Israeli air strikes destroy offices of Al-Jazeera and AP in Gaza | Hacker News Reader

Israeli air strikes destroy offices of Al-Jazeera and AP in Gaza

aljazeera.com

44 pointsDSingularity46 comments

Kind of crazy what you can get away with when the world's sole superpower gives you a blank check. What's next? Hospitals, places of worship, UN buildings? That's a rhetorical question, they've targeted all of those in the past as well.

Exactly. I just wanted to provide links before I read the end of your sentence.

Some floors - news agencies. Other floors - Hamas Terrorist HQ. They deserved that. Israel evacuated all of the personnel before.

Isn't it crazy how the Palestinians are always portrayed as the bad guys, but whose on Western media 24/7 every war trying to explain why killing children and destroying civilian infrastructure is the right thing to do? Why checkpoints and total occupation is the right thing to do? Why an ethno-state should exist but not a Palestinian one? Why people should be evicted but never return? Ask yourself this question.

This is how it will remain as long as Israel remains a useful tool for the US. The reasoning we're given for this near fanatical support is because they are one of the few allies they have in the Middle East but this is not really the root cause (they have the Saudis after all).

Israel is essentially used as a money launderer for the US where they can by proxy aid the perpetuation of fascist regimes in Central and Southern America to keep a stranglehold over the Panama canal trade route, the oil there, and the rare earth metals including lithium which the US will grow increasingly dependant on as they transition into renewables. Israel has spent billions in arms and training for many of these military and paramilitary organisations that engage in such fun activities as mowing down people who they even vaguely suspect of unionising as well as massacring villages of indigenous tribes that happen to stand in the way of oil pipelines.

The US used to do this military aid themselves in the 60's through to the 80's but the PR has grown so bad that now they just give Israel billions in US taxpayer money to engage in it for them. The media is a lot easier to control in Israel.

How can you justify blowing up a building as a war target, if you're going to tell everyone to evacuate; what was that supposed to accomplish? They say there were targets in there, but if you told them to leave....what?? It is disgusting our country is blindly supporting this

If you read the article: “The building also hosted offices of civilian media outlets, which the Hamas terror group hides behind and uses as human shields”

So when everyone in the building got a call to evacuate, Hamas just said, "no, we'll stay!"

If it were a real military target, they would have just bombed it outright, since you're "allowed" to do that in war...my point was its a BS claim. This is the country known for sniping journalists, and taking intentional knee-shots at unarmed protesters, their word has very little value.

So you think they should be more aggressive? I think that is what they are trying to avoid

> their word has very little value

It would seem to the people who matter that is not the case

Clearly I don't think they should be more aggressive, come on. I'm saying Israel loves to target civilians, and they make hollow claims to justify it, yet the evidence speaks for itself, they commit war crimes.

Edit: And I forgot to add the real context which is just days ago Israel accused the media of fabricating stories, and now they've gone and blown up their offices. I have a hard time believing thats a coincidence

Correct and it was also following a scathing interview Medhi Hasan had conducted with an Israeli official on Al Jazeera.

I don't understand how anybody with their brain switched on can live with the delusion that Israel is somehow some sort of bastion of democracy and western values in the middle east.

Not only do they actively discriminate and commit war crimes against Arabs (and this across all religions, whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim) but they also provide arms and training for far right groups in South America for the expressed purpose of suppressing unionisation of workers and democracy. This includes some groups (and this is hilarious) with pronounced anti-Semitic views. Then again, it should not surprise anybody that far right groups tend to support each other (provided that they are at some distance), regardless of the particulars of their respective nationalities.

Ok, so if there was a school that was taken over by terrorists in Tel Aviv, then the IDF's response would have been to bomb the school to dust, killing all the children inside, right?

If the answer is no, then they are full of shit and the real motive behind these indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets is ethnic cleansing and state sponsored terrorism on the Palestinians.

Lol so you think because they didn’t immediately bomb a school they must be lying? Basically no matter what they do you will condemn them, thats pretty illogical not to mention conspiratorial

I can only assume that you completely misunderstood my analogy. Since your bias seems to have affected your ability to think clearly, let me break it down to you:

You don't immediately bomb a school taken hostage by a terrorist group because if you're not a sociopath, you value the lives of innocent children and teachers over the deaths of terrorists. My point was that we wouldn't accept this logic in any other context but when it comes to Palestinian lives, they are suddenly nothing but furniture surrounding the baddies.

