief that Jews will actually also go to heaven as well as Christians. I've actually never met anyone that adhered to the pro-zionist dispensationalist view that fully thought out the implied consequences, then proceeded to harbor a personal hatred of Jews. The vast majority of them love all things Jewish and hold them in high regard.
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If they're not seeking to take it, then why are Zionist settlers currently crossing into Syria and taking it?
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> He immediately qualified it
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Schrodingers...
> He immediately qualified it
Did he qualify it by indicating his claim is based on centuries old religious documents that are not agreed to by any majority of the Earth's population?
I just wanna say it's nice to see more people finally waking up and smelling the ashes. I can only hope in the future this genocide will be studied to better understand the main points of failure to not repeat such a widely event covered event.
The problem is that both sides lie flagrantly with such frequency that very few claims about the war can be taken at face value.
On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket, with video from multiple angles of the failure, that it hit an empty parking lot in front of the hospital and only blew out the windows and burnt a few cars, and that no more than a handful of people had been killed.
And also the repeated claims that Israel were lying about the tunnels under Gaza Hospitals, and make videos of one such strike (a bunker buster penetrating the parking lot just outside the entrance) go viral, only for Hamas to later announce that one of the replacement leaders for Sinwar had been killed in that strike, and for excavation to find the bunkers / tunnel network underneath that very hospital.
As well as, earlier in the war, a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza.
None of that justifies genuine instances of war crimes and atrocities that Israel may have committed, but there's a reason why people tune out some of the extreme claims that fly around.
But not the video in the OP which demonstrates that the IDF were, in fact firing on aid workers and refugees as they had been accused of, and certainly not the hours of footage of the IDF brazenly taking human shields over the years while insisting they didn't, or the reports of the IDF arming settlers. Curious that you can't enumerate any of these, and you're happy to take at face value a claim the IDF makes but doesn't allow independent third parties to verify (a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza) while abjuring such behaviour.
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> On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket...
Forensic-architecture published a report on that too: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/israeli-disi...
> problem is that both sides lie flagrantly
And yet one side is committing genocide.
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> On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket,
This is an Israeli lie. Not only has Israel bombed all of the hospitals, they murdered an entire NICU of infants. I can't believe people are still trying to justify blowing up hospitals!
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The media organizations and people who pushed the pro-Israel narrative already understand all of this - it's not a failure, it was their intended goal.
It's gonna happen again and again and again until the end of humanity.
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And which country will welcome the 8 million people living there?
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It’s strange to me when otherwise intelligent people call this genocide. Genocide is an attempt to exterminate an entire people. Israel is a nuclear armed nation fighting against the equivalent of Dayton, OH.
If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
Collective punishment, or a long term ethnic cleansing would be much more accurate, but you’re just repeating what you read unthinkingly if you say genocide.
This is one of the worst pro-Israel arguments; I can't believe people still make it. Israel isn't going to drop a nuke on the "holy land", where they want to start building Jewish settlements, a few dozen miles from Tel Aviv. No matter how much they hate Palestinians, people don't want to live in an irradiated wasteland.
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>If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
And the retaliation from the rest of the world in those circumstances would be swift and measured in hours, and there would be a smoking pile of rubble in that particular part of the world that would be uninhabitable for centuries.
So instead, Israel is cooking the frog.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humanitarian_and_human...
So by your logic if you slowly exterminate a people its not genocide?
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Your are using an argument similar to the repugnant logic of Holocaust deniers. They use claims that Germany could have easily killed Jews /even faster/ as an argument to claim that they didn't commit genocide /at all/.
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“Your honor and members of the jury: my client could have easily committed way worse crimes!”
How is long term ethnic cleansing different from genocide?
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> If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
You can't infer intent that way. Nuking Gaza isn't free, it would introduce an existential threat to Israel. They are toeing a dangerous line already, and using WMDs would align other countries against them really quickly.
Putin isn't avoiding using nukes on Ukraine because he's a nice guy.
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Yes, there is a long term effort by the State of Israel to remove Palestinian life from Palestinian land.
The term "genocide" noes not mean "kill every single member of a group", it refers to the destruction of the group itself by whatever means.
> you’re just repeating what you read unthinkingly if you say genocide.
Your policy of deeming everybody who does not have the same opinion as you to be too stupid, is smug, self serving and lazy.
See, I could just also go ahead and tell you that you are too "unthinkingly" to know that "ethnic cleansing" is a euphemism for "genocide" and that "long term ethnic cleansing" is exactly congruent in meaning with "genocide" (look it up).
