There is an alternate World Peace Force that just got started recently because I believe, as regimes change, the UN will audit what happened. The issue is there will now be another international body that will argue the other way. It’s not exactly 3d chess, but, it is chess. Purchase of US TikTok (chess moves).
Hospitals may have been used for retaliation [0], but it is unclear how many & in what capacity (according to accepted conventions, using a hospital to treat wounded combatants wouldn't make it a valid military target, for example; but hiding weapons or personnel would).
A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Israel did not have a habit of drastically overstating their case and quietly walking it back after they end up killing more journalists and toddlers than active combatants in hospital bombings. Also if reports didn't deliberately conflate 'armed man' with 'Hamas militant' and euphemize about the 'Hamas-run Interior Ministry' like that one does.
> Israeli forces dressed in doctors’ scrubs and women’s clothes have killed three Palestinian militants in an undercover operation in a hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.
> It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy… The following acts are examples of perfidy… The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status...
(Assassinating a paralyzed patient in a hospital is also not typically - ahem - kosher. Even if you're in uniform!)
Why was it decided that feigning of civilian, non-combatant status is bad? because it led to death of civilians who had no part in the fight; pretending to be your enemy's civilians bring no such issue. Although assassinating a patient is also not kosher it less relevant to the discussion about use of uniforms.
> Could you clarify where in the Geneva Conventions this very important exemption is stated?
The spirit of the law is more important then its letter. Also I think Israel never signed that part of the Geneva Conventions.
> Because people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators, and even enemy civilians are protected persons.
When did that happened in the Israel-Arab conflict? (When did that happened elsewhere? It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?)
> Also I think Israel never signed that part of the Geneva Conventions.
You, earlier: "A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Hamas did not have a habit of not putting uniforms in combat."
Now it's suddenly not a problem? I can't imagine Hamas signed the Geneva Conventions.
> It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?
German Jews in the 1930s/1940s would probably disagree.
> When did that happened elsewhere? It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?
I mean, the IDF killed three Israeli hostages in Gaza, while with their hands up and holding a white flag, because they thought they were infiltrators.
It's not at all an uncommon scenario to have to deal with in war, especially asymmetrical conflicts.
IMO, Israel stepped very clearly over the line, repeatedly, in how they handled it, but the parent post is a pretty reasonable summary of the considerations.
> Article 8 of the Rome statute, which established the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague, defines a long list of war crimes including “intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected”.
> But it makes an exception if the targets are “military objectives”. Philip-Gay said that “if a civilian hospital is used for acts harmful to the enemy, that is the legal term used”, the hospital can lose its protected status under international law and be considered a legitimate target. Nevertheless, if there is doubt as to whether a hospital is a military objective or being used for acts harmful to the enemy, the presumption, under international humanitarian law, is that it is not.
Again, I think Israel committed war crimes here and throughout Gaza. But the parent poster has a point that using a hospital for combat purposes risks its status.
(There are still rules to follow in that case, that weren't followed. Again, war crimes.)
> Truth: Mass-destroying a country's hospitals, murdering the doctors, nurses, workers & patients, mass-executing aid workers ... is Israeli. And only Israeli.
This is the same mistake many made about Nazi Germany; convincing themselves that the Germans were uniquely evil. It stops people from having to examine themselves.
> The rules aren't written by plucky revolutionaries, but the big powers. They, thus, fairly often favor people who fight like the big powers.
I think this is one of the ugliest things about this particular war. While the IDF unquestionably committed various war crimes over the course of the conflict anyway, the bulk of what people found objectionable very well might have been done in total accordance with international law. Despite many failures and excesses, the IDF at least paid lip service to trying to do that, as a policy.
It's just that, the reality is, the rules are based on entirely different assumptions about how war is carried out. If they might lead to something resembling a "humane" war (hah!) when fought between, say, a relatively evenly matched France and Germany, they're quite ineffective at preventing a humanitarian catastrophe when you have a modern force attempting to siege an ultra-dense, militarized enclave run by an organization with no real hope of a conventional victory or interest in the well-being of its civilians.
And so you end up with this absurd situation where the world witnessed, over and over again, unimaginably horrible things being inflicted on the population of Gaza, and the Israelis responding - if we're being charitable, not entirely unreasonably - "Why are you getting mad at us? We're following the rules!"
It's just that, clearly, the rules are insufficient to match people's moral sentiments.
> While the IDF unquestionably committed various war crimes over the course of the conflict anyway, the bulk of what people found objectionable very well might have been done in total accordance with international law.
I think this is somewhat out of touch, the main reason this conflict has garnered so much attention is the amount of times Isreal commits war crimes.
Let's suppose it could be demonstrated conclusively that every hospital in Gaza that Israel has bombed had Hamas militants operating out of them, as Israel has claimed. Do you think that'd silence Israel's critics about bombing hospitals? Do you think it should?
Steven Sinofsky (ex Microsoft, and was also in the Epstein leaks), has been running cover for the IDF for the last few years. One tweet that comes to mind where he alluded that just because a building may have a few first aid kits, it's not a hospital.
- Hamas is a terrorist organization that planned and executed a mass terror campaign, fully knowing and hoping for the reaction. And boasting about it continuously and repeatedly.
- Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.
Israel's response was very similar to the US's response to 9/11. 3,000 Americans were killed by terrorists (a smaller percentage of the population than Israelis killed on 10/7) and as a response the US started two wars killing at least 100 times as many Afghans and Iraqis (there are lots of debates about the total casualties there too just like Gaza). This is not a defense of Israel, just a fact that seemingly is never part of the conversation that I think can help people better understand why this is happening.
