The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
The New York Times describes it as such:
"Ali Bani Odeh’s wife and four young boys hadn’t seen him in a month and a half when he came home to Tammun, in the West Bank, from his construction job in Israel late on Friday to spend the last few days of Ramadan with his family.
On Saturday night, the boys persuaded him to take them out for a drive. Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, was coming, so there were new clothes to buy. The day’s fast had been broken, so there were sweets to be had, too.
They picked up fried doughnut holes in Tubas, saving them for later, but the clothing shop they went to in Nablus was closed. It was already past midnight, so they headed back to Tammun: Khaled, 11, the oldest, in the back with Mustafa, 8, and Muhammad, 5. Othman, 6, blind and incapable of walking or feeding himself, was in his mother’s lap in front.
As they rounded a corner slowly, a few minutes from home, young Khaled and Mustafa recounted on Sunday, their mother, Waad, 35, asked her husband to pull over and take Othman from her so she could get something from her bag on the floor. Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire."
The situation in the West Bank (and similar forces are at play in Gaza, too) remind me of what's wrong with American policing, at a far more extreme scale.
The people charged with enforcing the peace deploy lethal force with near impunity at the slightest "provocation" (a child throwing a stone, a car driving too fast); I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are, to operate in constant fear and perceive absolutely everything and everyone as a deadly threat to be neutralized. The soldiers themselves are raised in a culture with deeply racist undertones, making them all too ready to view any random Palestinian as a terrorist. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy that should be overseeing them works only to protect them. It's no surprise that things like this happen as often as they do.
Reform in the US is imaginable, I can and do believe, but it's much harder for me to imagine it in Israel - even much of the so-called left in Israel is too radicalized against Palestinians after 100 years of conflict, the Second Intifada, and October 7.
That's a huge problem (immediate, unjustified escalation to violence becoming the norm) and:
> The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
"I feel unsafe" has become the catch-all excuse for everything in the recent decade. It's used to justify everything from Karen complaining about someone's behavior in public to people calling the cops on someone for looking at them wrong, to making a scene on a public bus, to police officers jumping the gun and escalating to violence, all the way to war crimes. When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card? Like a magic spell that you can cast before doing something crazy. It's like that old "He's coming right for us" South Park joke, but instead of being a joke it has real life and death consequences.
The IDF is a foreign occupation army, not the police.
At least in the US, the police come from much the same communities as they patrol, and there's some sort of democratic accountability. Don't like the police? You can vote for local government candidates who will implement reforms.
In the West Bank, Palestinians are subject to arbitrary violence at the hands of foreign soldiers. The IDF is not there to protect Palestinians. It's there to protect the Israeli settlers who are taking Palestinian land. If Palestinians don't like how the IDF behaves, tough luck. Palestinians can't vote in Israeli elections, so they have zero say in the government that exercises ultimate authority over their lives.
This is a fundamentally different situation from policing in the US.
Their media is non stop hammering the citizen with scary Muslim stories since the beginning of the country, every day since birth, with a density as if nothing else ever happened in the world.
Deprogramming is possible. Just tell them it is impossible to argue it was their own idea. They know how hard it was rubbed in their face.
A certain amount of politics should/must be tolerated on HN, because you cannot compartmentalize technology, politics and morality.
No-one, not even people who say they like technology but do not care about politics, should be able to live their life wihtout knowing that we live in a world where six-year old blind children are murdered with automatic assault rifles.
(For the same reason that no-one should be able to live not knowing that jewish once were murdered in the millions in gas chambers.)
Technology is a form of control. And in the capitalist system, this control is mostly exerted by private companies, on which the rules of democracy do not apply.
The west bank isn't at war with Israel. There wasn't some conflict or event that has justified these actions.
I wish people understood this better. Even if you could manage to justify what's happening in gaza as "this is war", Gaza and the west bank are separate entities with separate governments. The west bank, in particular, is more like an Indian reservation in the US, with the Israeli government effectively exercising supremacy over all aspects of the government.
Theoretically, the IDF is supposed to be the police force for the west bank. That's why they occupy it.
Except this situation has been going on like this for 60 years - with Israel, or the other western states having absolutely no plans to change anything about it (except making it even worse).
I have followed this conflict since Operation Cast Lead and the beginnings of the siege on Gaza.
Israel has been using enormous amounts of force against the Palestinian people since then, with death tolls of _at least_ 100 dead Palestinians for every dead Israeli.
For a very good account of life in Israel around the time of Cast Lead I recommend Guy Delisle, brilliant diary in comic form.
His partner was working for Doctors Without Borders, the Israeli Army refused to let them enter Gaza to help the people suffering under their bombardments.
There are horrific acts on both sides going back very very far. I grew up in a country with a relatively balanced media reporting on the issue and have tried my best to stay informed. Suicide bombings, bus hijackings, mass murders.
The inequality in force applied has still been a constant.
Also, the fact is that any peace deal has been made impossible by the hunting down and killing of anyone that could actually hold that conversation. All secular and left wing movements in Palestine have been eradicated in favor of Hamas, Islamic Jihad et al.
Likewise the Israeli extreme right wing now in power killed their own prime minister for trying to negotiate.
Also see the birth of Hezbollah as a response to Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which also gave rise to suicide bombings. These then spread across the region.
The reason Israel invaded was to fight the Palestinians there who were displaced by the founding of the Israeli state and the following conflicts.
Edit: the Palestinian groups there were doing raids in northern Israel and fleeing back across the border to Lebanon
It's a gordian knot at this point and i am very doubtful there will ever be a peaceful solution.
Imagine, this is just one of thousands upon thousands of incredibly tragic and similar stories of the last few years (going back much further than October 7th).
Most such stories never see the light of day. Hind Rajab is one such story which got some reasonable exposure [0]. I suppose this one will as well get due exposure at some point.
But the vast majority of similar atrocities will just vanish in the sands of time.
The scale of these atrocities and our governments' support are the reason why this story should be on HN. We elect people who support this, therefore it's only right it follows us and comes up often, even when it's not convenient. That "inconvenience" (skipping a story in HN feed every now and then) is nothing compared to the oppression our democracies support
Also there's barely a tech industry to talk about as our economy collapses through $100 oil and private equity backed destruction of our way of life - what else are we supposed to discuss now - it might as well be Israel.
This kid will grow up and fight, and I don't blame him. Gaza is a concentration camp, West Bank is an apartheid. These people have the audacity to bribe and threaten our governments to do their nationalist ethno-state bidding in one hand while pushing the narrative that the west must not have any identity or borders in the other. They fund PACs that threaten 80% of congress with "we'll front an opposition candidate and BTW 97% of them win". They fund NGOs who offload the people they don't want onto Europe and muddy the political waters allowing both far left and far right extremists to thrive. When TikTok woke the kids, they bought it. When Epstein died they fought tooth and nail to cover it up. Oil is $100, they do not understand the pure rage and anger they have dredged up.
As an Israeli, this is an inexcusable crime by IDF soldiers. Appallingly, I expect them to receive no punishment. My country's government is criminally racist.
It's hard to claim ""bad apples"" when the top brass acquits soldiers who get caught on camera sexually abusing a prisoner and instead prosecutes the whistleblower for leaking evidence of the crime.
Eh, tbh I've given up. Can't point out the terrible things that the IDF are up to without being labelled an apologist, or terrorist supporter, or just getting a massively negative reaction.
Now I'm not one to fall prey to the conspiracy theories around Judaism...but like...is it not possible to say that both hamas and the IDF do terrible things? And that innocent civilians are caught in between, with the usual bad faith reasons of "they were hiding hamas members" aka the exact same rhetoric that Russia used when accused of something terrible that they obviously did, deflection and formal outrage.
The very fact I feel I have to tread so carefully with my comment is an indication that something is seriously, seriously wrong. I don't live in China, I don't live in Russia. But when speaking about Israel or the IDF, I feel like I do.
> is it not possible to say that both hamas and the IDF do terrible things?
I agree. Hamas and IDF do terrible things - the ICC issued warrants for the leaders of both. This is why an external party has to impose a solution and it should involve in my opinion separation (two-states.) Both parties are radicalized at least for now and need to be separated and allowed to manage their own affairs while allowing the other to exist.
I feel something very similar. I have strong views that what Israel is doing is wrong. But I look around at our politics (in the UK), and there is such a well oiled Israeli PR operation that is very happy making career ending accusations that talking publicly about this is actually quite dangerous (Not helped by the loonies who are, and have always been disgusting anti-semites). And you look at our politician's stance on it - and the career of people like Lord Walney, and it's clear we're in a very dangerous place. I think there is a very wide gap between what the average British person actually believes about Israel and what is happening to the Palestinians, and the acceptable positions you can express in Westminster. I also fear that once the dam breaks, and it's no longer the case, that the swing back against Israel is going to be quick harsh, and that's difficult because I have friends and family in Israel - I would like to see Israel be a free and open liberal democracy that shares what used to be western values, but maybe we're too late for that.
I am German. My government does not acknowledge the tragedy that has been unfolding in Gaza since the Hamas attack in October 2023. It’s absurd. Since then, Jewish people in Berlin who were demonstrating alongside Palestinians against the war in Gaza have been beaten down by the German police. In 2021, Esther Bejarano, the last survivor of the Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra, passed away in Hamburg. Whenever she commented on the culture of remembrance, the media was eager to report on it. Whenever she commented on the situation of the Palestinians, it was not reported in the media. People sometimes ask how it was possible that the vast majority of so-called ordinary people in this country back then could simply tolerate these crimes against Jews and look the other way. Now that should be clear to everyone. The Max Planck Institute in Rostock estimates that well over 100,000 people have been killed in Gaza. But nobody here gives a damn (at least not publicly). We’re even supplying weapons there. Everyone acts as if they’ve forgotten what was written in German newspapers about the current Israeli government when it took office, and as if there were no connection to what’s happening in Gaza right now. I am deeply and profoundly disappointed in the elected officials and public servants of my country. They have learned nothing from the atrocities committed by their grandfathers.
It's terrifying everywhere, really shines a light on the insane levels of propaganda we live under. I don't really know what can be done about it, it's really just hard to wrap my head around living in a country that so explicitly and directly supports an ethnostate and their active genocide.