Instead of doing that, I would like you to consider that when I say that the state of Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian people, I have thought long and hard about whether that is the appropriate term, and without taking it lightly, I have for myself concluded that that is actually the correct term.
why is this flagged ?
I'll give you the "party line" (i.e. best-effort understanding of HN-moderators perspective) for why articles like this are frequently flagged:
1) The entire discussion is a rehashing of the exact same points every time the topic is posted, and not very insightful
2) The participation rate for experts (or even authors) in the discussed field/topic is very low (compared to programming topics)
3) The discussion rarely stays civil and requires excessive moderation
An observation (have no verbatim quote, but believe from dang) is that there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective and exact topic (presumably for above reasons). You can certainly still blame the flagging on bots or Zionists, but it's almost certainly not only those.
You left out the parts about how and when we turn flags off, about how a certain amount of political overlap is both necessary and inevitable, but that it also can't be too much. All of those are important factors, and I've posted many explanations of them:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flags%20off%20turn%20by%3Adang...
We can't, however, turn off flags on threads we don't know about. You guys (I don't mean you personally!) unintentionally assume that we're omniscient. We aren't, so we need people to tell us about cases like this.
In this case, no one told us; I ran across it randomly. Randomness is only good for partial results. For reliable message delivery, someone needs to email hn@ycombinator.com, and please remember that it takes time to work through that (er) rather active inbox.
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> there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective
I'm always sceptical of this given it doesn't happen to similar posts about Iran.
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> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is most certainly not something that is covered on TV news. Seems on topic to me.
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The forensic reconstruction to this level of detail is novel and interesting, both for the methods deployed and for the likelihood that the half-life of unsolved war crimes appears to be decreasing.
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Edit: if https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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No. Your message is. A lot of people commit mortal sin of logical fallacy by extending the responsibility for actions of certain group of people to everyone sharing with them ethnicity or religion. It‘s the stupidity worth of the strongest condemnation given the context.
It‘s not jews committing war crimes in Gaza, it‘s zionists. It‘s not muslims or Palestinians planning and executing terrorist attacks, it‘s religious extremists and far right nationalists. When there will be common understanding of this simple truth, fighting the root causes will be much easier.
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@dang any explanation for this being flagged?
Am I still allowed to ask why the moderators don't want people to read and discuss this particular technology story?
(@dang doesn't work. I only saw this randomly.)
Your question is answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443, but the short version is that your assumption that we see everything is incorrect.
I also would appreciate knowing if the mods see this. I'm worried that flagging is possibly automated and vulnerable to campaigning.
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Real shame this got flagged so quickly, too. This is prime HN material.
this is prime material for HN to flag...
Is there an HN but for anarchists? Or maybe just anti-authoritarians?
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If we can't flag it, make it disappear from the front page.
Collectively done via Israel's RiseApp and similar.
No, its not. And I gladly flagged it.
Redirects set to: talk.politics.misc.
> No, it’s not. And I gladly flagged it. > Redirects set to: talk.politics.misc.
So you don’t think anyone should discuss topics that touch on politics, including this war, on HN?
Isn't this a tech news site?
Did you click on the link? It's a pretty amazing technological investigation.
Even just technologically it's more interesting than 90% of the stuff posted here.
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Oh no, we shouldn't talk about war crimes because the iPhone I'm tapping my words into has some tech from the nation committing those war crimes. I should be more THANKFUL!
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Isn't mass murder of civilians the most Israeli thing ever? For those out of the loop, this isn't an anomaly.
It's a societal-level policy: 47% of Israeli Jews want all Palestinians killed; 82% want all Palestinians forcefully expelled (i.e., ethnically cleansed) [0] which would constitute genocide. 56% want the same for all Israeli Arabs.
So, it's pathetic when Westerners act surprised at Israel's antics: you can't support a genocidal state and then be shocked when it does genocidal stuff. This is just Tuesday for them.
Once you understand this, Israel's actions are not an anomaly. It's the natural expression of people who consider their neighbors beneath them, and barely even human.
[0]: https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/poll-show-most-jew...
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Palestinians just want their stolen land back and not to be murdered by an invading force backed by a global superpower.
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I do like to set a personal moral standard a little higher than "what would Hamas endorse?"
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Things are in terrible state in the world.
Gaza exposed it even more:
* No one accepts high western "morality" anymore
* Most US politicians are blackmailed via Epstein who worked for Israel, with high probability, including Trump
* ICE is just the beginning, they're trained by IDF, send more people and 1940 is not too far away from us
>Most US politicians are blackmailed via Epstein
??? Most? His network was certainly extensive but "most politicians" seems like a significantly overextended extrapolation.