You forgot eighty years of occupation, cultural , economical and ethnical cleansing of the local indigenous people called Palestinians with help of US and Western countries mainly.
> - Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning,
You’re being generous. There’s zero chance Israel didn’t know it’d happen and it let it happen anyway. The one country which all but brags about tying off loose ends.
Because of literally years of terrorist acts from Hamas? Because the action initially had overwhelming public support? Because, as any military action without proper planning, they promised a quick victory and had no plans beyond "bomb, bomb, bomb"? And had no plans for "what do we do if we don't succeed"?
For an exactly same "military action with no planning but a lot of bravado" scenario see Russia's invasion into Ukraine.
> Israel and it's defenders have been lying about the death toll this entire time and Hamas was not.
Lol if you believe that Hamas has not been lying about the death toll. Including immediate precise counts split by women and children within minutes of each Israeli strike.
As a person living on the border between New Mexico and Colorado on land that borders reservations and who drives past the site of a residential school pretty regularly, I completely agree.
I don't know why you're using the past tense here, I was still trying to talk some sense into these people barely two days ago. It's hopeless at this point.
If you have 3 hours, there's a documentary you can watch, about a man who was sanctioned by the government to kill a lot of "communists" in 1960's Indonesia: The Act of Killing (available at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q ).
It's sort of understandable why the defenders of the genocide have to keep defending it. Stopping doing so today would mean admitting that until yesterday you've been defending utter inhumanity.
A review:
> Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a challenging documentary. It is not only difficult to watch, but it also probes into one of the most grotesque aspects of human nature: the capacity for self-delusion in the face of horrific atrocities. This isn’t a film about history, facts, or statistics; it’s about the memories of the men who killed, the stories they tell themselves, and how they continue to live with the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. The film’s power lies in its ability to take the viewer beyond a surface-level understanding of evil and into the psychological abyss of those who have committed atrocities—and seemingly moved on with their lives.
> Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth quoted military officials Thursday as saying, “We estimate that about 70,000 Gazans were killed in the war, not including the missing.” Kan 11, the country’s public broadcaster, attributed the information to the Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT) and said there is now an effort to analyze how many of those killed were civilian or militant.
And the IDF ain't contesting it:
> “The IDF clarifies that the details published do not reflect official IDF data,” the spokesperson said. “Any publication or report on this matter will be released through official and orderly channels.” The spokesperson did not answer if the IDF held data about the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza or if such information would ever be released.
Where is the source? Show me the actual source. Showing me that one news agency is reporting that another news agency reported something, with no way to verify anything in that chain, does and proves nothing. It's a claim with no backing.
The official quote clearly states "the details do not reflect official data". If you see it as "no contest" we're gonna have to chalk it up to cultural differences in parsing language.
At the end of the day, you made a conscious choice to accept the claim that the IDF confirmed the death toll as truth, and to spread it online as such, despite not having any actual proof. That was Hamas strategy since 0day, long before Israel even managed to clear the last Hamas terrorist from its borders after the attack: just make anti-Israel claims. Just make them. Everybody will accept them, no questions asked.
At the end of the day, I make the conscious choice to trust three different Israeli news outlets, CNN, the fact that the IDF isn't offering a different estimate, and satellite photos of the destruction in Gaza.
The IDF is most welcome to publish a claim and have it dissected. I would remind you we're on a thread where their "official data" fell apart because of direct video evidence of their war crimes obtained from their dead victims' phones.
> You can't blow up entire hospitals and kill patients just because someone's storing stuff in the basement
I believe hospitals lose much of their protection under international law when they’re dual used like this. (There is still proportionality and morality.)
I don't know how much weight the legalist argument holds here, seeing how the IDF has been acting extra-legally for a long while now, but anyway, I seriously doubt that each destroyed hospital and each destroyed school held terrorists. We've seen the IDF target civilians, aid workers and journalists too many times to believe them so easily.
This is a common excuse, but The Truth is Israel doesn't care they're housing anything in the basement, they'll bomb it anyway. The ethnic cleansing agenda is plainly obvious at this point. In fact they seem to prefer having Hamas in predictable places, easier to take out and a convenient excuse to cull a few hundred of a superfluous population -- the Palestinian birth rate is way above that of Israelis. The operational reality is that Hamas is simply the best advertisement for the political hacks in charge of Israel, the system perpetuates itself because the current situation provides leverage for both ruling parties. And it turns out when you have two antagonistic death cults, people die. Solution: don't get born a Palestinian in Israel? Depressing.
I don’t like it but it was a war. October 7 was a declaration of war. I heard almost no one complain about the “war on terror” and I’m sure similar collateral occurred.
For some reason people forget the pearl harbour event that happened before it all kicked off ?
Not trying to say it’s fine to bomb a hospital, but it doesn’t seem fair to single out the IDF. Do you whine about Hiroshima ?
It's been awhile since I've been in high school, but even back then standard public education was to discuss the topic very respectfully and to question the mainstream narrative that "more lives were saved because of it". It's not uncommon for US High Schools recommend Barefoot Gen as a supplemental reading on the subject. Americans largely feel complicated about Hiroshima and absolutely do not view strong critique of it as "whining".
In the PNW there is also plenty of discussion in public school about the shame of Japanese internment camps in the US.
As others have pointed out "The War on Terror" has been nearly constantly criticized by Americans since it's inception. Mocking it on the Daily Show was a fairly common theme even 20 years ago.
With a specificity of the number of shots and the spatial reconstruction of the scene, there's some impressive uses of tech to bolster reporting:
>A digital reconstruction of the scene shows that the soldiers would have had an uninterrupted view of the arrival of the convoy.
