IDF killed Gaza aid workers at point blank range in 2025 massacre: Report
dropsitenews.com
dropsitenews.com
The case seems pretty clear, especially since the soldiers tried to hide all evidence.
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.
However, you are also correct, 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)And just to be clear, my position is that if there was a criminal act here the IDF should absolutely prosecute. To my understanding this is still not settled for this case, i.e. there has not been a decision to not prosecute. But we shouldn't kid ourselves that this is somehow different.
For an example of how big this accountability is, when 3 of the hostages escaped they were killed by the IDF and that's ok because there was no malice in the act of shooting bare chested unarmed civilians waving a white flag as they approach.
You are correct about others but it doesn't change anything here - war crimes and atrocities are the worst of human behavior. Whataboutism shouldn't diminish outrage, and every such person should be extremely severely punished and ostracized by rest of humankind till end of their days, no exception, doesn't matter what passport they hold. Basic morality and all that.
That might be a little strong. A cover up can happen for other reasons than covering up crimes (for example covering up bad PR that doesn't raise to the level of criminality). It does seem like a crime is what happened in this case, but i don't agree with applying that logic in general.
One part that is really confusing, is if they knowingly intentionally targeted the ambulance because they thought they could get away with it if they destroyed the evidence, why leave witnesses alive? If you assume the motive was an intentional massacare with point blank executions, it doesn't entirely make logical sense to leave witnesses.
Couldn't the ability to make this very argument be a reason why?
The most concrete evidence of this incident is clear video, not eyewitness testimony. It was obtained about a year ago from the dead when the grave was unearthed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
> A video, discovered on the cellphone of a paramedic who was found along with 14 other aid workers in a mass grave in Gaza in late March, shows that the ambulances and fire truck that they were traveling in were clearly marked and had their emergency signal lights on when Israeli troops hit them with a barrage of gunfire.
Like, it the monsters massacre people and no one's left to report on how awful it was then they kind of "lose the gloat value" to a degree?
Why didn’t they murder everyone? As testimony says [0], when one of the survivors called out that his mother was Israeli, the IDF soldiers lowered their weapons and helped him up. It seems to me that these are soldiers that have decided that Palestinians are less than human, or that Palestinians will never coexist and it is “them or us”. This mindset happens in many wars, but actual incidents depend on leadership at all levels and how much it is implicitly allowed. I think their cover up actions speak the loudest to how widespread these things are. The on the ground commander clearly wasn’t worried about destroying any and all evidence or leaving witnesses. Buring everything was to make it too difficult for outsiders confirm what happened, not to prevent leadership from putting them in jail. They were counting on being protected, and they were. A letter of reprimand for the commander, and losing his position as deputy commander (not loss of rank or being kicked out of the military) is little more than a speedbump to their military careers.
[0] Page 36-37 of report
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfD1y7WZLpM
alternative FE: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=bfD1y7WZLpM
Mind blowing analysis.
https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/beirut-port-...
>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.
Not sure if they're still fêted as artists or have moved away from that label. I still find their approach completely mesmerizing nevertheless.
Their reconstruction of the Beirut Port explosion was incredible though: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/beirut-port-...
All the hospitals are now rubble, and the IDF quietly let it slip that the death toll is legit recently. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-01-29/ty-article/.p...
There's damning video of this specific incident, recovered from the dead. I suspect subsequent massacres made a policy of finding and destroying all the phones. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
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).
[0] One such recent report: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
Idk. if this is happening here but given how some threads devolved and other patterns common for such people emerged (red hearing arguments, false conclusions etc.) it looks quite a bit like it.
This kind people (the also tend to argue endlessly not based on common sense, understanding of the real world and empathy (in questions of ethic/moral) but based on nit picking stuff like as if the word ist just a game you find holes in the rules with to "cleverly win". Because for them the world often is just that.
But a lot of people find such behavior deeply deplorable. hence why if something looks like that it will get a lot of down votes even if it wasn't meant that way.