I find this bewildering. Im not German. Im not Israeli.
Yet I have known that Israel sails German subs (the best in the world) since.... the Greek financial crisis (the subs were part of the scandal) ? Certainly since the mid 2010s.
> They have learned nothing from the atrocities committed by their grandfathers.
No no, they have learned from them. That's why they are the biggest backers of these new atrocities on the whole continent - they learned exactly how it's done.
Same thing in Austria, everyone in mainstream politics basically ignores the topic and when pressured parrot something like "Israel has the right to defend itself" or "It is very complicated"
Repression against students and demonstrators is happening regularly
The last time I was in Berlin (2018), I was actually somewhat shocked by the amount of antisemitic graffiti that I saw just about everywhere (especially on lamp posts). Especially given the strictness of the laws against such speech.
It's even more insidious, I know activists in your country and they not only abhor the current support for Israel's genocide but they are terrified of their activism being criminalized under anti-nazi laws. How ironic.
i am honestly puzzled as to why germans, with all the educations they have received during decades, are letting this rock as is. or maybe disillusioned would be a better term...
While I agree with you on the case of Esther Bejerano (a recent example from public broadcasting shows that her own communist beliefs and support for BDS are seemingly 'censored' [0]), I find the general situation complicated. Although it should be easy for any half intellectual being to contextualize the recent Israeli aggression by mentioning October 7, like you did, this is often not done. At the same time I think that the coverage of likely Israeli war crimes also happens in German media and I think nobody is looking away. Still Germany is the reason why the whole mess exists in the first place. I feel, that Germany, has quite some problems like many other countries to find it's
role in a world where particularly the UN is failing and international law/human rights seem not enforcable.
> Germany is the reason why the whole mess exists in the first place.
I think this is the most unfair thing about it; Germany might be the reason, but it’s not Germans paying the consequences. It’s not 70k dead Germans, but 70k dead Palestinians (a Semitic people).
I can understand thefeeling of wanting to make amends for their crimes, but they are making amends by now allowing a whole new genocide to occur, against a completely unrelated people.
>and unfortunately for us the palestinians political leadership has brought us all into this scenario
Simply not true. The plan from the start was to take over the area for jews, see Ben Gurions private letters. Netanyahu has supported Hamas to make sure that Palestine couldn't be politically united to be able to continue taking over the west bank. The power balance has since long been tipped to one side that is engineering the situation.
Germany is cucked, what Hitler did was outrageous and destroyed any rational ability for generations - and yes while I am heavily critical of Israel and the demonstrably true supremacy and nepotism they have created outside of Israel, I am strongly against the "rounding up of Anne Franks". Germany must now tread the difficult tightrope between standing up for themselves and going full-on loony right, and every time they fall they simply reset to loony left. This is why the establishment just puts their head in the sand.
(The eyewitness) told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account.
I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired.
"No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
Yes, it is a downward spiral. How do you propose to stop it, assuming both parties want another one to disappear from reality, and see any compromise as weakness?
Regarding rules of whether or not this should be posted here - I think it's less about whether it's important and more about whether it causes arguments.
As the saying goes, religion and politics.
People are going to have varying and at times oppositional views to things like this, and frankly the rest of the internet is often flooded with those discussions, so bubbles isolated from them can be a positive.
We don't need to mourn the woes of the world every hour of every day.
I was going to say I disagree, that I think that at least some level of discussion on HN about important things going on is important. Israel is actually a tech powerhouse and a lot of this is seriously shaping the defence technology policy and is telling a lot about how power dynamics actually can play out.
Having said that, my settings show me all comments that are flagged. HN is apparently not capable of having a respectful conversation about this. Almost anything expressed on the actual topic has been flagged. The only thing left are comments rules lawyering to say we shouldn't discuss the topic at all.
It's kind of an indictment of the users of HN. It might be the right move to remove the article, but it becomes the right move because the users of this site can't be trusted to actually conduct a conversation about it.
I see people saying this story doesn't belong on HN. genuine question, if this story were about a german national would it be considered as political? is palestinian existence inherently more political than other peoples' existence?
I'm saying this as someone who doesn't really care about this certain topic:
Either we allow _all_ political content or nothing.
The HN guidelines are incredibly grey and handwave-y
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
To me HN became to big for its own good since the Covid days. It's like the reddit front page except there are no subs with mods but one big flood (basically /r/all).
If I got to /r/linux, /r/selfhosted/, /r/networking/ or other tech subs I'll probably find what I saw on HN 15 years ago. But less and less here.
Banning all political content means banning all mention of open-source software, self-driving cars, anything involving a Big Tech company, anything concerning AI, anything to do with EU or US legislation, anything involving hacking or right to repair, anything about copyright...
Ban all politics, and you ban >99% of HN content. Heck, the very concept of HN itself is political!
What about AI slop causing the Iranian school-children strike ? US military confirmed that they are using AI to identify targets and provide coordinates. Will you ban that because its "politics" ?
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
If the story was about a German national then yes, I would still say this is political and doesn't gratify my intellectual curiosity.
Every time these sorts of articles get posted people that express a differing opinion from the standard get flagged (making it so you can't read their post at all) pretty quickly making it seem more like the intention isn't to start discussion. It seems like it's gotten to the point that the people that just get flagged into oblivion stopped trying to post.
I wouldn't care about it being a German or American or Chinese national any more than I care about it being a family of Palestinians, and more importantly it wouldn't belong on HN in any of those cases.
This has nothing to do with tech, isn't something hackers would find interesting, and doesn't satisfy intellectual curiosity, end of story. It's generic run of the mill nightly news slop that I could get from literally anywhere else if I wanted to waste my time reading/watching uninteresting news that doesn't affect me.
I'll bite: If for any reason, probably because it's neither technically interesting nor entrepreneurial in nature.
US Politics seems to get more of a pass, probably due to Silicon Valley being there (and nearly all the major tech outlets), similarly some China news gets a pass, also largely when it relates to supply chain and Taiwan.
This goes beyond US politics. The US and Israel do not exist in a bubble. This conflict can and will have big repercussions which will impact our technical and entrepreneurial institutions.
I think the middle eastern conflicts are a tragedy. That said, this story does not belong on HN. As others called out this is a tech community and while there is sometimes an overlap with politics, it should at least be somewhat related like mass surveillance or AI being used for war.
HN is one of the most informative and least toxic communities and I’d appreciate if it would stay this way.
Why? Everyone has alternative news sources where they can find such stories, and there’s nothing new here. There’s always some tragedy that you could argue deserves more attention, I don’t think we should hold our guidelines hostage to pleas for the heart.
> it should at least be somewhat related like mass surveillance or AI being used for war
Sure. Let's spin the story on developments in laser-guided sniper rifle accuracy:
> Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire.
The tech community props up these regimes by continuing to serve their tech needs. Everything is political in this day.
Toxic is saying politics needs to be kept separate. If we can't discuss how tech is literally fueling genocide, enslavement, and exploitation of people, then all other discussions tacitly serve those functions.
I disagree with this. The tech bros building these dystopian systems for big paychecks need to be informed somehow, this is the best way to reach them. They do care what their peers think of them and if we can reach their conscious in between bouts of agentic blogs and vibe coded hopes and dreams, then that is what we should do.
Mainstream world news has a place on HN if it contains "significant new information", and as much as this site is primarily for curious conversation and gratifying intellectual curiosity, we don't want to pretend that horrific events like this aren't happening.
Horrific events happen almost every hour of every day. This is political, and the events that are upvoted are always from the same political perspective. If you don't see this, you're blind. But from my perspective, mods do see it, are ok with it, and that is unfortunate. There are few places left online without explicit political bias. HN used to be one of them.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
These are not even a isolated or a new pattern that Palestinian people are enduring such atrocities by the rogue israeli regime with full impunity from the western super powers. In fact, the Palestinian people have been suffering such oppression and injustice everyday at the hand of zionist society on a regular basis since 1948.
In fact, here are some more such equally horrible actions of the israelis just in the recent days that you may not find on the western media ever.
Historically, the western news media have always downplayed or completely ignored the persecution of Palestinians at every cost. Now due to rise of social media and citizen journalism, the israeli and zionist atrocities are coming out every single day hundreds of times, causing the abysmal distrust in these media outlets across the globe. To salvage their credibility, the western media now picking up some stories here and there, yet use the very artistic and convoluted language not to damage the image of the rogue zionist regime as much as possible. Journalists with conscience, who could not take anymore such order from their bosses, kept resigning from these news outlets:
* The New York Times
- Anne Boyer: The Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry editor for The New York Times Magazine resigned in November 2023. In her resignation letter, she wrote that she could no longer work for the publication amidst the "reasonable tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering" and "verbally sanitized hellscapes."
- Jazmine Hughes: An award-winning staff writer for The New York Times Magazine resigned in November 2023 after signing an open letter by "Writers Against the War on Gaza." The outlet stated the signing violated its policies on public protest.
- Jamie Lauren Keiles: A frequent contributor and writer for the magazine also resigned in solidarity with Hughes after signing the same open letter.
* BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation)
- Karishma Patel: A presenter and journalist who walked out of the BBC in October 2024. She later published an essay in The Guardian criticizing the broadcaster's "obstructive editorial policy" and its decision to shelf the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack.
- Bassam Bounenni: A veteran North Africa correspondent for BBC Arabic resigned in October 2023. He announced his departure on social media, stating it was for the sake of his "professional integrity" regarding the coverage of the escalation in Gaza.
- Noah Abrahams: A freelance sports reporter for the BBC resigned in October 2023 in protest of the broadcaster's refusal to use the word "terrorist" to describe Hamas, highlighting the internal friction over language and terminology.
* Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)
- Nour Haydar: A political reporter in the Canberra bureau resigned in early 2024. She cited concerns over the broadcaster's coverage of the Gaza conflict and its treatment of culturally diverse staff as primary reasons for her departure.
* Reuters
- Valerie Zink: A Canadian photojournalist who resigned from Reuters in August 2025. She publicly denounced the agency's coverage as a "betrayal of journalists," specifically citing an instance where the outlet allegedly published unsubstantiated claims from the Israeli military to justify the killing of a Palestinian colleague.