>The reconstruction was jointly achieved with the two survivors of the incident, with an immersive spatial model they could walk through and amend. Together with spatial and audio analysis we established the position of the soldiers on an elevated ground with an unobstructed line of sight to the emergency vehicles.
Forensic Architecture, the people who did the spatial reconstruction, have been around for a while. You can see more examples of their investigations here: https://forensic-architecture.org/
Forensic Architecture are great. I remember their work being very hot in the international art scene around ~2018 (when they were nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize, among others - https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/turner-prize-2...).
Not sure if they're still fêted as artists or have moved away from that label. I still find their approach completely mesmerizing nevertheless.
What digital reconstruction? They took a witness and basically did what they said in a 3D editor. I don't see anything sophisticated about this. They also did things like count weapon sounds in audio, which might be the only factual reliable data point on this report.
Forensic Architecture is a truly remarkable work. If anybody is unfamiliar with Eyal Weizman, I would highly recommend checking out more of his work. Including the 2014 series Rebel Architecture and some of his talks. He recently did a presentation called "Conditions of Life Calculated" at the David Graeber Memorial Lecture at CIIS that I think gives a lot of insight into why the work being done at Forensic Architecture is so remarkable. He also talks about his work with David Wengrow and the Nebelivka Hypothesis based on novel archeology of ancient Ukrainian cities
> case seems pretty clear, especially since the soldiers tried
Even if the 'soldiers' didn't, it wouldn't have mattered as the governing apparatus usually goes out of its way to protect their own militants.
Ex A:
Detainees executed, unarmed civilians killed in their sleep, a child, handcuffed and shot, all covered up by the chain of command – this is the testimony of more than 30 eyewitnesses, former members of UK Special Forces ... Panorama – Special Forces: I Saw War Crimes ... reported a series of cold-blooded murders by UK military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan over a period of ten years, followed by years of official cover-up.
Yes and no. It does matter because it illustrates both malicious intent and evidence of guilt, as in the guilty party knew they were perpetrating a criminal action.
However, you are also correct, the IDF has little or no accountability for criminal behavior.
> the guilty party knew they were perpetrating a criminal action ... the IDF has little or no accountability for criminal behavior.
May be the brazenness is why they make the best Tech CXOs?
"The Israeli tank commander who has fought in one of the Syrian wars is the best engineering executive in the world. The tank commanders are operationally the best, and are extremely detail oriented. This is based on twenty years of experience — working with them and observing them."
Eric Schmidt (Start-up Nation / Saul Singer et al / pg. 41)
> Hamas was insane to think that Bibi would NOT BOMB the Gaza in retaliation.
My theory is that they knew this would happen and they did it because they knew it would garner support (which it did) and they also knew they had nothing to lose because this is what would have happened in the long-term anyway. They chose between a quick death and a slow death. Unfortunately, everyone else who originally chose them to protect them didn't get to choose. I doubt most would have voted for this if they had that choice.
You can't just stamp out a guerilla resistance the way Israel have tried to do. I suspect Hamas reckoned that a well-timed short term sacrifice would turn global opinion against Israel.
I also almost believe that top echelons of Israeli intelligence knew about the upcoming attack, but they didn't expect THAT many fatalities and that Hamas were going to take hostages alive.
What in actuality was happening long-term is the increasing integration and cooperation of Gazans with Israel, reduction of tensions and hopes for eventual peace. Which is an existencial threat to Hamas.
People in places like this generally don't feel the need to condemn Hamas because it's understood that they are bad. Hamas is not an ally of the United States, it's troops and police force don't train with the United States military, it does not buy weapons from United States factories, and it does not receive government aid from the United States. If you feel the need to, you can add a condemnation of Hamas to basically every post here and it'll be accurate. Hell if you want to add a condemnation to the Iranian and North Korean governments too while you're there, that'd be fine too.
The attack on Israel was deliberately designed to provoke Israel into committing atrocities, and Israel- partially- took the bait.
That is a very different situation from, say, the Kosovo, when the Serbs just walked in intent on killing everybody.
Was that good? Of course not.
If you go around accusing Israel of genocide, deliberately omitting the little detail of facing an enemy who does everything they can to get their own people killed to make you look bad- are you being fair and just in your assessment? Obviously not. Are you incentivizing Hamas to do it all again? Absolutely.
> If this was happening against the west, people would care a lot more
It’s literally happening in Ukraine and, to a lesser scale but precisely the same in type, Minneapolis. On the other hand, there are conflicts across Africa and Asia which are not receiving half the attention.
> Because the West doesn't fund and shield the perpetrators unlike Israel.
You could make an at least passable argument that the US offers a favorable media environment to our MENA allies (i.e., those other than Israel) during what is by all accounts an extremely brutal and mostly ignored conflict in Sudan.
I hear this sentiment a lot when it comes to people trying to justify why Ukrainians or Iranians are somehow less deserving of their attentions, and it infuriates me every time. If the goal is to try to prevent unjustified killings, then it makes no sense.
And WW2 only has more journalist deaths because some number of the genocide casualties had been journalists before the Holocaust.
Being a journalist typically provides you some protection in times of war, but for journalists who are part of a group suffering genocide, it's a liability.
From where I sit nobody is questioning that the Israelis are supposed to be the good guys in this story. But the stories coming from the region are horrific! Is it true that it is the official policy of the IDF to shoot to kill children who throw stones at them?
Plus because Israel is making serious efforts to choke off all information from the region, I understand that it takes some time before a sober accounting of an incident like this reaches the outside world. To avoid the charged rhetoric I have waited. Yet the point blank executions of humanitarian workers is still shocking to me. Such reckless hate, it must destroy a person.