---
(1): Non intellectual people try that too. But they tend to lack the skill to pull it off. Hence why it tends to be pretty obvious why they are down voted or similar.
(2): Non evil people do that too, they just normally have the decency not to do so with topics like genocide. I also use evil here as a over-generalization but I have mostly seen that behavior with neo-nazis and other groups which are least fascist adjacent (and most times outright fascist).
I get what you're trying to say, but ...
> playing devil advocate
One look at my comment history on this topic should help dispel the notion.
I think sometimes people are so certain about their beliefs that they perceive any argument that challenges them to be evil, bad faith trickery. But I think the best way to respond to these arguments is simply to give compelling reasons why they are wrong (and not why the person giving them is bad).
Otherwise, some people will be mislead by these bad arguments and you will have done nothing to help but say “don’t listen to him he’s evil”, which is not very convincing really.
Who accepted those? And did they have a right to do so on behalf of _all_ of humanity?
The conventions are a guideline. To use them as a blanket moral justification for your actions after the fact is extremely disingenuous.
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.
From: https://docthisway.com/2024/09/23/the-act-of-killing-review/
For whatever reason YouTube has put age limits on some of the uploads of it, here's the start of one without it:
I don't think "sense" is the issue.
1) Are you sure you were talking to actual people and not fake personas or even bots?
2) Keep in mind that there is A LOT of money to be made working for Israeli PR. Some people will take that money regardless of what they know is the actual truth. Some examples:
- Certain social media influencers being paid up to $7000 per post [1]
- Israel boosts propaganda funding by $150m to sway global opinion against genocide [2] [3]
- "[...] a firm called Bridges Partners LLC has been hired to manage an influencer network under a project code-named the “Esther Project.” " [4]
[1] https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-influencers-netanya...
[2] https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/isr...
[3] https://jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com/israel-has-spent-m...
[4] https://www.jta.org/2025/09/30/united-states/israels-secret-...
- 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 hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.
This is also an extreme understatement. It's literally a genocide.
Why did it quickly grow?
For an exactly same "military action with no planning but a lot of bravado" scenario see Russia's invasion into Ukraine.
Today they still spit to the side when having to say the name George Bush or Tony Blair, among others.
You either weren't there, have a bad memory, are watching typically mainstream new sources, or are willfully ignoring the voices that are having that conversation today.
Many of the ills today can be traced back to powers grabbed at the time to assist that so-called "war on terror".
I'm suggesting that many of us are disgusted now by Israel's genocide, land theft, and murder ... just as millions of us were disgusted by the Iraq war.
The US response was deadlier in both total number of people killed and in proportion to the inciting terrorist attacks. Both countries also committed clear war crimes along the way.
The primary distinguishing factor between the two is the label of "genocide" only consistently being applied to Israel's actions, but that is mostly due to practical reasons, namely the relative small size of Gaza in terms of both geography and population. If Afghanistan and Iraq had the population density of Gaza, not only would that have likely made the US response even more deadly due to the mechanics of warfare, but it certainly would have led to more people describing the US's actions as genocide.
Once again, this is not a defense of Israel. If this reads to you like I'm downplaying the actions of Israel, then you are underestimating the death and destruction caused by the US. Some estimates have the US responsible for as many as a million deaths.
While I recall many at the time calling it a genocide due to the sanctions, the thrust of the military action was an illegal war.
Israel, by contrast, systematically murdered civilians, journalists, starved a civilian population with impunity and with government intent, and ... the list is tragically too long. Size and numbers have nothing to do with it.
Israels actions were ruled a genocide in the ICJ, the UN, among many other genocide experts (including Jewish experts).
The Israeli's had/have actual genocidal intent. Just read the reprehensible words of some of the current Israeli cabinet. Not some radical fringe, but the actual Israeli cabinet.
Sure, you mention you're not defending Israel, but the implication that there is some double standard here (perhaps "antisemitic" given your focus on labelling) is in itself a defense of Israel.