I wouldn’t point to Epstein, but there is a very powerful lobby that will protect the image of any Israeli government. A lot of Evangelicals also consider Israel important in bringing about the apocalypse, without which they can’t access eternal life. I wish I was kidding on that last one, but there are people actively trying to bring down civilisation so they can go to heaven.
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ICE is not trained by the IDF??
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Not Israel, but Russia - good old KGB honeytrap.
The russian bots are here too downvoting? Great.
> * No one accepts high western "morality" anymore
Is that an accurate trend on an individual basis?
Travel to Middle East, some parts of Africa and China, ask what people think. Most say have similar opinion that west is not "morally" superior.
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I think when people say "West", they automatically think US and UK - and given their war crimes in recent history, you do get this sentiment, yes. I suspect, however, that this view has exacerbated and now includes other "western" countries that are silent/complicit in current horrific war crimes.
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People in places like this generally don't feel the need to condemn Hamas because it's understood that they are bad. Hamas is not an ally of the United States, it's troops and police force don't train with the United States military, it does not buy weapons from United States factories, and it does not receive government aid from the United States. If you feel the need to, you can add a condemnation of Hamas to basically every post here and it'll be accurate. Hell if you want to add a condemnation to the Iranian and North Korean governments too while you're there, that'd be fine too.
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If the only defense you can think up is that Hamas is worse, it's a bad sign.
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If you're going to put words in someone's mouth, at least make them big words.
Whataboutism.
Irish siding with a colonial terrorist power which flounders its genocidal ambitions freely financed by a petro state which also flounders its genocidal ambitions freely instead of the indigenous people of a land who's artefacts and scriptures are in the name of the land as well as dug up from the ground has to be the biggest moral confusion of the 21st century.
You mean the Philistines?
The article was about IDF, not Hamas.
And the IDF are terrorists.
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I find that a good sniff-test in politics is to change the actor in a claim to be Jewish and then consider if that make the claim an antisemitic conspiracy theory. Works surprisingly well.
For example:
> facing an enemy [Hamas] who does everything they can to get their own people killed to make you look bad
Imagine the "enemy" in that sentence was not "Hamas", but "The Jews" - that would be a very antisemitic narrative, and in a similar way that antisemitism has nothing really to do with Jews, but rather with antisemites what you are writing here just shows your hatred.
> does everything to get their own people killed
for the purposed of making the killer look bad, is such a naïve take on this. Do you think netanyahu and his cronies care about "looking bad" ? To whom ? That ship has sailed since at least the 90ies.
> Imagine the "enemy" in that sentence was not "Hamas", but "The Jews" - that would be a very antisemitic narrative,
Your substitution turns a true statement into a false statement; this mechanism is at best meaningless. Yes, making false claims about Jews is antisemitic, but that has no bearing on statements that aren't false.
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>If you go around accusing Israel of genocide, deliberately omitting the little detail of facing an enemy who does everything they can to get their own people killed to make you look bad
Easy to make that enemy look bad when you are an impoverished country that has no food, no old people (they were all killed) or modern weapons, that enemy is starving you, killing your women and children, bombing schools and hospitals.....and oh yeah that nation has nuclear weapons.
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This is answered in many of the past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... and the links they include. If you read some of those and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
The short answer is (1) most, but not all political stories are off topic here, (2) a certain amount of political overlap is inevitable, and (3) we try to moderate this question in a principled way, although consistency is impossible in practice. You'll find many descriptions of the principles we try to follow at the link I just mentioned.
Unfortunately there is a type of person who thinks there should be no places where politics is absent, and these people will endlessly spam non-tech politics articles like this one in the hopes of a few making it to the front page and surviving being flagged.
You'll notice that posts like these don't have actual, logical discussion underneath and in their stead have repetitive slogan comments.
The real question is: why is this on hacker news with 4 digits upvotes and why has Gaza been on Hacker News non-stop while there's been hardly any coverage of the islamist republic of Iran slaughtering tens of thousands of unarmed civilians in a matter of days.
And I already know that although there's been very little coverage so far of what's happened in Iran, where islamists have been executing people inside hospitals, there's going to be non-stop coverage of Iran if the US decides to strike Iran to topple the islamist regime / prevent them from getting the atomic bomb. Then we'll have detective work to find innocents killed and upvoting of stories about how the evil west is committing war crimes on innocent islamists.
But tens of thousands of unarmed civilians --who want sharia law to stop and who are protesting for a regime change-- being executed by an islamist regime?
Very little coverage on HN.