Im questioning whether the Israelis are the good guys. Frankly I don’t know how you can look at their history of provocation and unbalanced retaliation and not begin to wonder if maybe they aren’t the good guys
> Earshot used echolocation to analyze the audio on the recordings in order to arrive at precise estimates of the shooters’ locations. Echolocation is the process of locating the source of a sound based on an analysis of the sound’s echoes and the environment in which the sound travels. The Israeli military destroyed and cleared so many buildings in the Tel Al-Sultan area where the ambush of the aid workers took place that very few structures remained. This destruction actually strengthened Earshot’s ability to determine the positions and movements of Israeli soldiers, based on identifying the surfaces responsible for clearly distinguishable gunshot echoes. Rather than having multiple buildings reflecting the sound waves, there were only a few standing walls and the emergency vehicles themselves.
> Earshot used echolocation to analyze the audio on the recordings in order to arrive at precise estimates of the shooters’ locations. Echolocation is the process of locating the source of a sound based on an analysis of the sound’s echoes and the environment in which the sound travels. The Israeli military destroyed and cleared so many buildings in the Tel Al-Sultan area where the ambush of the aid workers took place that very few structures remained. This destruction actually strengthened Earshot’s ability to determine the positions and movements of Israeli soldiers, based on identifying the surfaces responsible for clearly distinguishable gunshot echoes. Rather than having multiple buildings reflecting the sound waves, there were only a few standing walls and the emergency vehicles themselves.
> “Earshot forensically analyzed over 900 gunshots fired at aid workers. It took one whole year of careful listening to reconstruct an auditory picture of what happened that dark night,” Lawrence Abu Hamdan, the director of Earshot, told Drop Site.
I'm not sure how much this was actually necessary to the eventual verdict if this is ever adjudicated, though, if "hiding the evidence" is a factor:
> Following the ambush, Israeli forces crushed all eight vehicles using heavy machinery and attempted to bury them under the sand.
> The body of Anwar al-Attar was found near the ambush site on March 27, and the bodies of the other 14 aid workers, all wearing identifying uniforms or volunteer vests of their respective organizations, were found in a mass grave near the site on March 30.
But the understanding that they were advanced upon in a walking wave of fire, and then the survivors were executed one by one at close range, may help.
Its not automatic due to bot activity. It is from people actively suppressing stories that don't want other people to see.
This is discernible by watching how long it takes stories like these to reach a flagged state on the new submissions page. It is further evident by watching which comments within those submissions get flagged based upon their upvotes and visibility.
Indeed, and try suggesting there should be minimal accountability for flagging[0] and you'll likewise be flagged. Sure maybe the data says there's not some cartel flagging conspiracy but it starts to seem awful suspicious that even reasonable discussion of this misfeature gets flagged.
It's desperation at this point. With each passing day, the truth comes out in clear, non-negotiable detail, and therefore the desperation to hide and/or deflect increases.
You always have plenty of excuses when you get called out. Looking the other way while bot armies mass downvote pro Palestine / anti ICE / anti PayPal mafia content is complicity. I’m sure you have the data to suss out what is obvious to anyone watching these threads in real time.
Think about what you are saying for a moment. Why would "bot armies" come to Hacker News of all places to flag pro-Palestine articles? Don't you think it's a much more reasonable conclusion that people read the site guidelines[1], which clearly say that political posts are off-topic, and then flagged for that reason instead?
There are a million places to discuss politics online. If I wanted to discuss politics, I would go to any one of them. Claiming any HN moderator is 'complicit' in atrocities is absurd.
In 2026 I don't for one second think it organized inauthentic activity is implausible. I think in fact it's probably pretty extensive these days, though I'm not especially sure about penetration of HN in particular. But everything from marketing to state actors to organized political actors to anarchic but politically motivated online groups are mobilized to influence online forums and I think these phenomena are reasonably well characterized by academic research. It can also be people who aren't organized but abuse flagging out of political commitments.
I also don't think your read of it as an organic outcome of a post that obviously violates guidelines is the natural conclusion here, I actually think that interpretation strains credulity more. Where I agree is that I don't think moderators are being heavy-handed on issues like this, but I do think high level political events do merit attention at least once in a while and I don't think the HN pattern has been toward oversaturation.
And in terms of things that make this story unique, I think it's the highest standard of specificity I've ever seen in reporting of this kind, it's using impressive technological reconstruction of the scene, it's actually quite unlike typical news reporting on the topic and it's hosted on a platform that was YC-incubated, and I think DropSite News is in an ascendant moment as a major news breaker. There's lots to talk about here imo.
I mean doesn't your take strain credulity as well? Let's actually think where most discussion happens these days, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, the few remaining newspaper comments sections. I'd struggle to list more off the top of my head.
Why wouldn't influence campaigns, we know every big country to be running, target this site? What reason would they have to leave it out from their list? Why not target a major news forum for the more wealthy and connected (predominantly) Americans in tech? This is not an uwu smol bean site anymore and the cost of (undetectably) botting any given site is rapidly approaching cents.
Mike Huckabee said yesterday that all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates should be taken by Israel. That would involve a cleansing of hundreds of millions of people.
Mike Huckabee is a clown who was more or less strategically plonked into Israel to feed soothing quotes to the settler minority. I think it'd be an error to assume that his particularly evil flavor of Christian eschatology reflects the political or military policies of Israel (which is saying a lot, since Israel's military policy is very clearly good at producing war crimes).
This is commonly misconstrued as christianity, but in christian tradition it would bring about the coming of the antichrist, massive persecutions globally, and armageddon.