There's no mention of any particular company, tech or otherwise, here. Yes, you can probably connect your work in some way to something that affects the military if you live in the US or Israel (and even many places outside of it - we're not restricting to direct connections), but, after all, "there is no ethical consumerism under capitalism".
If I worked at [supposedly evil company], I doubt this largely unverifiable story would cause much turmoil. I'm sure at work I'd be hearing about much worse and more concrete stuff already.
DIfferent people have different levels of empathy. If you can live with these things happening in the world, let along being involved even in an extremely minor way then fine, but don't try and downplay it.
We (and I) have become desensitized. When I saw one of these for the first time about 25 years ago, I was thinking about it for a week. Maybe longer. Because it was new, internet was new, and the video (not the same but it really does not matter) was the first time I saw it for ... real, felt it for real.
But after seeing a 100 of these, after knowing some of these are AI, after seeing news of a 1000 more ... I mean how is columbine or sandy hook different ... you see these but you eventually scroll up, sometimes immediately sometimes after a few seconds.
I am not making light of it just saying ... a lot of people at evil companies are also tuned out.
Charitably, this is an astroturf that accumulated 200+ upvotes in about 20 minutes, which I suspect is highly irregular for HN. Along, with a very clear concerted effort to quickly downvote anyone pointing out this is isn’t HN. If this is the case, what is HN admin doing about it?
Less charitably, HN is not where hackers hang out anymore. The hackers have moved on and HN is now this.
Interesting how this highlights a philosophical conundrum here that I'm not sure I have the answer to that goes beyond just forums. Do people make the community, or do rules make the community? I can envision arguments for both sides.
You think, charitably, that this is an astroturf, really? What's the distribution of upvotes look like for front-page posts, binned in 20 minute intervals?
Reviewing your post history, it's overwhelmingly in non-tech related threads. This seems like a standard post for your tastes, semantically. Why then the sudden distaste?
It absolutely does. Israel uses an AI system("Lavender") to decide which civilians to kill. I remind myself of this fact every single day when deciding where to apply my work. We(software developers) are more than ever exposed to the reality that our products will kill people in the real world.
Unfortunately, even in this comment section, you see people conflating the two. People don't realize that Palestinians live in both the west bank and gaza or that there are 2 different government for the west bank and gaza.
Can't say I'm glad to have read that, but at the same time it's good that male victims of wartime sexual assault/rape get covered. It's just a shame that the response is still incredibly muted. It's like men just don't want to think about it.
Whereas I feel pure, hot rage at the lack of coverage, the lack of anybody caring. Raped men being offered paracetamol because the clinics after only for women has been seared into my brain for a long time now: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/jul/17/the-rape-of-....
It is good that it gets covered, but the antagonistic and accelerated nature of modern media means that such coverage is rapidly subjected to spin, repackaging and so on. This opinionated but imho fair article summarizes how one of the self-admitted participants in the incident was treated as a mini0celebrity by one of the right-aligned Israeli TV channels:-
Too many people think of politics as a tribal team sport. It's not. Politics overlaps with tech because it's really about labelling situations accurately and modelling consequences effectively.
If you fail at those, politics can literally kill you.
Technology happens to be one of the ways it can do that.
I think that's the point - to discourage (certain) people from living there at all. Except it turns out people are capable of never-ending suffering and persevering through it.
You would think Israelis would already know this very well.
What's surprising is how nonchalantly people like you suggest victims should just surrender and leave. Exactly the same thing was told to Ukrainians after the invasion. The fucking audacity you people have is staggering.
If my tax dollars, military and government are killing those two people every second, you better believe that I'm going to do everything in my power to stop it.
It's not collateral damage in the gaza war. This was a family in the west bank, where there is no hamas and no "war", that was gunned down in cold blood for no reason. Not even presenting a threat. I hope one day you are able to find compassion.
I go to HN to read about technology and startups. I don't want to read about Israel/gaza, etc, I get enough of that everywhere else in life. But I guess that makes me not a compassionate person.
For people who don't follow this, the West Bank has a different government vs Gaza (they are not friends!), and is in fact pretty compliant wrt Israel.
Zionism is the idea that the Jewish people deserve a national state. Being anti-Zionist is equivalent to wanting Israel to not exist as a national state.
Zionism is currently realized as an apartheid system because there are too many non-Jews within the borders of Israel. The solution should have been two-states, but it seems that current Israeli leadership doesn't want that. So what is left? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/11/israels-netanyahu-s...
And why do they? There's minorities in almost all countries that doesn't have their own state. It's not unusual. What is unusual is creating a state on land where other people already live and then turns guns on them.
Please take your propaganda elsewhere. If Hamas or any other group in the region perpetrated any of the war crimes that Israel commits on any given day, every media outlet would be writing about it for weeks. In the meantime, Israel can bomb Gaza literally every day since the so-called ceasefire and nobody bats an eye. Israel just now acquitted its soldiers caught raping Palestinians in custody on camera. No coverage, no outcry. Israel is very objectively a bad guy, armed with nukes.
The West Bank is governed by the PLO, not Hamas, so it sounds like your concern is that you just don't wish to hear about it because it's an inconvenience.
Terrorist government? This is the West Bank, which is currently governed by Fatah, which has global recognition as the rightful representative authority of the Palestinian people.
I think you're right. Obviously this is awful and the IDF shouldn't be doing this and should be held responsible (of course they won't). But it seems like the implicit message behind the story is Palestine good, Israel bad, which at best is a massive oversimplification.
If you don’t mind developing, what made you switch stance ? many people never change their minds even when faced with overwhelming evidence , and based on your prior level of support, I’m quite curious about the actual process .
Hard to tell in retrospect. I think the thick layer of distrust against palestinians (which was built by debunked lie after lie from Hamas etc over the years) was finally breached by the sheer asimmetry of power that Israeli forces have gained against Palestinian civilians.
Just forget that the two parties are Jews and Arabs and instead make them Suaheli and Kazakh, and then put one group in such an "agency-less" position as Palestinians are, and give the other group the leverage in power as the Israelis have, plus the grievances. Even if you can understand these grievances – there is just no way these things aren't going to happen.
Plus: The state of Gaza has reached a level of destruction that is just ... well basically as if they have nuked the place (Like I initally favoured). At some point the humane thing would be to call it a win and leave. An that point has probably passed a long time ago.
Plus, I have read about the background of some of Netanjahu's cabinet members and they essentially tick all the boxes of what I find problematic with the aforementioned power asimmetry:
Prior aggresive behaviour against Palestinian civlians in the settlement areas, with the victims having no proper way of legal recourse. Like ganging up on random Arabs there and beating them up. I know there is backlash for this from within Israeli society but man, things are bad if a literal street thug is getting a place in the cabinet, because he behaved that way.
Lets just say many Gazans didn't display any empathy for dead or almost dead civilians either that they dragged into the city and instead were filming themselves celebrating over corpses, and captured women bleeding from their r_pings as well as from the achilles-heel cuts applied. A technique highlighting how deep enslavement-culture run in this part of the world.
Nuking Gaza is an abhorrent position but I don't think there will be any reform out there until there is a decisive win and if I have to pick a side it's not the Palestinians. If the Palestinians win it'll embolden other states or factions to have another go at the six-day war again and possibly prop up break-away action against other factions' host countries. There needs to be a complete and utter defeat that results in an enlightenment process. The strategy and military approach Hamas uses for example cannot be seen to win.
You have to look at the bigger picture. If they lose it's going to be a problem for all of us. Thus I have to support them.
And no I'm not a Trump supporter or Jewish or Israeli. The current operation in Iran is a fuck up. The whole thing that lead to 10-7 was a fuck up. It should have been dealt with years ago, preferably through diplomacy and threat of a strong hand rather than actually having to bomb the place.
There's no righteous side at all in this conflict.
Same thought in reverse. If oppressive regimes see that intentionally backing a population into a corner ultimately lets them get away with genocide on the global stage then presumably more of them will attempt it in the future.
That's literally the strategy of the Likud, who undermined the more moderate Fattah to allow the extremist Hamas to reign on the Gaza strip, hoping that one day the 7th of october would happen, and would let them unleash a genocide...
> about an incident involving New Zealanders and Maoris
Really?
Aotearoan here. Our racist history is shameful. Many massacres, both sides but mostly one way traffic.
Our history of "othering" indigenous people here in law was shameful too.
But seriously, and with all due respect, fuck you!!
We are facing up to our racist past, present and (Dog help us) future.
Tikanga Māori is joining our legal system.
Being openly racist to Māori is politically suicidal (some right wing politicians are giving it a go, and getting burnt for it)
Māori institutions are integrating themselves into all levels of our culture and society
And on and on. New Zealand is a Māori country, I am Pākehā, I have no problem with that, I belong here too. We (white people) are learning to share, learning there are more ways than our ways. Israel could learn from us, but...
The Isralies are utterly different. The violent homicidal, nay genocidal, racism of Israel is institutional.
Fuck you. For all we have our problems with racism, we are not genocidal racist violent thugs, as are the IDF representing the Israli state
Reminder that whatever you think, war, terrorism, questions of "the right/wrong target," etc are all insperable from AI and technology these days. These soldiers were where they were for concrete reasons dictated across vast automated networks; their choices of engagement are insperable from the tools either side (army and occupied population to be clear) here has or is perceived to have. War is simply many different "user stories," to put it coldly, and there is ethical and/or practical reasons, as technologists/scientists/academics, to see it that way (even if the goal is to just know thy enemy).
This is all why Anthropic is now a "supply-chain risk", why Thiel and Musk are particularly powerful persons-qua-tech-CEOs, why embedded microcontrollers getting so cheap (or whatever) enables drones instead of suicide bombs.
Well, right now the "better technology" is Israel's use of the "Lavender" AI to designate people to kill because they are "likely" to be hamas supporters.
And yes, probably they could have used better technology to realize that people in the car are not a danger to them. But that would immply they actually want to avoid killing civilians instead of looking for any excuse to shoot them.
Sad story. War is sad. 2 countries in a war that cannot end otherwise.
Its either Palestine or Israel unfortunately.
Put your good will and emotions somewhere it can actually make a sensible difference guys
Did you serve in Army? Do you know war from first account? Did your country take part in a war in the last decade? Or is it proxies who fight your wars? Its independence war for Israel everyday since its 1948.
