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Comment by bonbonsofa | Hacker News Reader

There's a pretty big difference between a soldier during the heat of a firefight shooting someone that (at a distance) they might genuinely perceive as a threat vs a targeted assassination of a political enemy while they eat dinner.

The Mossad is certainly capable of killing people in more low profile ways. There's no reason to believe this was ordered at a high level. Most likely, it was an individual soldier's fault.

And the fact that she had press gear on is really not the kind of guarantee one might hope.

Here's a video of a "medic" grabbing a downed Hamas fighter's AK47 to give it to another fighter so they can use it to try to kill IDF soldiers:

https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/17rff07/west...

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It was probably an individual decision rather than high-level but that's only because the Israeli leadership has normalized killing Palestinian civilians and the military personnel know there will be no repercussions unless it is so bad that they can't cover it up.

They used the normal playbook in this case (blame Palestinian terrorists) and when there was enough evidence to disprove that assertion they just threw up their hands and said "accident" and that was it.

Yeah, I think that's a fair assessment. And if it was completely deliberate, with no mitigating circumstances, I'd be in favor of the responsible person being imprisoned for a very long time.

To be clear, I am saying it was probably deliberate but only the decision of the local forces rather than from up on high.

Even the IDF isn't trying to say anything like that. They say it was "accidental". Though there's lots of convincing analysis it was very deliberate. Where the shooter would have been shooting right at 2 people, nobody else in their sights, with blue vests/helmets and "PRESS" labels.

That's actually very much what I'm saying. It may have been accidental in the sense that it was not the deliberate plan of anyone, but happened during combat, due to a soldier's bad/unethical judgement call.

How about these? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Israeli_assassinatio...

What about them? Almost all of those are examples of the IDF targeting enemy militants who are actively involved in military operations against Israel, many of which have murders innocent civilians.

And e.g. a few scientists, politicians and random civillians. And I'm not sure it's according to international law to assassin even "enemy" officers.

But who cares, right?

Seems pretty obvious that the theme among those killings is self-defense. And if a scientist is working on Iran's nuclear weapons program, that counts as self-defense in my book. If someone is a "politician" of an active terrorist organization, that's also fair game to my mind. Bin Laden could be deemed a "politician" by some, but he would be more honestly categorized as a terrorist leader.

If Israel's goal was to kill civilians, they could kill millions of civilians any time they want. They go through effort not to kill civilians.

But I'm in total agreement with people arguing that the IDF should go much further in preventing civilian deaths, even if it results in more IDF deaths, which it likely would.

So if some intelligence agency deems e.g. Ben-Gvir a "politician" of active terrorist organization, it's OK to assassinate him in Israel? How about scientists working on Israel's "possible" nuclear weapons program?

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