Keep in mind that these powerful men believe that Jewish people coming back to Israel is the first step of the Apocalypse, and the return of Christ. It is a death cult quite literally trying to bring about the end of the world, and they're ruling the world. Also, they are insanely antisemitic and believe most Jews will go to hell.
> Also, they are insanely antisemitic and believe most Jews will go to hell.
A good chunk of them are insanely pro-semitic as well, as they adopt the dual covenant belief that Jews will actually also go to heaven as well as Christians. I've actually never met anyone that adhered to the pro-zionist dispensationalist view that fully thought out the implied consequences, then proceeded to harbor a personal hatred of Jews. The vast majority of them love all things Jewish and hold them in high regard.
Did he qualify it by indicating his claim is based on centuries old religious documents that are not agreed to by any majority of the Earth's population?
In https://hckrnews.com these flagged items appear listed. With https://hckrnews.com as my entry into HN I don't see the need for HackerNewsRemovals other than curiosity to see what is removed.
I'll give you the "party line" (i.e. best-effort understanding of HN-moderators perspective) for why articles like this are frequently flagged:
1) The entire discussion is a rehashing of the exact same points every time the topic is posted, and not very insightful
2) The participation rate for experts (or even authors) in the discussed field/topic is very low (compared to programming topics)
3) The discussion rarely stays civil and requires excessive moderation
An observation (have no verbatim quote, but believe from dang) is that there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective and exact topic (presumably for above reasons). You can certainly still blame the flagging on bots or Zionists, but it's almost certainly not only those.
You left out the parts about how and when we turn flags off, about how a certain amount of political overlap is both necessary and inevitable, but that it also can't be too much. All of those are important factors, and I've posted many explanations of them:
We can't, however, turn off flags on threads we don't know about. You guys (I don't mean you personally!) unintentionally assume that we're omniscient. We aren't, so we need people to tell us about cases like this.
In this case, no one told us; I ran across it randomly. Randomness is only good for partial results. For reliable message delivery, someone needs to email hn@ycombinator.com, and please remember that it takes time to work through that (er) rather active inbox.
This is such a garbage assessment. I have don't see post of pro-Israel companies and startups that fund/enable this massacre being flagged for political content?
What is this facade of impartialness and too much politics? Tell that to the people massacred.
> there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective
I'm always sceptical of this given it doesn't happen to similar posts about Iran.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
The forensic reconstruction to this level of detail is novel and interesting, both for the methods deployed and for the likelihood that the half-life of unsolved war crimes appears to be decreasing.
I think it also touches on issues of interest to the hn crowd (it's being reported on a YC-incubated platform!), and one especially unique things about the reporting is the spatial reconstruction of the scene, which is not a degree of detail you typically get, and limits the number of variations of interpretations possible.
I also think issues of censorship are very high on the list of topics of interest on HN and few topics are subject to more extensive censorship than reporting on events in Israel and Palestine.
Israel and Palestine is one of the most obsessively covered topics in every form of western media. All the more the reason it doesn’t belong on HN. I’ll grant that there’s a tech angle to this specific story, but past experience with such articles on HN is that they reliably devolve into endless repetition of fixed talking points on each side. No useful information or opinion is conveyed, just endless insinuation and infective.
Furthermore, there are handful of accounts who sole purpose seems to be to pump the HN feed full of Israel and Palestine. People who want so badly to talk about a single political topic should probably go to Bluesky.
I agree that Bluesky is a great place to go into more depth about it, and in many respects a better place than HN to get good discussion. But I think there's equivocation going on here.
Framing it as "obsessive" is an attempt to shift away from subject matter toward an attitude of journalists or consumers, like it's borne of the same attitude as paparazzi. But I think it merits significant coverage not for that reason, but because it so frequently meets criteria for meriting journalistic attention.
I agree that comment sections can be bad, but they aren't always, and to some degree I would rather trust moderation than suppress reporting on a topic of legitimate interest. You're exactly right that a lot of reaction is toxic and politicized, and sometimes the way that manifests is by trying to cook up rationales to suppress stories by flagging them. Out of respect for the concern you've identified, it would be a huge mistake to let politicization win by allowing politically motivated abuse of flagging.
I think the solution which will lead to the best quality of life for people in and around the levant is a single, secular state. Two states that are both ethnonationalist is unsustainable, and any single state which isn't secular can only be achieved through genocide. Freedom to practice whatever religion, seperation of church and state, and no apartheid for a certain group of people.
If you post like this again we will ban you. There's no place for slurs on this site.
Yes, we apply that equally - I've banned the account that was slurring the opposite group elsewhere in this thread (btw, their comments won't appear to anyone who hasn't turned 'showdead' on in their account). In that case, I didn't post a reply because the account was new and already had a pattern of breaking the site guidelines. In your case, the account is well-established so we wouldn't just go ahead and ban it without replying or warning first.
Dang, I'm writing this reply as a target of antisemitic hate. I am not strictly a Jew (though I am often mistaken for one due to both name and appearance). My relatives were hunted and gassed in WW2.
The poster you are responding to is making ha joke:ish observation (probably badly communicated) that the modus operandi in the Israeli Government is to label all evidence of their crimes "antisemitic" no matter how truthful they are, no matter how many facts, no matter how vile their actions look.
Netanyahu et al have nurtured a context where there is no difference between real antisemitic hate and valid criticism. He and the people like him equate truth to antisemitism. Something which hurts many of us.
We have to be proactive about moderating anti-semitism on HN—which does appear, unfortunately, though of course not in every comment that someone happens to read that way. There is huge variance in how people interpret these things and we do our best to be charitable. (Also, I had better add that we do our best moderate other types of slur in just the same way.)