Israel, West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon - all contain a majority/big minority of Palestinians - yet only Israel and Jordan effectively impose law and sovereignty over them.
PA cannot deal with their own radicals. I mean, they actually hand out prizes to shaheed's families. They loves this guerilla war equation. Its good for the Palestinian cause apparently cause they keep doing it for years now.
But somehow no momentum is gained by the Palestinian movement, and nobody dares to suggest its because their head is stuck we-know-where. And this applies to West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon.
Somehow most Israeli Arabs AKA Israeli Palestinians do not have a radical/resentful sentiment towards the Zionist idea. Some even serve in army, or do national service. Some have houses I can dream of. But yeah right, lets blame the Jews.
This picture you paint with big words, holds no grasp in the Middle East reality. Its a Eurocentric perspective, mostly held by people in countries which fight their wars via proxies. Its non pragmatic for Palestinians, and only serves Europeans. As evidence you can see how far the Palestinian cause has progressed in last decades.
But in the early 21st century Europe is currently in the back seat, sits, learns and questions: How does Israeli economy is thriving even though they have so many active conflicts?
And I'll answer what you do not even dare to think of: only a righteous cause can fight such war and have the upper hand.
"Ethnic cleansing" is such a nice word. "Etničko čišćenje" is what the Serb paramilitaries called raping and murdering a population to make them leave. "Remove kebab" as the later meme culture would call it. It's so trite, and a little funny it seems. We should call it what it is: *genocide*; thereby robbing the perpetrators of any semblance of cleanliness or propriety.
Monsters are filthy. Let's call them the filthy monsters they are.
I have no doubt isreali forces are responsible for a lot of war crimes. At the same time i see how one they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination. All sides just need to stop with that hatred. It leads to so much pain.
> they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination
This is the biggest lie of all.
Israeli Jews constantly dream about eliminating the Palestinian people. We talk about it openly and without shame.
We discuss pros and cons in terms of security, legality, world public opinion, etc. These are the only considerations. We don’t see any humanity there. We just need their land.
That said, it’s true that some Palestinians have dreams of defending themselves from us.
> i see how one they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination. All sides just need to stop with that hatred. It leads to so much pain.
I think by now we all know this is a straw man, considering the disproportionate amount of power both parties have. There is absolutely no excuse left for what Israel has been doing in Gaza.
This will never stop, because on both sides there are people who benefit from the existence of the conflict and they are the ones with power.
The last time when Israel had a PM who was willing to find a way for ending the conflict, he was murdered and replaced by those who want a perpetual conflict.
I have worked in Israel for some years, and the vast majority of people that I have encountered were very nice, but I have also seen a few that were definitely evil, and of course, the evil ones were concentrated in positions like the government or the management of companies.
Because most Israelis live in constant fear that if they would ever lose their technological and financial superiority their neighbors will come and cut their throats, when I was there, and I assume that also today, the majority of the population was exploited in a way that would not be possible in any other country.
Everybody had to work very hard, much harder than in any other country, and prioritize work over anything else, because this was a patriotic duty, like one might have worked in USA during WWII or in Ukraine today or in any country that is at war and its survival depends on how everyone works, except that in Israel the war has been continuous for three quarters of a century.
For the elites of the country this war economy is extremely desirable because they can demand any sacrifices from the workers, since those are supposedly not for increasing the profits of the company owners, but for ensuring the survival of the nation, and anyone who would not want to do what is required would be seen as a traitor.
For ending the conflict, it is not possible to just say that from tomorrow the parties in conflict should stop hating each other. Reparations would be necessary, like Israel itself has received plenty from Germany and other countries.
However, it is very unlikely that Israel will ever have a government willing to end the conflict, instead of keeping it alive as long as possible, to have something with which to scare the population.
Even post Epstein revelations, Chomsky's core thesis in The Fateful Triangle from 1983 still holds. A minority of hateful, brutish war hawks and crazy people on all 3 sides perpetuate a never-ending cycle of violence. The challenge is removing them from power and holding them accountable.
Except those people are dead. Those who ethnically cleansed Arabs (and Jews) during the nakba are dead. Almost everyone who was ethnicity cleansed is now dead. At a certain point you need to recognize that a new generation has been born into this conflict, and with it, a change in circumstances. Attitudes like yours ignore that Israelis who were born there don't have another home to 'return' to.
That doesn't mean that Palestinians don't have a right to resist occupation, but the circumstances are significantly materially different today then 40 years ago.
Given that the IDF involved were undercover agents (according to the reports), it seems unlikely that this family knew that driving fast would get them killed.
> He told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account.
I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired.
"No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
For those wondering, it is verifiable story, it is covered as fact in Israeli newspapers:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-forces-kill-west-bank-...
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/p7mq5k5bs
The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
The New York Times describes it as such:
"Ali Bani Odeh’s wife and four young boys hadn’t seen him in a month and a half when he came home to Tammun, in the West Bank, from his construction job in Israel late on Friday to spend the last few days of Ramadan with his family.
On Saturday night, the boys persuaded him to take them out for a drive. Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, was coming, so there were new clothes to buy. The day’s fast had been broken, so there were sweets to be had, too.
They picked up fried doughnut holes in Tubas, saving them for later, but the clothing shop they went to in Nablus was closed. It was already past midnight, so they headed back to Tammun: Khaled, 11, the oldest, in the back with Mustafa, 8, and Muhammad, 5. Othman, 6, blind and incapable of walking or feeding himself, was in his mother’s lap in front.
As they rounded a corner slowly, a few minutes from home, young Khaled and Mustafa recounted on Sunday, their mother, Waad, 35, asked her husband to pull over and take Othman from her so she could get something from her bag on the floor. Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/world/middleeast/palestin...
The situation in the West Bank (and similar forces are at play in Gaza, too) remind me of what's wrong with American policing, at a far more extreme scale.
The people charged with enforcing the peace deploy lethal force with near impunity at the slightest "provocation" (a child throwing a stone, a car driving too fast); I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are, to operate in constant fear and perceive absolutely everything and everyone as a deadly threat to be neutralized. The soldiers themselves are raised in a culture with deeply racist undertones, making them all too ready to view any random Palestinian as a terrorist. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy that should be overseeing them works only to protect them. It's no surprise that things like this happen as often as they do.
Reform in the US is imaginable, I can and do believe, but it's much harder for me to imagine it in Israel - even much of the so-called left in Israel is too radicalized against Palestinians after 100 years of conflict, the Second Intifada, and October 7.
That's a huge problem (immediate, unjustified escalation to violence becoming the norm) and:
> The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
"I feel unsafe" has become the catch-all excuse for everything in the recent decade. It's used to justify everything from Karen complaining about someone's behavior in public to people calling the cops on someone for looking at them wrong, to making a scene on a public bus, to police officers jumping the gun and escalating to violence, all the way to war crimes. When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card? Like a magic spell that you can cast before doing something crazy. It's like that old "He's coming right for us" South Park joke, but instead of being a joke it has real life and death consequences.
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> I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are
IDF trains them.
https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/with-whom-are-many-u-s-polic...
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> I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are'
American police officers ARE trained much like IDF forces. By the IDF! https://jinsa.org/jinsa_program/homeland-security-program/
The IDF is a foreign occupation army, not the police.
At least in the US, the police come from much the same communities as they patrol, and there's some sort of democratic accountability. Don't like the police? You can vote for local government candidates who will implement reforms.
In the West Bank, Palestinians are subject to arbitrary violence at the hands of foreign soldiers. The IDF is not there to protect Palestinians. It's there to protect the Israeli settlers who are taking Palestinian land. If Palestinians don't like how the IDF behaves, tough luck. Palestinians can't vote in Israeli elections, so they have zero say in the government that exercises ultimate authority over their lives.
This is a fundamentally different situation from policing in the US.
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Their media is non stop hammering the citizen with scary Muslim stories since the beginning of the country, every day since birth, with a density as if nothing else ever happened in the world.
Deprogramming is possible. Just tell them it is impossible to argue it was their own idea. They know how hard it was rubbed in their face.
A certain amount of politics should/must be tolerated on HN, because you cannot compartmentalize technology, politics and morality.
No-one, not even people who say they like technology but do not care about politics, should be able to live their life wihtout knowing that we live in a world where six-year old blind children are murdered with automatic assault rifles.
(For the same reason that no-one should be able to live not knowing that jewish once were murdered in the millions in gas chambers.)
Technology IS politics.
Technology is a form of control. And in the capitalist system, this control is mostly exerted by private companies, on which the rules of democracy do not apply.
There must be guardrails
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I'm wondering about the broader context here: Are stories like this rare or common? Are they increasing or decreasing in frequency?
Yeah it is getting worse. This was written 3 days ago before this event by Human Rights Watch:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/03/13/in-the-shadow-of-war-set...
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> this is war 101
The west bank isn't at war with Israel. There wasn't some conflict or event that has justified these actions.
I wish people understood this better. Even if you could manage to justify what's happening in gaza as "this is war", Gaza and the west bank are separate entities with separate governments. The west bank, in particular, is more like an Indian reservation in the US, with the Israeli government effectively exercising supremacy over all aspects of the government.
Theoretically, the IDF is supposed to be the police force for the west bank. That's why they occupy it.
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> this is war 101, every day.
Except this situation has been going on like this for 60 years - with Israel, or the other western states having absolutely no plans to change anything about it (except making it even worse).
I don’t think anyone is going to forget about this
completely deranged way of thinking that calls for a hard self-reflection.
> this is war 101
genocide 101
"The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe."
Funny way of saying trying to run someone over.
I just know what type of person you are from this comment
I have followed this conflict since Operation Cast Lead and the beginnings of the siege on Gaza.
Israel has been using enormous amounts of force against the Palestinian people since then, with death tolls of _at least_ 100 dead Palestinians for every dead Israeli.
For a very good account of life in Israel around the time of Cast Lead I recommend Guy Delisle, brilliant diary in comic form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem:_Chronicles_from_the...
His partner was working for Doctors Without Borders, the Israeli Army refused to let them enter Gaza to help the people suffering under their bombardments.
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There are horrific acts on both sides going back very very far. I grew up in a country with a relatively balanced media reporting on the issue and have tried my best to stay informed. Suicide bombings, bus hijackings, mass murders.