There's an ongoing inquiry led by several members or parliament in the UK about mass rapes that happened on UK soil, complete with a cover-up attempt by the government, involvement of police officers, as much, in some cities, as 30% of all men from one particular community involved, descriptions of killings (according to the testimony of some victims), of victims having their tongue nailed to the table and being ass-raped by several men, etc.
And no coverage on HN.
But the IDF firing for four minutes on the Toyota Hilux'es from Gaza aid workers: more than 1000 upvotes.
The double standards here are just insane.
> The real question is: why is this on hacker news with 4 digits upvotes and why has Gaza been on Hacker News non-stop while there's been hardly any coverage of the islamist republic of Iran slaughtering tens of thousands of unarmed civilians in a matter of days.
900 points, 800 comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...
(And this one, at least, has the interesting little bit about echolocation from a cell phone video being used to verify events. I find that neat, technologically.)
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For sure there will be coverage if the Epstein class decides to go to war with Iran on behalf of Israel who obviously holds the blackmail on this, surprisingly few mentions on mainstream media about the Mossad honeypot that the Epstein setup was btw.
North Korea has nukes now and the threats to them have surprisingly gone quiet, I wonder why? Trump is instead writing love letters to Kim Jong-un.. Apparently having nukes is quite a good insurance policy.
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I don't know lots of zionist fashists defending their favourite ethno state all over here
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Read the article. This is an incredible feat of science and technology. The "forensic architecture" done here uses genuinely innovative and groundbreaking technologies and techniques. Even if you somehow have no sympathy for the conflict it is undeniably fascinating work
That battle's been fought and lost. The moderators' suggestion, which I recommend, is to email the moderators.
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> Earshot used echolocation to analyze the audio on the recordings in order to arrive at precise estimates of the shooters’ locations. Echolocation is the process of locating the source of a sound based on an analysis of the sound’s echoes and the environment in which the sound travels. The Israeli military destroyed and cleared so many buildings in the Tel Al-Sultan area where the ambush of the aid workers took place that very few structures remained. This destruction actually strengthened Earshot’s ability to determine the positions and movements of Israeli soldiers, based on identifying the surfaces responsible for clearly distinguishable gunshot echoes. Rather than having multiple buildings reflecting the sound waves, there were only a few standing walls and the emergency vehicles themselves.
Seems like interesting tech.
Much discussion of the tech here, lots of it. Should be definitely flagged.
It's relevant for all humanity.
Not relevant only for those that have lost theirs.
Nice try Zionist drone.
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Ah, yes, part one of the ole
That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, that's not the IDF's fault. And if it was, they didn't mean it. And if they did, Gaza deserved it.
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Indeed. Vouched but it won't last for long.
As shablulman's inexplicably dead post says, this is very impressive work analyzing this unquestionable war crime.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443
Shablulman is shadowbanned.
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shablu shouldn't sounds like a LLM (no, i didn't flag or downvote it)
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Echolocation based on audio from a cell phone video, with the reports echoing off flat walls in the area, establishes 3D troop movement during the massacre, and the eventual close-range executions. Including of the person whose cell phone it was.
Eyewitness accounts may be dismissed for any number of biases by the motivated reasoner, but echoes are echoes.
There are plenty of people on HN who are active in protecting human rights, and this particular incident is a clear example of the amount of work still left to do in the world by those of us who care about each other more than we cling to national identities - especially those national identities with a long track record of human rights violations.
Hacker News is not solely news about hacking. "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."
you cannot be serious. wtf?
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Oh, come on.
> The Israeli military was forced to change its story about the ambush several times, following the discovery of the bodies in a mass grave, along with their flattened vehicles, and the emergence of video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers. An internal military inquiry ultimately did not recommend any criminal action against the army units responsible for the incident.
Unfortunately, the takeaway here will be "be better at destroying the evidence". The video is quite damning against their initial claims; it includes an uninterrupted view of their arrival, in marked emergency vehicles with lights on and uniformed personnel, and the gunfire beginning: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
> Hamas murdering their own citizens again
A good test of whether claim like this is true is to swap out the actor and put in "the Jews"
Like this:
> The Jews murdering their own citizens again
Suddenly it sounds like an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
And the reason why that works, is that antisemitism has nothing to do with Jews, for stupid reasons they just ended up as the victim of it.
What it does do, is expose antisemitic thinking, which is, in the end, really just concentrated anti-human thinking.
So if I was you, I would start examining how I construct argument and critically evaluate information I come across.
I think that's a pretty loaded statement and honestly wild way to make comparisons. What do "The Jews" have to do with this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvxV4knxpLQ
This isn't some claim, Hamas is happy to film themselves doing things like this, e.g., October 7th.