Let's assume you're correct. Such a point needs to be expressed thoughtfully and substantively, not snarkily in a way that pattern-matches to a slur. This ought to be clear from the site guidelines: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - "Eschew flamebait." - "Don't be snarky." - [etc.]
It might not be the most substantive comment ever made. But by now it is about as classic as the Stephen Colbert quote ”reality has a well-known liberal bias”, and I bet you would not consider that quote hateful near-bannable offence, versus Republicans, right? It follows the exact pattern, and has a similar connotation. There is a large contingency in power in Israel and the west who loudly considers the truth to be antisemitism. Therefore we have a duty (BECAUSE ALL OTHER WAYS HAVE CLEARLY FAILED) as human beings to mock them. And what better way to mock them (like a court jester) than to use their words against them?
There are others here who would strongly disagree with this view, or the other views expressed on here. Personally, I was startled by the post in question, even as I wondered what was actually meant by it. We all have to coexist on here.
Were you more or less startled by reading it here or hearing those words from the mouth of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's Minister of National Security since 2022?
Here's a tip I learned the hard way: you can't assume that other commenters have seen or heard the same things that you have; and when they have, you can't assume that they have the same subset in working memory.
As I mentioned above, I was also startled by that post, because the obvious pattern-match was to something nasty.
No. Your message is. A lot of people commit mortal sin of logical fallacy by extending the responsibility for actions of certain group of people to everyone sharing with them ethnicity or religion. It‘s the stupidity worth of the strongest condemnation given the context.
It‘s not jews committing war crimes in Gaza, it‘s zionists. It‘s not muslims or Palestinians planning and executing terrorist attacks, it‘s religious extremists and far right nationalists. When there will be common understanding of this simple truth, fighting the root causes will be much easier.
Good instinct to fight against antisemitism, because there is a lot of it. Unfortunately the Israeli government lobs accusations of antisemitism at its (legitimate) critics frequently, enough so to muddy the waters between actual antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli state.
Nah, let’s not let them to set the narrative. It is not antisemitism to criticize Israel and I do not care what Israeli or my (German) government says about it.
I disagree that it's ambiguous, and I think how you choose to interpret it comes down to the difference between charitable interpretation and bad faith.
Whether you agree with it or not, does not matter. It is ambiguous due to a simple fact that I did not had the choice of interpretation in my mind. It is how I understood it and it differs from your understanding. The author should have been more clear.
This is 1) extending responsibility for actions of induviduals to everyone sharing with them ethnicity or religion 2) a display of anti-semitic bigotry
Otherwise it, like most tech heavy investigations, showcase how much useful information there is fly around out there in the air just waiting to be hoovered up - and (althought not the case here) YC funded companies happen to be at the frontlines of such work
whether or not you agree that zionism is intrinsically jewish or not, it would serve you to understand that the poster you're arguing against does not believe that zionism is intrinsically jewish, and thus, you're talking past them.
But it's not all zionists committing war crimes in Gaza, it's the IDF. And it's not all IDF members, only some individuals. And its not all of those some individuals, only some of their brain and trigger finger. And it's not all the time, only some of the time.
You are surprisingly right. I know people who served in IDF and would prefer to have nothing in common with those criminals. Generalizing to them would be wrong. It is not voluntary service, different people are required to serve. But people aside, is IDF as institution rotten? It is not generalization to say „yes“, when such things happen. An institution is an entity with the agency to prevent such things and not only did it fail, it covered up. Is Israeli government complicit? Hell, yes, same reason.
There were people in the German army (Wehrmacht) who wanted to have nothing in common with those criminals. Some even tried to kill Hitler and get rid of the regime.
Re the concern about flagging, the situation is much as I've described in these past threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Specifically, when I looked through who had flagged the current post, I saw the usual coalition between users who appear to be consistently flagging for political reasons, and other users who have quite different flagging patterns than that. In any case, virtually all of the accounts that flagged the thread were established HN users.
Sometimes when people bring this concern up, I go through and make a list of other stories that the same accounts had flagged, to illustrate the point that their flags are not exclusively targeting one specific topic or vector. I've done that here in a collapsed reply, if anyone wants to take a look.
I hope this explanation helps - your posts in this thread seemed to me to be in good faith so I wanted to respond in kind. If you still have a question that my comments and links to past explanations haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Here are some stories that flaggers of this submission also flagged. I have no idea why, except for the handful of obvious spam, but it illustrates the point I made in the parent comment.
It seems that people, even "established HN users" will flag literally anything. Do you feel that there is any remaining article quality signal that can be obtained from the current flagging mechanism?
If the above list gives the mistaken impression that flagging is basically random, that's an artifact of the way I cherry-picked the list. The flagging system has problems, for sure, but it's a vital part of how HN's system functions.
If you squint and look closely, though, I think you can detect this in the above list. The weirdest "wtf?" cases of flagging are ones where the threads had a lot of comments and were on the frontpage. That means upvotes won the tug-of-war with flags, as they should have in most of those cases.
Conversely, it you look at the submissions in the list which had 0 comments or very few, it looks to me like most were either spam, low-quality articles, or dupes.
Remember, also, that some flags are just mistakes - the link is easy to fat-finger or misclick, and the UI doesn't provide feedback about that. That's likely to change soon as part of work that tomhow and I are planning.
Funny to see the complaints of this being flagged but no complaints about people posting here flagged. If these aren't going to be open discussions and responses get flagged to invisibility what is the purpose?