The current "administration" is a disgusting body, and the Zionist ideology, in its current form, is an absurd, preposterous ideology which gives birth to a population who dehumanise their "enemy" in exactly the same way as the Nazis dehumanised the Jews (not my words, but the words of Jewish scholars).
>Israel, by contrast, systematically murdered civilians,
I'm not willing to ignore the US's propensity for bombing weddings.[1][2][3][4][5]
>journalists
Or the notorious Collateral Murder strikes.[6]
> starved a civilian population with impunity and with government intent
I already hit on this with the mentioning of Gaza's population density and the mechanics of war. Gaza is much smaller and denser which means that the same bomb dropped there will kill more people and destroy more infrastructure than in Iraq or Afghanistan. That has caused a larger percentage of the arable land in Gaza to be destroyed and they already had less of it to begin with. This had made them more reliant on Israel. The US simply didn't have the opportunity to control the food supply in the same way and I'm not willing to categorize a lack of opportunity as evidence of a lack of intent. And despite that all, the long tail of the US's actions still has led to a food crisis.[7]
>Just read the reprehensible words of some of the current Israeli cabinet. Not some radical fringe, but the actual Israeli cabinet.... The current "administration" is a disgusting body, and the Zionist ideology, in its current form, is an absurd, preposterous ideology which gives birth to a population who dehumanise their "enemy" in exactly the same way as the Nazis dehumanised the Jews
If we're talking "reprehensible words" and dehumanization, it hasn't even been two weeks since a US congressperson said that Muslims were below dogs. The US has the benefit of two extra decades of hindsight and many still haven't learned the lesson you're discussing.[8].
I genuinely think you should read through some of this[9]. It sounds like it might open your eyes to the US's actual record of behavior.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wech_Baghtu_wedding_party_airs...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haska_Meyna_wedding_party_airs...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukaradeeb_wedding_party_massa...
[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruzgan_wedding_bombing
[5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Radda_airstrike
[6] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstri...
[7] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%932026_hunger_crisi...
[8] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Fine#Muslims
[9] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes#War_o...
Some estimate that these were even bigger than the demonstrations against the war in Vietnam in the 1960s. These put the total number of people going out in demonstrations world wide at 30M+. This war was massively protested against, any which way you count.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040904214302/http://www.guinne...
Also, I'm not clear on whether there was a precursor to 9/11 comparable to Israel's response to Gaza's 2018 non-violent protest, the Great March of Return.
While you have a valid point overall, I always hate this specific phrasing because it's either ignorant of history or implies there is a statute of limitations on being indigenous. And if it is the latter, you're actively being counterproductive to the cause because that is telling the Israelis that the land will be morally theirs if they can hold it for enough generations thereby encouraging continued occupation.
US big brother will make sure to protect its little “older” brother. Hilarious as it sounds.
Is there not? I’m pretty sure every tribe that’s considered indigenous now at any place has replaced some other group that lived there before them.
* https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_high...
* https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2016-09-22/world-first-s...
This recent genetic based view replaces the "gut feeling" view akin to yours that was long pushed by Quadrant et al.
Read article, chase up the papers, evidence says "no".
The Tasmanians and the Noongars (Southern most to east, southern most to west) have genetically been in place a long time and had no one to replace.
The article mentions "genetic diversity" between east, west, centre, north, south, etc - that comes from not mixing.
"But surely..." <-- gut feelings? You should joinn Quadrant.
> If a tribe moved from southern Australia to the north and replaced another tribe
Do you have any evidence of that?
> who gets the land now?
There's a wealth of material on Mabo, Land rights, Native title, et al that address all that - if you're generally curious it's there to read.
eg: starting with, say https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/mabo-case
Sorry for shifting the goalposts now, but we still need a method to determine what to do with the rest of the earth, right? Who gets to stay in the different parts of Europe for example?
Your "assertion" (weakly stated) was
> I’m pretty sure every tribe that’s considered indigenous now at any place has replaced some other group that lived there before them.
which is _false_.
A single counter example suffices, the Māori people of New Zealand are still in a shared treaty with European settlers and no prior humans were displaced by the Māori people when they first arrived circe 1320 or so.