What they could do that would stop me condemning them is to abandon the occupation and settlements in Palestinian land that are illegal by international law and cease the evictions and indiscriminate attacks on Palestinian civilians.

While you're at it, they could also stop funding and training far right militaries and paramilitaries in South and Central America. I'd prefer if their state sponsored terrorism not be reproduced elsewhere.

They destroyed the equipment. Harder for a smaller group to rebuild when all their offices are destroyed than a big international news network losing one office.

edit: I can’t reply to your reply due to hackernews limitation, but I’d imagine the goal is to make it unpalatable for Palestinians to want to share office space with Hamas in the future making it more difficult for them to hide their rocket firing positions in schools or hide behind legitimate news offices and civilians like they do.

Ok that is a great point, I'd think an hour still enough time for them to clear the most important stuff (i.e, bombs?)

You left out a key part: “Israel alleged …”. I’m sure Aljazeera would disagree with this allegation.

Why do people always take the IDF at face value? Just two days ago they admitted to lying to the media about a ground invasion as a military tactic, what makes you think they would not lie about this? They've provided zero proof for targeting all this civilian infrastructure. Even some of the videos they try to use to justify the killing of civilians are 3-4 years old. The IDF can not and should not be treated as the end all of the truth, they can claim anything is a legitimate target and get away with it.

Isn't this a clear and unambiguous violation of the Geneva convention?

> Article 53. Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.[0]

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Geneva_Convention#Artic...

Does Israel recognize the Geneva convention?

I really should have said that this appears to be a violation of International Law. The question should really be "How are the international community going to respond?"

The UN have taken a stance that says that Israel is an occupying force and so this kind of attack seems to be a clear problem for the international community to address:

> The United Nations, Human Rights Watch and many other international bodies and NGOs continues to consider Israel to be the occupying power of the Gaza Strip as Israel controls the Gaza Strip's airspace and territorial waters as well as the movement of people or goods in or out of Gaza by air or sea.[0]

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli-occupied_territories

I won’t count on a response. Israel has been emboldened and has acted with impunity for decades. They have the most powerful lobbying group in the US and have many politicians on their payroll.

I mean just look at the illegal settlements. Universally accepted as illegal and actual war crimes. Ongoing for decades now and we have rarely seen anything more than an occasionally gentle condemnation. Is it any surprise that the Palestinians are revolting?

For a possible motivation behind this attack that doesn't come out of the lying teeth of the IDF, there was a recent interview conducted by Medhi Hasan with an Israeli Official where he called him out on his doublespeak.

This is not the first time that Israel have launched attacks in retaliation for speech either.

Hamas themselves boasted of firing 2000 unguided rockets into Israel in a single day. Additionally, they boasted switching to a new type of rocket that "can hit all of Israel".

https://www.timesofisrael.com/hamas-makes-unverified-claim-i...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2021/05/14/hamas-...

So there are some motivations apparently coming out of the (I'm sure also lying) teeth of Hamas, the government of Gaza, who seem to be boasting of initiating the violence. Additionally they are still threatening more Israeli civilians, including foreign civilian aviation companies transporting foreign civilians ...

They are now also using suicide drones, called "Shehab", that were fired at planes they didn't even know who was on them.

I haven’t seen anything about Hamas boasting that they started the violence. The only thing I saw is them warning Israel to stop the ethnic-cleansing of East Jerusalem or they will respond. Note that it isn’t me calling it ethnic cleansing but the UN[1]. Note that even though it is Zionist Israeli settlers doing displacing it is done under the protection of the Israeli military who are always standing by to fire upon any Palestinians who defend their homes — you see this in many of the Sheikh Jarrah videos.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-un-cleansing-idUST...

This is from 2011. Is this really the most recent comment you can find?

A video that's going viral claims that both Hamas and Fatah and Israel have elections coming up, and all 3 are far-right governments (and in Hamas' case, a totalitarian far-right party) that will benefit from a conflict. (In Israel's case the odds of an election are pretty high, it's not technically guaranteed. However Netanyahu has failed 5 times in 2 years to prevent elections, odds are he'll break his own record).

