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Comment by stevenwoo | Hacker News Reader

It's unconfirmed who authorized it but the recent food charity workers killed by Israeli bombing had a security person (death confirmed by family in UK) who is unarmed but by job description clears the way by telling Israeli authorities where the charity team is going to be so the chain of command knew who they were, so one is naturally lead to ask - who would authorize a targeted killing in this situation? The after photos show the missile went right through the roof of the car, ironically next to the food charity's visible logo on top of the car. Israeli defense minister now claims it was a mistake, although if they had hit a real target it might have been acceptable in terms of their rules of engagement with 15-100 unrelated collateral deaths according to the investigation.

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Haaretz reports that the ground troops in Gaza are acting on their own and in a state of anarchy.

https://archive.is/2024.04.02-205352/https://www.haaretz.com...

So like ground troops in every war, ever? There’s a whole school of thought around having the boots on the ground make their own in the moment decisions.

> There’s a whole school of thought around having the boots on the ground make their own in the moment decisions.

So when the war crimes trial happens the higher ups can throw their subordinates under the bus and claim ignorance. The Nuremberg defense was about blaming superiors. I wonder if the reverse, blaming subordinates and computers will be known as Hague defense, after the apartheid officers in Tel Aviv are taken to court. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders

"apartheid officers in Tel Aviv"

First time I am reading this on Hacker News.

The current Israeli regime is recognized as an apartheid by human rights organizations. See for example:

https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/isra...

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2022/02/qa-israel...

No. Obviously there are things called discipline and rules of engagement. What kind of an answer is this?

To quote someone on social media:

> With unintended strikes, there's "we work hard to avoid this, but based on bad intel made a rare, tragic error," and "we've encouraged RoE that foreseeably makes tragic errors frequent, but this looks bad and in hindsight wish we hadn't done it."

> Israel's strike on WCK food aid workers is the latter

Israel has long had pretty plain issues with its rules of engagement. Recall that earlier in this conflict, the IDF shot three of the hostages whose recovery is one of the main goals of the operation!

War zones aren't as quiet and organized as you would imagine. More so when one side is disguised as regular civilians. All war zones also have people killed by friendly fire. I would assume friendly fire > killing western charity workers > killing civilians in order of importance to the military

Yet still, even that its the most important, friendly fire still happens

I agree with the other commenter that this goes way beyond "friendly fire". According to a Haaretz article, those aid workers were targeted 3 times in a row and I assume someone had to confirm the bombing for all 3 of them. This isn't friendly fire. I would love to see their validation data to check on their claim of 90% accuracy.

The targeting problems in this war seem much more serious than "friendly fire still happens."

It's certainly possible for what you write to be true, and the video we've seen from other targeted killings indicates that even an entire human chain of command could have missed the logos on the car, off the top of my head the USA example is when we attacked a wedding party in Afghanistan because it was close to a combat zone. But it sounds like the rules of engagement give IDF the leeway to kill up to 15 non combatants in any situation for one AI identified male in targeted age group and 100 if the male matches a high value target, which seems incredibly broad. It's all a moot point for the victims, and the IDF killing hostages with their hands in the air sounds like it's kind of out of control but could be sampling bias since reporters are being killed at a pretty high rate as well.

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