There's 4chan but for leftists (leftypol) and there's reddit for leftists (lemmy or raddle). I'd also argue Mastodon is kind of twitter for leftists/hackers
I think The Atlantic is actually pretty close to the mark. Committed, hardcore ideologues frequently turn out to be authoritarian, even if they refer to themselves as "anarchists". Most of these ideologues are busy administering ever more stringent purity tests to anyone they encounter lest someone in their vicinity commit wrongthink.
There is a name for people who build coalitions through compromise and diplomacy, and work towards pragmatic solutions to actual problems — they're called "centrists".
Of course, that's because Qatar actually is an authoritarian state, unlike the US. It hasn't stopped Al-Jazeera from challenging the authority of other nations or claiming that they are authoritarian. Pot, meet kettle and all that.
Oh no, we shouldn't talk about war crimes because the iPhone I'm tapping my words into has some tech from the nation committing those war crimes. I should be more THANKFUL!
I wouldn’t point to Epstein, but there is a very powerful lobby that will protect the image of any Israeli government. A lot of Evangelicals also consider Israel important in bringing about the apocalypse, without which they can’t access eternal life. I wish I was kidding on that last one, but there are people actively trying to bring down civilisation so they can go to heaven.
I think when people say "West", they automatically think US and UK - and given their war crimes in recent history, you do get this sentiment, yes. I suspect, however, that this view has exacerbated and now includes other "western" countries that are silent/complicit in current horrific war crimes.
Isn't mass murder of civilians the most Israeli thing ever? For those out of the loop, this isn't an anomaly.
It's a societal-level policy: 47% of Israeli Jews want all Palestinians killed; 82% want all Palestinians forcefully expelled (i.e., ethnically cleansed) [0] which would constitute genocide. 56% want the same for all Israeli Arabs.
So, it's pathetic when Westerners act surprised at Israel's antics: you can't support a genocidal state and then be shocked when it does genocidal stuff. This is just Tuesday for them.
Once you understand this, Israel's actions are not an anomaly. It's the natural expression of people who consider their neighbors beneath them, and barely even human.
Echolocation based on audio from a cell phone video, with the reports echoing off flat walls in the area, establishes 3D troop movement during the massacre, and the eventual close-range executions. Including of the person whose cell phone it was.
Eyewitness accounts may be dismissed for any number of biases by the motivated reasoner, but echoes are echoes.
There are plenty of people on HN who are active in protecting human rights, and this particular incident is a clear example of the amount of work still left to do in the world by those of us who care about each other more than we cling to national identities - especially those national identities with a long track record of human rights violations.
Hacker News is not solely news about hacking. "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
The problem is majority of Israeli citizens think the government isn't doing enough.
Cue the citizens that protested to stop the aid trucks from going into Gaza. The citizens that protested because the Israeli military arrested (after a lot of international pressure) soldiers that were caught raping Palestinian prisoners. They were protesting for the right of soldiers to continue to rape.
> The citizens that protested because the Israeli military arrested (after a lot of international pressure) soldiers that were caught raping Palestinian prisoners.
The people you're talking about are Israel's far-right. I don't think you can index from them onto the median Israeli's political views anymore than you could reasonably index from a member of Hamas's armed wing onto the median Palestinian.
(A recurring theme in both I/P and MENA conflicts more generally is that political minorities - WB settlers in Israel, for example, manage to wield disproportionate power and induce chaos and strife across the region.)
Might behoove you to know how schooling in that "country" is handled..especially when it comes to Palestinians. Below is an excellent insight as to how this is a "country" wide homegrown effort to raise unhinged cilivians that celebrate the murder of children & women.
Exactly. I replied to the comment above, but a lot of people don't appreciate the right-left divide in Israel is very different to that in other western nations. A leftist in Israel would probably be considered extreme right in some other nations.
I know a fair number of leftists of both Israeli and Palestinian extraction, and I don't really think this is true. The more nuanced and IMO correct appreciation of left-right politics in Israel (and MENA more generally) is that they're flavored but not inherently dominated by ethnonationalist movements that reached their fever pitch in the 20th century, and have slowly been replaced by ethoreligious movements that have substituted declining follower numbers for more extreme activity.
I don't know what to tell you. If you think I don't believe that Israel structurally dehumanizes Palestinians, you'd be wrong. But you'd also be wrong in thinking that this is somehow a deviation from the norm; both sides are actively governed by their political extremes, like I said.
A stat I came across recently is that over 60% of Israeli's don't support a two state solution - i.e. they don't support the idea of Palestinians having a state.
This also tracks with my travels to Palestine, friends who have travelled more recently, and various videos and article: the right-left in Israel is quite different to the right-left in other Western nations: namely, if you talk to a leftist Israeli, they will also hold strong view against Palestinians.
> A stat I came across recently is that over 60% of Israeli's don't support a two state solution - i.e. they don't support the idea of Palestinians having a state.
This is, critically, a pretty different political position from defending people accused of wartime rape. That doesn't make it a good position, but we shouldn't conflate the two.
As for why: Israelis don't appear to disapprove of a two-state solution any more or less than Palestinians[1]. Both are absolutely committed to the idea that their one-state solution will be supreme.
I just wanna say it's nice to see more people finally waking up and smelling the ashes. I can only hope in the future this genocide will be studied to better understand the main points of failure to not repeat such a widely event covered event.
The media organizations and people who pushed the pro-Israel narrative already understand all of this - it's not a failure, it was their intended goal.
The problem is that both sides lie flagrantly with such frequency that very few claims about the war can be taken at face value.
On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket, with video from multiple angles of the failure, that it hit an empty parking lot in front of the hospital and only blew out the windows and burnt a few cars, and that no more than a handful of people had been killed.