The inequality in force applied has still been a constant.
Also, the fact is that any peace deal has been made impossible by the hunting down and killing of anyone that could actually hold that conversation. All secular and left wing movements in Palestine have been eradicated in favor of Hamas, Islamic Jihad et al.
Likewise the Israeli extreme right wing now in power killed their own prime minister for trying to negotiate.
Also see the birth of Hezbollah as a response to Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which also gave rise to suicide bombings. These then spread across the region. The reason Israel invaded was to fight the Palestinians there who were displaced by the founding of the Israeli state and the following conflicts.
Edit: the Palestinian groups there were doing raids in northern Israel and fleeing back across the border to Lebanon
It's a gordian knot at this point and i am very doubtful there will ever be a peaceful solution.
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Imagine, this is just one of thousands upon thousands of incredibly tragic and similar stories of the last few years (going back much further than October 7th).
Most such stories never see the light of day. Hind Rajab is one such story which got some reasonable exposure [0]. I suppose this one will as well get due exposure at some point.
But the vast majority of similar atrocities will just vanish in the sands of time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Hind_Rajab
The scale of these atrocities and our governments' support are the reason why this story should be on HN. We elect people who support this, therefore it's only right it follows us and comes up often, even when it's not convenient. That "inconvenience" (skipping a story in HN feed every now and then) is nothing compared to the oppression our democracies support
Also there's barely a tech industry to talk about as our economy collapses through $100 oil and private equity backed destruction of our way of life - what else are we supposed to discuss now - it might as well be Israel.
The US economy will probably be ok. It's an oil exporter and the Apples and Nvidias are thriving.
This wouldn't have happened if they didn't dehumanize their enemies. This should be considered a crime in itself.
Who exactly are you blaming here, the IDF or the boys family?
https://x.com/Imamofpeace/status/2033709979211886928
Who pulled the trigger here?
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https://www.haaretz.com/west-bank/2026-03-16/ty-article/.pre...
This kid will grow up and fight, and I don't blame him. Gaza is a concentration camp, West Bank is an apartheid. These people have the audacity to bribe and threaten our governments to do their nationalist ethno-state bidding in one hand while pushing the narrative that the west must not have any identity or borders in the other. They fund PACs that threaten 80% of congress with "we'll front an opposition candidate and BTW 97% of them win". They fund NGOs who offload the people they don't want onto Europe and muddy the political waters allowing both far left and far right extremists to thrive. When TikTok woke the kids, they bought it. When Epstein died they fought tooth and nail to cover it up. Oil is $100, they do not understand the pure rage and anger they have dredged up.
Wtf is this Jew hate and why is it on HN?
Jews aren't all zionists and it's perpetuating jewish hatred to pretend so.
May be they all should embrace "show the other cheek" and the suffering will stop
This is a joke right?
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As an Israeli, this is an inexcusable crime by IDF soldiers. Appallingly, I expect them to receive no punishment. My country's government is criminally racist.
> IDF soldiers
Hopefully, such trigger-happy soldiers are in the minority.
It's hard to claim ""bad apples"" when the top brass acquits soldiers who get caught on camera sexually abusing a prisoner and instead prosecutes the whistleblower for leaking evidence of the crime.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2xrz71zm3o
They are not. And they are incited by their hierarchy to commit more crimes, because they are not held accountable
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Eh, tbh I've given up. Can't point out the terrible things that the IDF are up to without being labelled an apologist, or terrorist supporter, or just getting a massively negative reaction.
Now I'm not one to fall prey to the conspiracy theories around Judaism...but like...is it not possible to say that both hamas and the IDF do terrible things? And that innocent civilians are caught in between, with the usual bad faith reasons of "they were hiding hamas members" aka the exact same rhetoric that Russia used when accused of something terrible that they obviously did, deflection and formal outrage.
The very fact I feel I have to tread so carefully with my comment is an indication that something is seriously, seriously wrong. I don't live in China, I don't live in Russia. But when speaking about Israel or the IDF, I feel like I do.
> is it not possible to say that both hamas and the IDF do terrible things?
I agree. Hamas and IDF do terrible things - the ICC issued warrants for the leaders of both. This is why an external party has to impose a solution and it should involve in my opinion separation (two-states.) Both parties are radicalized at least for now and need to be separated and allowed to manage their own affairs while allowing the other to exist.
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I feel something very similar. I have strong views that what Israel is doing is wrong. But I look around at our politics (in the UK), and there is such a well oiled Israeli PR operation that is very happy making career ending accusations that talking publicly about this is actually quite dangerous (Not helped by the loonies who are, and have always been disgusting anti-semites). And you look at our politician's stance on it - and the career of people like Lord Walney, and it's clear we're in a very dangerous place. I think there is a very wide gap between what the average British person actually believes about Israel and what is happening to the Palestinians, and the acceptable positions you can express in Westminster. I also fear that once the dam breaks, and it's no longer the case, that the swing back against Israel is going to be quick harsh, and that's difficult because I have friends and family in Israel - I would like to see Israel be a free and open liberal democracy that shares what used to be western values, but maybe we're too late for that.
Also to note UK is on massive rise in anti muslim sentiment in recent years. That also a major contribution
If you feel the need to temper your speech to avoid offending people you are using the wrong moral compass.
There are plenty of good reasons to speak carefully, thoughtfully and compassionately, but avoiding criticism is not a good reason.
I'm not avoiding criticism, I'm avoiding very real legal repercussions by treading so lightly. Lest I get caught in the crossfire.
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I am German. My government does not acknowledge the tragedy that has been unfolding in Gaza since the Hamas attack in October 2023. It’s absurd. Since then, Jewish people in Berlin who were demonstrating alongside Palestinians against the war in Gaza have been beaten down by the German police. In 2021, Esther Bejarano, the last survivor of the Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra, passed away in Hamburg. Whenever she commented on the culture of remembrance, the media was eager to report on it. Whenever she commented on the situation of the Palestinians, it was not reported in the media. People sometimes ask how it was possible that the vast majority of so-called ordinary people in this country back then could simply tolerate these crimes against Jews and look the other way. Now that should be clear to everyone. The Max Planck Institute in Rostock estimates that well over 100,000 people have been killed in Gaza. But nobody here gives a damn (at least not publicly). We’re even supplying weapons there. Everyone acts as if they’ve forgotten what was written in German newspapers about the current Israeli government when it took office, and as if there were no connection to what’s happening in Gaza right now. I am deeply and profoundly disappointed in the elected officials and public servants of my country. They have learned nothing from the atrocities committed by their grandfathers.
I live in DE too, it's terrifying. I didn't realize the extent of the armaments shipped to Israel from Germany until recently.
The Israeli navy ships were built in German shipyards and subsidized 30%...
It's terrifying everywhere, really shines a light on the insane levels of propaganda we live under. I don't really know what can be done about it, it's really just hard to wrap my head around living in a country that so explicitly and directly supports an ethnostate and their active genocide.
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I find this bewildering. Im not German. Im not Israeli.
Yet I have known that Israel sails German subs (the best in the world) since.... the Greek financial crisis (the subs were part of the scandal) ? Certainly since the mid 2010s.
Why is this?
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> They have learned nothing from the atrocities committed by their grandfathers.
No no, they have learned from them. That's why they are the biggest backers of these new atrocities on the whole continent - they learned exactly how it's done.
Same thing in Austria, everyone in mainstream politics basically ignores the topic and when pressured parrot something like "Israel has the right to defend itself" or "It is very complicated"
Repression against students and demonstrators is happening regularly
> Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra
Is this something from the post-war or did that really exist?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Orchestra_of_Auschwi...
“The Germans wanted a propaganda tool for [SS] visitors and camp newsreels and a tool to boost camp morale.”
There were also several men’s orchestras.
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The last time I was in Berlin (2018), I was actually somewhat shocked by the amount of antisemitic graffiti that I saw just about everywhere (especially on lamp posts). Especially given the strictness of the laws against such speech.
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It's even more insidious, I know activists in your country and they not only abhor the current support for Israel's genocide but they are terrified of their activism being criminalized under anti-nazi laws. How ironic.
i am honestly puzzled as to why germans, with all the educations they have received during decades, are letting this rock as is. or maybe disillusioned would be a better term...
While I agree with you on the case of Esther Bejerano (a recent example from public broadcasting shows that her own communist beliefs and support for BDS are seemingly 'censored' [0]), I find the general situation complicated. Although it should be easy for any half intellectual being to contextualize the recent Israeli aggression by mentioning October 7, like you did, this is often not done. At the same time I think that the coverage of likely Israeli war crimes also happens in German media and I think nobody is looking away. Still Germany is the reason why the whole mess exists in the first place. I feel, that Germany, has quite some problems like many other countries to find it's role in a world where particularly the UN is failing and international law/human rights seem not enforcable.
[0] https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/koepfe/Esther-Bejarano-Das-Erb...
> Germany is the reason why the whole mess exists in the first place.
I think this is the most unfair thing about it; Germany might be the reason, but it’s not Germans paying the consequences. It’s not 70k dead Germans, but 70k dead Palestinians (a Semitic people).
I can understand thefeeling of wanting to make amends for their crimes, but they are making amends by now allowing a whole new genocide to occur, against a completely unrelated people.
The tragedy in Gaza, the tragedy in Srebrenica, the tragedy in Rwanda? Genocide is the word.
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There is a difference between war and extermination.
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>and unfortunately for us the palestinians political leadership has brought us all into this scenario
Simply not true. The plan from the start was to take over the area for jews, see Ben Gurions private letters. Netanyahu has supported Hamas to make sure that Palestine couldn't be politically united to be able to continue taking over the west bank. The power balance has since long been tipped to one side that is engineering the situation.
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Germany is cucked, what Hitler did was outrageous and destroyed any rational ability for generations - and yes while I am heavily critical of Israel and the demonstrably true supremacy and nepotism they have created outside of Israel, I am strongly against the "rounding up of Anne Franks". Germany must now tread the difficult tightrope between standing up for themselves and going full-on loony right, and every time they fall they simply reset to loony left. This is why the establishment just puts their head in the sand.