That's literally the opposite of how the media game around this genocide has played out. And Forensic Architecture has proven to be a reliable source thoughout the conflict.
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Please don't cross into personal attack, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Don't do this. TFA doesn't come even remotely close to collectively blaming Jews (or Israelis) for this particular war crime.
Don't do what? Point out that "TFA' is selectively reporting on an (admittedly undeniably tragic and dystopian, as war inherently is) situation that has been weaponized by powerful, unfathomably wealthy “news” (”real” news can be framed such that it is “propaganda”) organizations?
Analysis of Potential Anti-Israel Bias Bias in journalism is best assessed through criteria such as language tone, source selection and balance, contextual framing, omissions, and factual selectivity. This article exhibits several hallmarks of anti-Israel bias in its presentation, while reporting on verifiable elements of a tragic incident that has drawn international scrutiny.
Loaded and emotive language: Terms like "massacre," "executed," "execution-style killings," "ambushed," "point-blank range," and "deliberately" dominate descriptions of Israeli actions. Palestinian victims are consistently portrayed as unarmed, clearly identifiable "aid workers" with "emergency lights" and markings visible. Israeli forces are depicted as advancing methodically to kill survivors without provocation. By contrast, the article does not use neutral phrasing such as "incident," "exchange of fire," or "alleged." A quoted Forensic Architecture official explicitly links the event to "genocide," which the piece endorses without qualification.
One-sided sourcing and lack of balance: The core narrative relies on PRCS (a Palestinian organization), two named survivors, and Forensic Architecture/Earshot—entities whose prior work has frequently focused on alleged Israeli violations. A single supportive quote comes from a Center for Constitutional Rights attorney. The Israeli military's response is relegated to a brief paragraph near the end, presented without detailed rebuttal or independent corroboration of its claims (e.g., that the convoy was uncoordinated or posed a perceived threat in an active combat zone). No interviews with IDF personnel, Israeli forensic experts, or neutral third-party analysts appear.
Selective contextual framing and omissions: The article opens by noting Israel's "abandonment" of a January 2025 ceasefire and resumption of "scorched earth bombing," implying unprovoked aggression. It provides no discussion of the broader operational context in Rafah (an area of ongoing military activity post-ceasefire violations by both sides), Hamas's documented history of embedding in civilian and medical infrastructure, or any potential misidentification of vehicles/personnel in pre-dawn conditions. Claims of a "rescue convoy" responding to an airstrike omit whether movements were coordinated with Israeli forces (a point raised in Israeli accounts). Post-incident military engineering (the "Morag Corridor") is framed solely as evidence concealment rather than standard security measures. Autopsy details from PRCS/Guardian sources alleging "intent to kill" are accepted without cross-examination.
Publication context: Drop Site News, founded by journalists with records of critical coverage of Israel and U.S. policy, is rated left-biased by independent evaluators, with a tendency toward one-sided narratives on conflict issues. The timing aligns precisely with the Forensic Architecture/Earshot report release, functioning more as advocacy amplification than detached analysis.
Counterpoints and Broader Context Independent reporting and Israeli statements acknowledge a serious incident involving the deaths of protected aid personnel, with autopsies indicating close-range upper-body wounds and an internal IDF probe admitting a "professional error" while denying executions. The audio-visual evidence cited (gunshot counts, shooter positioning via echolocation, lack of return fire) appears methodologically rigorous and has been cross-verified in allied outlets. However, Israeli accounts describe an ambush setup in a high-threat environment where the convoy's approach was deemed suspicious, with no coordination notified. The event occurred amid resumed hostilities following ceasefire breakdowns, and Palestinian Civil Defense has been alleged by Israel to have militant ties in other contexts. These elements receive minimal or no engagement in the article, limiting its analytical depth.
Overall Assessment The article demonstrates clear anti-Israel bias through its adversarial framing, selective emphasis, emotive terminology, and near-exclusive reliance on sources critical of Israel, while marginalizing the Israeli perspective and relevant conflict context. It advances a narrative of deliberate, unprovoked executions as established fact, rather than a contested interpretation of evidence from a chaotic combat zone. That said, the underlying forensic reconstruction raises substantive questions about proportionality and accountability that merit transparent investigation by credible international bodies—not dismissal. A more balanced treatment would integrate diverse viewpoints, test competing hypotheses (e.g., misidentification versus intent), and avoid presuming genocidal motive. Readers seeking a fuller picture should consult primary sources, including the full Earshot/Forensic Architecture report, Israeli military statements, and contemporaneous coverage from multiple outlets.