Australia and that region offer up many many other examples.
> Who gets to stay in the different parts of Europe for example?
I cannot see how this is related to your global assertion nor can I see how I'm responsible to answer it.
Even when my original assertion that every single tribe replaced another tribe at some point is wrong, there still needs to be some mechanism do determine what to do with the rest of the world where my claim applies.
Otherwise, how would you decide who gets which part of the world?
Indeed, it is ethnic cleansing. This situation isn't unique at all. Actually, it's quite common in History. The same happened to Algeria with the French colonization.
Netanyahu is on the record funnelling money through Qatar. He said it was for "humanitarian aid" - which would be more credible if it wasn't such an extraordinary and unusual outbreak of concern for Palestinian wellbeing.
The occupation is straight out genocide, labelled as such by many Israeli scholars, as well as most of Rest of World.
This level of barbarism and entitlement has no place on a civilised planet.
Target a music festival with no military value: terrorism.
Blow up a building because hamas has a tunnel under there: not terrorism. If the military value gained is disproportionate to the civilian cost, it is a war crime. But still not terrorism.
Not disagreeing with the definition but this is what both sides have been doing.
Look, blowing up aid workers, which is in question in this article, is also terrorism. Killing unarmed civilians, kids, etc is also terrorist. Also if you you use your definition for what Israel has been doing in the last 70-80 years it makes them terrorists as well, the word is simply meaningless at this point.
> Killing unarmed civilians, kids, etc is also terrorist.
The vast majority of lethal force actions in Gaza are targeting Hamas operations. Civilians getting killed by those strikes is NOT terrorism.
Terrorizing aid workers, which reduces how much aid reaches the Palestinian population?
There is real evidence that Israeli authorities helped the Islamist network that later became Hamas to grow and organize, but not good evidence that Israel secretly “founded” Hamas in the sense of designing or controlling the group. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Israel allowed and at times supported Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s Islamist charity Mujama al‑Islamiya in Gaza (the Muslim Brotherhood–linked precursor to Hamas), seeing it as a useful counterweight to the secular PLO. eg From 1967 to 1987, the number of mosques in Gaza reportedly tripled, with Mujama heavily involved and benefiting from Israeli recognition and Gulf funding; Israeli officials hoped Islamist forces would weaken leftist, PLO‑aligned groups.
Scholars and former officials describe this as “blowback”: Israel strengthened the Brotherhood‑type infrastructure, which then reorganized itself into Hamas and turned violently against Israel.
There is no credible evidence that Israeli intelligence drew up Hamas’s founding charter, appointed its leaders, or covertly directed its formation in 1987; the group was an initiative of Palestinian Islamists tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.
To reiterate: Israel did not secretly found Hamas, but it surreptitiously facilitated the growth of its Islamist precursor networks and tolerated them for strategic reasons, and several former Israeli officials now openly say that this policy helped “create” Hamas in hindsight.
you still refuse to call it a crime against humanity? shame on you.
Make up the math yourself, even if there will be legitimate expenses for PMCs, reconstruction and god knows what else, even skimming off 5% of that sum will still be a lot of money for Trump. And it would not be the first time he launches a multi-billion grift / money laundering scheme, remember $TRUMP and $MELANIA and I've probably forgotten about the other coins?
Then trump seems to have bolted on two or three entirely new and unrelated organisational levels "over" the UN affiliated board and declared himself king of all peacemaking.
There is much that is unclear about how things will work in practice, but the reality is there's a potentially important part of the Gaza deal being held hostage by this board of peace, and that's why the Arabs joined.
What has happened is Israel has attacked hospitals with Hamas presence using ground forces, and they have dropped bombs on hospital grounds, but not in hospitals themselves.
An oddly specific claim. Hamas hasn't killed any Israeli with a turtle, either.
I'm not sure why destroying hospitals with tanks, missiles, and sappers is better than "aerial bombs". Could you elaborate?