An eyewitness account from the article:
(The eyewitness) told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account. I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired. "No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
This is a side effect of using a guerilla terrorist tactics - normal people are start to be seen as "threat".
A side effect of brutal oppression is that it drives people to use guerilla terrorist tactics.
Yes, it is a downward spiral. How do you propose to stop it, assuming both parties want another one to disappear from reality, and see any compromise as weakness?
This is outrageous. No humanity by the Israeli government and the IDF
Remember; they are punishing Palestinian for wanting to be free and sovereign. To "LIVE FREE OR DIE" is definitively more than a motto to them.
What does free mean? A state next to Israel?
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Regarding rules of whether or not this should be posted here - I think it's less about whether it's important and more about whether it causes arguments.
As the saying goes, religion and politics.
People are going to have varying and at times oppositional views to things like this, and frankly the rest of the internet is often flooded with those discussions, so bubbles isolated from them can be a positive.
We don't need to mourn the woes of the world every hour of every day.
I was going to say I disagree, that I think that at least some level of discussion on HN about important things going on is important. Israel is actually a tech powerhouse and a lot of this is seriously shaping the defence technology policy and is telling a lot about how power dynamics actually can play out.
Having said that, my settings show me all comments that are flagged. HN is apparently not capable of having a respectful conversation about this. Almost anything expressed on the actual topic has been flagged. The only thing left are comments rules lawyering to say we shouldn't discuss the topic at all.
It's kind of an indictment of the users of HN. It might be the right move to remove the article, but it becomes the right move because the users of this site can't be trusted to actually conduct a conversation about it.
It shouldn't be on HN because it has nothing to do with tech and we come here to escape
It should be on HN because we are human and once in a while it is good to see human interest break through and calibrate the room
This I came here to escape politics and the conflict. As a Jew there are not many places left on the internet for us to escape.
If anything, it's refreshing to see something that isn't about the latest apple / llm / current techbro trend bullshit
I can go to Reddit for that.
You can also not click on links you are not interested in. Is that difficult?
You can go to Reddit for everything. There’s even r/hackernews.
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nah, leddit can collapse any day and i would not even notice.
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I see people saying this story doesn't belong on HN. genuine question, if this story were about a german national would it be considered as political? is palestinian existence inherently more political than other peoples' existence?
I'm saying this as someone who doesn't really care about this certain topic:
Either we allow _all_ political content or nothing.
The HN guidelines are incredibly grey and handwave-y
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
To me HN became to big for its own good since the Covid days. It's like the reddit front page except there are no subs with mods but one big flood (basically /r/all).
If I got to /r/linux, /r/selfhosted/, /r/networking/ or other tech subs I'll probably find what I saw on HN 15 years ago. But less and less here.
Banning all political content means banning all mention of open-source software, self-driving cars, anything involving a Big Tech company, anything concerning AI, anything to do with EU or US legislation, anything involving hacking or right to repair, anything about copyright...
Ban all politics, and you ban >99% of HN content. Heck, the very concept of HN itself is political!
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What about AI slop causing the Iranian school-children strike ? US military confirmed that they are using AI to identify targets and provide coordinates. Will you ban that because its "politics" ?
bingo
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From the guidelines:
What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
If the story was about a German national then yes, I would still say this is political and doesn't gratify my intellectual curiosity.
Every time these sorts of articles get posted people that express a differing opinion from the standard get flagged (making it so you can't read their post at all) pretty quickly making it seem more like the intention isn't to start discussion. It seems like it's gotten to the point that the people that just get flagged into oblivion stopped trying to post.
It's not just these articles. Having any differing opinions on basically anything now.
It's as far from hacking interest as it gets for me.
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FWIW, you can read flagged posts and comments by turning on “showdead” in your profile.
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News not connected to technology or VC doesn't belong on HN.
is that an opinion or a consistently enforced policy?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45202200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47136179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46543457
I wouldn't care about it being a German or American or Chinese national any more than I care about it being a family of Palestinians, and more importantly it wouldn't belong on HN in any of those cases.
This has nothing to do with tech, isn't something hackers would find interesting, and doesn't satisfy intellectual curiosity, end of story. It's generic run of the mill nightly news slop that I could get from literally anywhere else if I wanted to waste my time reading/watching uninteresting news that doesn't affect me.
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this article is about the west bank
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I'll bite: If for any reason, probably because it's neither technically interesting nor entrepreneurial in nature.
US Politics seems to get more of a pass, probably due to Silicon Valley being there (and nearly all the major tech outlets), similarly some China news gets a pass, also largely when it relates to supply chain and Taiwan.
> US Politics seems to get more of a pass,
This goes beyond US politics. The US and Israel do not exist in a bubble. This conflict can and will have big repercussions which will impact our technical and entrepreneurial institutions.
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I think the middle eastern conflicts are a tragedy. That said, this story does not belong on HN. As others called out this is a tech community and while there is sometimes an overlap with politics, it should at least be somewhat related like mass surveillance or AI being used for war.
HN is one of the most informative and least toxic communities and I’d appreciate if it would stay this way.
At the same time, there must be a point where general humanity overrides community guidelines.
Why? Everyone has alternative news sources where they can find such stories, and there’s nothing new here. There’s always some tragedy that you could argue deserves more attention, I don’t think we should hold our guidelines hostage to pleas for the heart.
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Why does Gaza get 10x the coverage on HN and other social media well, when what has been happening in Sudan in the same time period is 10x worse?
(The 10x coverage number is from algolia hn search, the 10x worse number is from reported killings in the past year)
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HN routinely talks about politics. Thinking that technology and politics can be understood in isolation is a pipe dream
> it should at least be somewhat related like mass surveillance or AI being used for war
Sure. Let's spin the story on developments in laser-guided sniper rifle accuracy:
> Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire.
The tech community props up these regimes by continuing to serve their tech needs. Everything is political in this day.
Toxic is saying politics needs to be kept separate. If we can't discuss how tech is literally fueling genocide, enslavement, and exploitation of people, then all other discussions tacitly serve those functions.
I disagree with this. The tech bros building these dystopian systems for big paychecks need to be informed somehow, this is the best way to reach them. They do care what their peers think of them and if we can reach their conscious in between bouts of agentic blogs and vibe coded hopes and dreams, then that is what we should do.
> and least toxic communities
Your comment sounds toxic to me. It endorses silence in face of a genocide.
We discussed a lot other wars here without immediate technological or economic consequences: Ukraine, Iraq, etc.
Why not the genocide in Gaza & West Bank?
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Exactly! Don't bring politics into HN. Everyone and their dog have grievances. There's a time and place for them.
Exactly, we shouldn’t waste the precious time of HNers so that they can instead… checks notes… read about the nth vibevcoded side project!
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Mainstream world news has a place on HN if it contains "significant new information", and as much as this site is primarily for curious conversation and gratifying intellectual curiosity, we don't want to pretend that horrific events like this aren't happening.
Horrific events happen almost every hour of every day. This is political, and the events that are upvoted are always from the same political perspective. If you don't see this, you're blind. But from my perspective, mods do see it, are ok with it, and that is unfortunate. There are few places left online without explicit political bias. HN used to be one of them.
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and your comment is flagged, as is mine. This article has no relevance to HN, just more political activism
As was mine. HN: a place for technology (and Palestine)
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> The same reason your inane question is on HN.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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These are not even a isolated or a new pattern that Palestinian people are enduring such atrocities by the rogue israeli regime with full impunity from the western super powers. In fact, the Palestinian people have been suffering such oppression and injustice everyday at the hand of zionist society on a regular basis since 1948.
In fact, here are some more such equally horrible actions of the israelis just in the recent days that you may not find on the western media ever.
1. Either the illegal settlers or the israeli occupation force themselves set a Palestinian boy on fire in Ramallah: https://x.com/dillyhussain88/status/2033528694833127569
2. An israeli ran over a 6 years old in front of her home in Hebron while she was playing: https://x.com/anadoluagency/status/2033226719986069866
3. Another israeli settler deliberately ran his car over a Palestinian child in the Nablus: https://x.com/angeloinchina/status/2033402402062434589
Historically, the western news media have always downplayed or completely ignored the persecution of Palestinians at every cost. Now due to rise of social media and citizen journalism, the israeli and zionist atrocities are coming out every single day hundreds of times, causing the abysmal distrust in these media outlets across the globe. To salvage their credibility, the western media now picking up some stories here and there, yet use the very artistic and convoluted language not to damage the image of the rogue zionist regime as much as possible. Journalists with conscience, who could not take anymore such order from their bosses, kept resigning from these news outlets:
* The New York Times - Anne Boyer: The Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry editor for The New York Times Magazine resigned in November 2023. In her resignation letter, she wrote that she could no longer work for the publication amidst the "reasonable tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering" and "verbally sanitized hellscapes."
- Jazmine Hughes: An award-winning staff writer for The New York Times Magazine resigned in November 2023 after signing an open letter by "Writers Against the War on Gaza." The outlet stated the signing violated its policies on public protest.
- Jamie Lauren Keiles: A frequent contributor and writer for the magazine also resigned in solidarity with Hughes after signing the same open letter.
* BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) - Karishma Patel: A presenter and journalist who walked out of the BBC in October 2024. She later published an essay in The Guardian criticizing the broadcaster's "obstructive editorial policy" and its decision to shelf the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack.
- Bassam Bounenni: A veteran North Africa correspondent for BBC Arabic resigned in October 2023. He announced his departure on social media, stating it was for the sake of his "professional integrity" regarding the coverage of the escalation in Gaza.
- Noah Abrahams: A freelance sports reporter for the BBC resigned in October 2023 in protest of the broadcaster's refusal to use the word "terrorist" to describe Hamas, highlighting the internal friction over language and terminology.
* Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) - Nour Haydar: A political reporter in the Canberra bureau resigned in early 2024. She cited concerns over the broadcaster's coverage of the Gaza conflict and its treatment of culturally diverse staff as primary reasons for her departure.
* Reuters - Valerie Zink: A Canadian photojournalist who resigned from Reuters in August 2025. She publicly denounced the agency's coverage as a "betrayal of journalists," specifically citing an instance where the outlet allegedly published unsubstantiated claims from the Israeli military to justify the killing of a Palestinian colleague.
Did you have this pre written for HN or is this just AI slop?