So we have 3 parties, all extreme-far-right facing election problems in the near future. A conflict now would greatly benefit all of them (for the next 4-5 months or so).

Think there's something to that? At least when it comes to timing it seems pretty relevant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48VEN5y6fMQ

The link was just so you don’t think I’m engaging in hyperbole when I say that Israel is engaging in ethnic cleansing.

I agree with you overall. One thing that is worth mentioning though is how emboldened Netanyahu is. He is beloved by the far right in Israel for disregarding Oslo and expanding settlements. He was given the Golan heights and Jerusalem by the US. Why would he not escalate and plow on? He’s winning elections and becoming more popular with his base — a base that grows faster than liberal Israelis.

I think the region is doomed.

This comes after air strikes on Shati refugee camp which killed 10 including 8 children.

> This comes after air strikes on Shati refugee camp which killed 10 including 8 children.

Is your position that targeting journalists and destroying their long term office building is some sort of reasonable solution (or proportional retaliation, if you like) to that awful catastrophe?

The OP wrote it as if it were that, but the refugee bombing was done by Israel, so I think they were pointing out how Israel is just attacking soft targets

There's a video of a Gaza paramedic breaking down after being at that scene, posted to Reddit, where reported only a single child was found alive there. If you scroll down thread comments there was a NSFL description of photo of the remains of a blown apart toddler based a photo of the scene that was posted to Twitter.

How does this differs from terrorist bomb attacks?

IRA, ETA also often made phone calls before attacks.

If being mean on twitter is "attacking the press", then what is this?

please can someone explain how these troll organisations work? are they using some kind of AI or automated garbage or real people behind every comment? i can not believe what i am reading. there are pictures of dead children and people spamming highfives.

Consider that someone had to kill those children, so I dont think its much of a shock to think there are other people who really support it. There are disgusting people everywhere in society, but before the internet they used to have to hide a little better

Although sad, but this is a great point. We have to find ways to restore the humanity where it is most lost then these voices which support such violence would become fringe and ignored.

a soldier may defer the responsibility and somehow manage to rationalize it. there is also probablity in the equation. but after the fact? horror in front of your eyes how a human being can highfive the death of a children? won't these horrors come home some day? there has got to be some automation going on, these are not human in any sense. i am not talking about a few cases, there are stream of abhorent comments from many accounts.

At some point there has got to be a human in the loop, right? I mean, it’s hard for me to imagine that NLP is sufficiently advanced to automate this. Or maybe the present limitations of NLP systems is what leads to “high-fives” on threads related to Palestinian children deaths but that is accepted as trolling absorbs the energies of pro-Palestinian activists and wastes their efforts.

You're probably right some are automated, but there is still a human behind it, I guess is my point, and even more behind them enabling it. And based on other things i've seen on the net, and heard in real life, I have zero doubt some of those people high fived in real life.

My former coworker could spend an hour justifying peeing on dead soldiers; another can defend cockfighting in once sentence, ending in 'because god said I can.' My dad grew up hearing the only good black man is a dead black man, and that applied to children obviously (dad never took the bait.) There is a whole rainbow of ignorant or angry people in the world

i think i might be wrong about those comments being automated. just watched a few videos on youtube, especially one involving a group of snipers and a child. people are so radicalized. i don't want to sound alarmist but there is something so much bigger on the horizon.

I hate to tell you but we've been at the horizon for a long time now. But journalism wasn't nearly as open years ago, either simply due to access, or lack of stomach.

Pick a decade and you can find a bombed out school, or other mass atrocity.

@dang would you please indulge me once and reply why this thread is flagged? in a moment where earth needs to stand still and witness? this is something straight out of manifacturing-consent.

in exchange, i promise i will no longer participate this medium again.

Wow! Why would this get flagged? I think that people ought to know what’s happening.

Why is this flagged?

It's incredibly sad how dismissive most people are on this topic, especially considering how so much of Israel's influence on America is through technology and soft power.

This through companies that I assume many here on HN will be involved in and have ability to steer the direction of.

Well, I guess it’s simply because the Palestinian lives, unfortunately, don’t matter to this audience.

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