And also the repeated claims that Israel were lying about the tunnels under Gaza Hospitals, and make videos of one such strike (a bunker buster penetrating the parking lot just outside the entrance) go viral, only for Hamas to later announce that one of the replacement leaders for Sinwar had been killed in that strike, and for excavation to find the bunkers / tunnel network underneath that very hospital.
As well as, earlier in the war, a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza.
None of that justifies genuine instances of war crimes and atrocities that Israel may have committed, but there's a reason why people tune out some of the extreme claims that fly around.
But not the video in the OP which demonstrates that the IDF were, in fact firing on aid workers and refugees as they had been accused of, and certainly not the hours of footage of the IDF brazenly taking human shields over the years while insisting they didn't, or the reports of the IDF arming settlers. Curious that you can't enumerate any of these, and you're happy to take at face value a claim the IDF makes but doesn't allow independent third parties to verify (a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza) while abjuring such behaviour.
Independent 3rd parties were brought in to verify, though.
I already said I don't condone any instances of legitimate war crimes. I don't think enumerating everything that has ever happened by either side is very useful. But it's a fact that both sides lie flagrantly about atrocities. Lots of the footage in the early days of the war that was claimed to be from Gaza was actually recycled from the Syrian civil war.
If you want me to start listing some BS that Israel has done, fine - the calendar stunt was ridiculous (if you have followed the conflict, you probably have heard of it). What goes on in the west bank is disgraceful. There are plenty of statements by Israeli politicians that are basically genocidal language (though you can play that game with most countries, random US politicians say psychotic shit all the time).
>Independent 3rd parties were brought in to verify, though.
Reuters was given an IDF escort as they were walked through the tunnel system, during which a room with some servers was called a Hamas data centre, and they nodded along. That's not quite the same thing.
>Lots of the footage in the early days of the war that was claimed to be from Gaza was actually recycled from the Syrian civil war.
Lots of footage that Hamas or advocates for Palestine released or Twitter randos? Not all of those things are equivalent to Israel making a claim.
October 7th was genocide, though. You cannot possibly in good faith argue that what Israel is doing is genocide but what Hamas did wasn't.
Also, to be perfectly honest, we've seen 4x as many people killed in Sudan as in Gaza in the same timeframe, including entire cities being wiped out by gunmen filming themselves literally going door to door and shooting people begging for their lives, lying on the ground or in hospital beds. 6,000 people were killed over a single weekend in el-Fasher and barely a peep from the media.
What Israel is doing in Gaza is more similar to what Russia did to Grozny during the 2nd Chechen war than it is to most of the events historically termed "genocides". Which, to be extremely clear, is not at all a sympathetic comparison. The conduct of the Russians was incredibly brutal and disgusting and unjustified (then and now). I would not want to be compared to them.
But, like, you do have to have standards for what words mean. If the low-tech butchers of the RSF have killed hundreds of thousands in the same timeframe, it's not crazy to be more cautious with the "genocide" label.
The difference between Hamas and Israel is the magnitude of effect. And that for most of the war one party had much more capacity to change its course than the other. But either way criticism of the semantics and focus of media just seems irrelevant and overly abstract. It focuses too much on the group and not enough on the individual. Which drags the argument into the realm that ethno-nationalists of either side occupy. Death is always a tragedy and unnecessary killing is immoral. Anything deeper than that stinks of ignorance and is grotesque.
What Israel is doing is genocide. The International Association of Genocide Scholars say so https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS... . Is there anyone who is arguing, in ”good faith” as you say, that the atrocities of October 7th were a genocide?
Even then, Gaza is far more dense than Grozny; almost certainly the Grozny campaign was conducted with far more deliberate indifference to any concept of morality.
And one side started it by killing 1,200 civilians and kidnapping 250. Which doesn't justify genocide. But it does factor into the response when one side is governed by a death cult that has no problem letting scores of their own civilians die if it furthers their cause.
About 700 israeli civilians were killed, out of which an unknown number was killed by the IDF. Quite a few, if the large amount of hellfired cars are anything to go by, and the kibbutzim inhabitants weren't very happy about being shelled by tanks.
Are you referring to the jewish israelis by "death cult"?
Your are using an argument similar to the repugnant logic of Holocaust deniers. They use claims that Germany could have easily killed Jews /even faster/ as an argument to claim that they didn't commit genocide /at all/.
> If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
You can't infer intent that way. Nuking Gaza isn't free, it would introduce an existential threat to Israel. They are toeing a dangerous line already, and using WMDs would align other countries against them really quickly.
Putin isn't avoiding using nukes on Ukraine because he's a nice guy.
Why have this topic on HN? I mean, search this page for the word "flagged", and while doing that also look at all the grayed-out, downvoted comments that are within an inch of being flagged. Obviously, this is not suitable for HN.
Not sure how much I'm going to trust this source or report. Seems like there's always a motive behind them, and when counter reports come out actually showing it was Hamas murdering their own citizens again there's no redactions or updates.
> The Israeli military was forced to change its story about the ambush several times, following the discovery of the bodies in a mass grave, along with their flattened vehicles, and the emergence of video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers. An internal military inquiry ultimately did not recommend any criminal action against the army units responsible for the incident.
Unfortunately, the takeaway here will be "be better at destroying the evidence". The video is quite damning against their initial claims; it includes an uninterrupted view of their arrival, in marked emergency vehicles with lights on and uniformed personnel, and the gunfire beginning: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
That's literally the opposite of how the media game around this genocide has played out. And Forensic Architecture has proven to be a reliable source thoughout the conflict.