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There's no mention of any particular company, tech or otherwise, here. Yes, you can probably connect your work in some way to something that affects the military if you live in the US or Israel (and even many places outside of it - we're not restricting to direct connections), but, after all, "there is no ethical consumerism under capitalism".
If I worked at [supposedly evil company], I doubt this largely unverifiable story would cause much turmoil. I'm sure at work I'd be hearing about much worse and more concrete stuff already.
It is a verifiable story, it is covered as fact in Israeli newspapers and it includes verification by the IDF:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-forces-kill-west-bank-...
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/p7mq5k5bs
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DIfferent people have different levels of empathy. If you can live with these things happening in the world, let along being involved even in an extremely minor way then fine, but don't try and downplay it.
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> largely unverifiable story
there’s literally pictures in the article of the bodies
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We (and I) have become desensitized. When I saw one of these for the first time about 25 years ago, I was thinking about it for a week. Maybe longer. Because it was new, internet was new, and the video (not the same but it really does not matter) was the first time I saw it for ... real, felt it for real.
But after seeing a 100 of these, after knowing some of these are AI, after seeing news of a 1000 more ... I mean how is columbine or sandy hook different ... you see these but you eventually scroll up, sometimes immediately sometimes after a few seconds.
I am not making light of it just saying ... a lot of people at evil companies are also tuned out.
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I'm a hacker. I find cooking interesting. Stories about cooking belong on HN.
Do you now see that it doesn't work like this?
I mean, a simple search reveals hundreds of stories posted about cooking on HN.
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At least it's more interesting than all those AI stuff.
It’s an interesting look into HN.
Charitably, this is an astroturf that accumulated 200+ upvotes in about 20 minutes, which I suspect is highly irregular for HN. Along, with a very clear concerted effort to quickly downvote anyone pointing out this is isn’t HN. If this is the case, what is HN admin doing about it?
Less charitably, HN is not where hackers hang out anymore. The hackers have moved on and HN is now this.
Interesting how this highlights a philosophical conundrum here that I'm not sure I have the answer to that goes beyond just forums. Do people make the community, or do rules make the community? I can envision arguments for both sides.
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You think, charitably, that this is an astroturf, really? What's the distribution of upvotes look like for front-page posts, binned in 20 minute intervals?
Reviewing your post history, it's overwhelmingly in non-tech related threads. This seems like a standard post for your tastes, semantically. Why then the sudden distaste?
Flag and move on.
yes it does
It absolutely does. Israel uses an AI system("Lavender") to decide which civilians to kill. I remind myself of this fact every single day when deciding where to apply my work. We(software developers) are more than ever exposed to the reality that our products will kill people in the real world.
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Don't worry, it will sadly get flagged like they tend to.
I don't know if HN does, but I very much do. But yes, don't worry - it will get flagged and removed soon, no doubt.
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Well I guess let people vote and moderators do they work.
Maybe I need to see it at the top and then see it disappear to understand what I am looking at when reading HN first page.
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Unfortunately, even in this comment section, you see people conflating the two. People don't realize that Palestinians live in both the west bank and gaza or that there are 2 different government for the west bank and gaza.
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Can't say I'm glad to have read that, but at the same time it's good that male victims of wartime sexual assault/rape get covered. It's just a shame that the response is still incredibly muted. It's like men just don't want to think about it.
Whereas I feel pure, hot rage at the lack of coverage, the lack of anybody caring. Raped men being offered paracetamol because the clinics after only for women has been seared into my brain for a long time now: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/jul/17/the-rape-of-....
Nothing has changed since then either.
It is good that it gets covered, but the antagonistic and accelerated nature of modern media means that such coverage is rapidly subjected to spin, repackaging and so on. This opinionated but imho fair article summarizes how one of the self-admitted participants in the incident was treated as a mini0celebrity by one of the right-aligned Israeli TV channels:-
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/08/the-main-suspect-in-the-sde-t...
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HN was never about technology, just things interesting people find interesting.
Its in the rules. And up to Dang to decide.
Technology isn't apolitical.
Too many people think of politics as a tribal team sport. It's not. Politics overlaps with tech because it's really about labelling situations accurately and modelling consequences effectively.
If you fail at those, politics can literally kill you.
Technology happens to be one of the ways it can do that.
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> it is very unfortunate and we as a society feel bad for this
> Sick pro palys...
Lol. And you as a society don't feel bad for illegally occupying and colonising other people's territory? Why don't you withdraw within your borders?
> Whilst Palestinians celebrate death
This poem might interest u/dikozaken: https://youtu.be/aKucPh9xHtM
> Why don't you withdraw within your borders?
They already did that multiple times with no positive outcomes whatsoever, go learn some history
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I think that's the point - to discourage (certain) people from living there at all. Except it turns out people are capable of never-ending suffering and persevering through it.
You would think Israelis would already know this very well.
Choose?!
What's surprising is how nonchalantly people like you suggest victims should just surrender and leave. Exactly the same thing was told to Ukrainians after the invasion. The fucking audacity you people have is staggering.
The audacity you have to encourage them to die for nothing is what's staggering.
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What you're talking about is called ethnic cleansing.
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If my tax dollars, military and government are killing those two people every second, you better believe that I'm going to do everything in my power to stop it.
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It's not collateral damage in the gaza war. This was a family in the west bank, where there is no hamas and no "war", that was gunned down in cold blood for no reason. Not even presenting a threat. I hope one day you are able to find compassion.
I go to HN to read about technology and startups. I don't want to read about Israel/gaza, etc, I get enough of that everywhere else in life. But I guess that makes me not a compassionate person.
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Which war? This happened in the West Bank!
For people who don't follow this, the West Bank has a different government vs Gaza (they are not friends!), and is in fact pretty compliant wrt Israel.
This isn't a war, though. This is an extermination. This is an army with effectively limitless power against unarmed civilians.
> Collateral damage is inevitable in any war.
"Collateral damage" is when "they" die. "Tragedy" is when "we" die.
Or, in other words: "Some of you might die. That's a sacrifice I am willing to make."
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> the Zios
It's okay to just say you don't like Jews. Just be honest.
_account created 3 days ago_
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Zionism is the idea that the Jewish people deserve a national state. Being anti-Zionist is equivalent to wanting Israel to not exist as a national state.
Zionism is currently realized as an apartheid system because there are too many non-Jews within the borders of Israel. The solution should have been two-states, but it seems that current Israeli leadership doesn't want that. So what is left? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/11/israels-netanyahu-s...
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And why do they? There's minorities in almost all countries that doesn't have their own state. It's not unusual. What is unusual is creating a state on land where other people already live and then turns guns on them.
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> Palestine is an impoverished community with a terrorist government that isn't afraid to commit atrocities against humanity
If you're going to comment on the conflict, at least learn to distinguish between The West Bank and Gaza.
Please take your propaganda elsewhere. If Hamas or any other group in the region perpetrated any of the war crimes that Israel commits on any given day, every media outlet would be writing about it for weeks. In the meantime, Israel can bomb Gaza literally every day since the so-called ceasefire and nobody bats an eye. Israel just now acquitted its soldiers caught raping Palestinians in custody on camera. No coverage, no outcry. Israel is very objectively a bad guy, armed with nukes.
This is the same Israel that has attacked Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Quatar and Sudan (https://youtu.be/pRxKltphg6c?si=bDSB_jA-KPM4Efzu) and globally trafficked children?
(https://youtu.be/RJhqGDZbqBI?si=MQFuah6er7TvHcaD)
Or is it the Israel that deliberately destroys crops (https://youtu.be/Lyp9Xfess3Q?si=1_4usvB1yjgYhKSb)?
Maybe it’s the Israel that ignores ceasefires (http://youtube.com/post/Ugkxn4SkyNfKESV6nPO_ZzgOhdaH8lb_FAkx...) or fills in wells (http://youtube.com/post/UgkxaPo3ERDtr5fQKPAHnFgxwYkMaEeMgdlo...)
Or it could be the Israel that shoots and kills 234 peaceful protestors (https://www.972mag.com/gaza-return-march-idf/)
Restraint is not really in Israeli vocabulary, and the story being sold is a lie.
The West Bank is governed by the PLO, not Hamas, so it sounds like your concern is that you just don't wish to hear about it because it's an inconvenience.
Terrorist government? This is the West Bank, which is currently governed by Fatah, which has global recognition as the rightful representative authority of the Palestinian people.
I think you're right. Obviously this is awful and the IDF shouldn't be doing this and should be held responsible (of course they won't). But it seems like the implicit message behind the story is Palestine good, Israel bad, which at best is a massive oversimplification.
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If you don’t mind developing, what made you switch stance ? many people never change their minds even when faced with overwhelming evidence , and based on your prior level of support, I’m quite curious about the actual process .
Hard to tell in retrospect. I think the thick layer of distrust against palestinians (which was built by debunked lie after lie from Hamas etc over the years) was finally breached by the sheer asimmetry of power that Israeli forces have gained against Palestinian civilians.
Just forget that the two parties are Jews and Arabs and instead make them Suaheli and Kazakh, and then put one group in such an "agency-less" position as Palestinians are, and give the other group the leverage in power as the Israelis have, plus the grievances. Even if you can understand these grievances – there is just no way these things aren't going to happen.
Plus: The state of Gaza has reached a level of destruction that is just ... well basically as if they have nuked the place (Like I initally favoured). At some point the humane thing would be to call it a win and leave. An that point has probably passed a long time ago.
Plus, I have read about the background of some of Netanjahu's cabinet members and they essentially tick all the boxes of what I find problematic with the aforementioned power asimmetry:
Prior aggresive behaviour against Palestinian civlians in the settlement areas, with the victims having no proper way of legal recourse. Like ganging up on random Arabs there and beating them up. I know there is backlash for this from within Israeli society but man, things are bad if a literal street thug is getting a place in the cabinet, because he behaved that way.
> many people never change their minds even when faced with overwhelming evidence
Not the OP, but many people do. I've changed my stance on similar topics multiple times in the past, based on new (to me, at least) evidence.
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> nuke Gaza for good
Some great empathy for innocent civilians you got there, monster.
Lets just say many Gazans didn't display any empathy for dead or almost dead civilians either that they dragged into the city and instead were filming themselves celebrating over corpses, and captured women bleeding from their r_pings as well as from the achilles-heel cuts applied. A technique highlighting how deep enslavement-culture run in this part of the world.
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Nuking Gaza is an abhorrent position but I don't think there will be any reform out there until there is a decisive win and if I have to pick a side it's not the Palestinians. If the Palestinians win it'll embolden other states or factions to have another go at the six-day war again and possibly prop up break-away action against other factions' host countries. There needs to be a complete and utter defeat that results in an enlightenment process. The strategy and military approach Hamas uses for example cannot be seen to win.
You have to look at the bigger picture. If they lose it's going to be a problem for all of us. Thus I have to support them.
And no I'm not a Trump supporter or Jewish or Israeli. The current operation in Iran is a fuck up. The whole thing that lead to 10-7 was a fuck up. It should have been dealt with years ago, preferably through diplomacy and threat of a strong hand rather than actually having to bomb the place.
There's no righteous side at all in this conflict.
Same thought in reverse. If oppressive regimes see that intentionally backing a population into a corner ultimately lets them get away with genocide on the global stage then presumably more of them will attempt it in the future.
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> more conflict means more power for them
That's literally the strategy of the Likud, who undermined the more moderate Fattah to allow the extremist Hamas to reign on the Gaza strip, hoping that one day the 7th of october would happen, and would let them unleash a genocide...
https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/netanyahu-money-...
> My gut reaction to 10-7 was to nuke Gaza for good
What the actual fuck. Sorry, but you’re a fucking maniac.
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> Only relevant because the conflict is often portrayed in terms of European Colonialism or US race dynamics.
What do you want to tell with this? That there are no race dynamics because some people have a lighter skin color?
No "Judeo-Christian civilization", no "Villa in the Jungle", no "Light unto the nations", nope...
> about an incident involving New Zealanders and Maoris
Really?
Aotearoan here. Our racist history is shameful. Many massacres, both sides but mostly one way traffic.
Our history of "othering" indigenous people here in law was shameful too.
But seriously, and with all due respect, fuck you!!
We are facing up to our racist past, present and (Dog help us) future.
Tikanga Māori is joining our legal system.
Being openly racist to Māori is politically suicidal (some right wing politicians are giving it a go, and getting burnt for it)
Māori institutions are integrating themselves into all levels of our culture and society
And on and on. New Zealand is a Māori country, I am Pākehā, I have no problem with that, I belong here too. We (white people) are learning to share, learning there are more ways than our ways. Israel could learn from us, but...
The Isralies are utterly different. The violent homicidal, nay genocidal, racism of Israel is institutional.
Fuck you. For all we have our problems with racism, we are not genocidal racist violent thugs, as are the IDF representing the Israli state
Sorry but this is so off topic. Does not belong here.
Reminder that whatever you think, war, terrorism, questions of "the right/wrong target," etc are all insperable from AI and technology these days. These soldiers were where they were for concrete reasons dictated across vast automated networks; their choices of engagement are insperable from the tools either side (army and occupied population to be clear) here has or is perceived to have. War is simply many different "user stories," to put it coldly, and there is ethical and/or practical reasons, as technologists/scientists/academics, to see it that way (even if the goal is to just know thy enemy).
This is all why Anthropic is now a "supply-chain risk", why Thiel and Musk are particularly powerful persons-qua-tech-CEOs, why embedded microcontrollers getting so cheap (or whatever) enables drones instead of suicide bombs.
Hamas is the reason for all this. Palestine people will never forgive them
please...
It’s hard not to wonder whether better technology could someday help stop tragedies like this.
No. Better technology is only making it more efficient. We need better humanity, better morals, better policing of criminals in power.
That's misguided. Technology is a tool. Tools can be used for good or bad. The hammer that builds a hospital can also crack a skull open.
No, we need better people controlling the tools.
The israeli army are famous for their tech?
Well, right now the "better technology" is Israel's use of the "Lavender" AI to designate people to kill because they are "likely" to be hamas supporters.
And yes, probably they could have used better technology to realize that people in the car are not a danger to them. But that would immply they actually want to avoid killing civilians instead of looking for any excuse to shoot them.
The Holocaust was built on IBM, the genocide in Gaza is built on Azure. Technology won't be on the side of stopping these tragedies.
nothing has changed https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
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A classic "HN is not for politics unless it is about Palestine" post.
Sad story. War is sad. 2 countries in a war that cannot end otherwise. Its either Palestine or Israel unfortunately. Put your good will and emotions somewhere it can actually make a sensible difference guys
The West Bank is not part of the war (if you can even call the Gaza war a war, it's an extermination campaign, but still, people do call that a war).
This is just a regular tuesday massacre for the IDF, not an ongoing conflict, just occupation policing.
Did you serve in Army? Do you know war from first account? Did your country take part in a war in the last decade? Or is it proxies who fight your wars? Its independence war for Israel everyday since its 1948.
Israel, West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon - all contain a majority/big minority of Palestinians - yet only Israel and Jordan effectively impose law and sovereignty over them.
PA cannot deal with their own radicals. I mean, they actually hand out prizes to shaheed's families. They loves this guerilla war equation. Its good for the Palestinian cause apparently cause they keep doing it for years now.
But somehow no momentum is gained by the Palestinian movement, and nobody dares to suggest its because their head is stuck we-know-where. And this applies to West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon.
Somehow most Israeli Arabs AKA Israeli Palestinians do not have a radical/resentful sentiment towards the Zionist idea. Some even serve in army, or do national service. Some have houses I can dream of. But yeah right, lets blame the Jews.
This picture you paint with big words, holds no grasp in the Middle East reality. Its a Eurocentric perspective, mostly held by people in countries which fight their wars via proxies. Its non pragmatic for Palestinians, and only serves Europeans. As evidence you can see how far the Palestinian cause has progressed in last decades.
But in the early 21st century Europe is currently in the back seat, sits, learns and questions: How does Israeli economy is thriving even though they have so many active conflicts? And I'll answer what you do not even dare to think of: only a righteous cause can fight such war and have the upper hand.
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This is incredibly heart breaking, but unfortunately, in war, there are always casualties. This is the grim reality of war.
Wasn't aware Israel had declared war on the West Bank.
There is no war in the West Bank, this is ethnic cleansing.
"Ethnic cleansing" is such a nice word. "Etničko čišćenje" is what the Serb paramilitaries called raping and murdering a population to make them leave. "Remove kebab" as the later meme culture would call it. It's so trite, and a little funny it seems. We should call it what it is: *genocide*; thereby robbing the perpetrators of any semblance of cleanliness or propriety.
Monsters are filthy. Let's call them the filthy monsters they are.
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I have no doubt isreali forces are responsible for a lot of war crimes. At the same time i see how one they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination. All sides just need to stop with that hatred. It leads to so much pain.
> they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination
This is the biggest lie of all.
Israeli Jews constantly dream about eliminating the Palestinian people. We talk about it openly and without shame.
We discuss pros and cons in terms of security, legality, world public opinion, etc. These are the only considerations. We don’t see any humanity there. We just need their land.
That said, it’s true that some Palestinians have dreams of defending themselves from us.
I believe they need all the help they can get.
>Israeli Jews constantly dream about eliminating the Palestinian people. We talk about it openly and without shame.
We? speak for yourself loser
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> i see how one they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination. All sides just need to stop with that hatred. It leads to so much pain.
I think by now we all know this is a straw man, considering the disproportionate amount of power both parties have. There is absolutely no excuse left for what Israel has been doing in Gaza.
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This will never stop, because on both sides there are people who benefit from the existence of the conflict and they are the ones with power.
The last time when Israel had a PM who was willing to find a way for ending the conflict, he was murdered and replaced by those who want a perpetual conflict.
I have worked in Israel for some years, and the vast majority of people that I have encountered were very nice, but I have also seen a few that were definitely evil, and of course, the evil ones were concentrated in positions like the government or the management of companies.
Because most Israelis live in constant fear that if they would ever lose their technological and financial superiority their neighbors will come and cut their throats, when I was there, and I assume that also today, the majority of the population was exploited in a way that would not be possible in any other country.
Everybody had to work very hard, much harder than in any other country, and prioritize work over anything else, because this was a patriotic duty, like one might have worked in USA during WWII or in Ukraine today or in any country that is at war and its survival depends on how everyone works, except that in Israel the war has been continuous for three quarters of a century.
For the elites of the country this war economy is extremely desirable because they can demand any sacrifices from the workers, since those are supposedly not for increasing the profits of the company owners, but for ensuring the survival of the nation, and anyone who would not want to do what is required would be seen as a traitor.
For ending the conflict, it is not possible to just say that from tomorrow the parties in conflict should stop hating each other. Reparations would be necessary, like Israel itself has received plenty from Germany and other countries.
However, it is very unlikely that Israel will ever have a government willing to end the conflict, instead of keeping it alive as long as possible, to have something with which to scare the population.
Even post Epstein revelations, Chomsky's core thesis in The Fateful Triangle from 1983 still holds. A minority of hateful, brutish war hawks and crazy people on all 3 sides perpetuate a never-ending cycle of violence. The challenge is removing them from power and holding them accountable.
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There's another 1000+ "invaders took my shit" issues in the world. Your logic only leads to non-stop fights between everyone
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Except those people are dead. Those who ethnically cleansed Arabs (and Jews) during the nakba are dead. Almost everyone who was ethnicity cleansed is now dead. At a certain point you need to recognize that a new generation has been born into this conflict, and with it, a change in circumstances. Attitudes like yours ignore that Israelis who were born there don't have another home to 'return' to.
That doesn't mean that Palestinians don't have a right to resist occupation, but the circumstances are significantly materially different today then 40 years ago.
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My understanding if you read the Israeli news articles is that the justification is that the car was going fast:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-forces-kill-west-bank-...
Given that the IDF involved were undercover agents (according to the reports), it seems unlikely that this family knew that driving fast would get them killed.
From the article, an eyewitness account:
> He told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account. I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired. "No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
Indeed. Often one of the key details omitted is that Israel has been illegally occupying the west bank since 1967 as part of an apartheid regime.
The BBC had a literal Israeli officer as the head of their Middle East department. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/high-court-rules-favour-j...