Israel has also not fired any missiles at hospitals, with one exception (a small diameter bomb aimed specifically at Hamas that caused minimal damage).
> I'm not sure why destroying hospitals with tanks, missiles, and sappers is better than "aerial bombs". Could you elaborate?
Palestinians have been under this assault by Israel and Zionists in general for nearly a century. Defending anything Israel does at this point is indefensible. Their context has ALWAYS been wrong and they've been caught lying so many times it's more accurate to believe exactly the opposite of anything the IDF says.
Which isn't to say that Israel hasn't done some seriously unethical things, but this notion that the Palestinians are poor innocent victims that have never hurt a soul and carry no blame for their situation going back a century is absurd and ahistorical.
It's a conflict between the native population of Palestine and people who came in from the outside with the goal of making Palestine their own. The outsiders won for a number of reasons (British backing, superior political organization, etc.). They now rule over the native population, most of whom they deny any rights to. They justify this by saying the native population deserves it because it hates them and resists them.
Please read some history:
The Palestinians just care that foreigners came in and took over their land.
By casting this as the Palestinians hating "the Jews," you're trying to frame the conflict as just another example of antisemitism. The Palestinians get cast in the role of the Nazis, and the Israelis get to pretend they're the victims of antisemitism.
The actual situation is completely flipped. The Israelis exercise military rule over the Palestinians and subject them to an apartheid system, not the other way around.
"Presence" is an incredibly vague claim. In order to attack a hospital, you have to prove that the enemy is actively shooting at you from it, and your attack has to be proportionate. Vaguely asserting that some enemy might have set foot in the hospital at some point does not give you carte blanche to blow up a hospital full of civilians. Yet that's exactly what Israel has done over and over again.
Also, as I mentioned earlier, Israel has not blown up any hospital buildings. This is a myth. If you think I'm wrong, point to which hospital building Israel blew up. Show me standard OSINT stuff: when it occurred, pictures of the rubble, the munitions used, who died.
Israel has attacked every hospital in Israel with the blanket claim that some Hamas person was there at some point. Not that there was active fighting at the hospital. Not that Hamas was barricaded inside and firing out of it. Just that someone however loosely related to Hamas might have been near the hospital at some point. By that same argument, virtually every building in Israel would be a legitimate target.
So there's zero link whatsoever between Hamas executing 1200 civilians on Oct 7th, taking 200 hostages, and the following war (and war crimes) of Israel?
Israel literally unilaterally began a war and committed war crimes without any act of aggression?
And from the moment 200 hostages had been taken, many of whom died in captivity, everything was carved in stone and no matter what Hamas did, Israel was going anyway to war and to commit war crimes?
Or did something happen on Oct 7th that triggered all this?
Or the massacre that this thread is about for that matter?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-07/israel-hannibal-direc...
Report: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/coi-report-a-hrc-56-26-2...
> The Commission also verified information indicating that, in at least two other cases, ISF had likely applied the Hannibal Directive, resulting in the killing of up to 14 Israeli civilians. One woman was killed by ISF helicopter fire while being abducted from Nir Oz to Gaza by militants. In another case the Commission found that Israeli tank fire killed some or all of the 13 civilian hostages held in a house in Be’eri.
> The Commission found that Israeli authorities prioritised identifying victims, notifying families and allowing for burial rather than forensic investigation, leading to evidence of crimes, especially sexual crimes, not being collected and preserved. The Commission also notes the loss of potential evidence due to inadequately trained first responders.
(That I'm completely fine with. But it presents challenges for verifying incidents, which probably means it's an undercount.)
> Mostly firing on vehicles carrying hostages.
That is the Hannibal Directive; "the kidnapping must be stopped by all means, even at the price of striking and harming our own forces". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Directive
But there's definitely been a large reduction in violence since the hostages were returned. Most or all of it in response to violations of the ceasefire by Hamas.
Honest question. Why should they surrender?
> Most or all of it in response to violations of the ceasefire by Hamas.
A complete and utter inversion of reality.
First page of Google results for: Israel ceasefire violations
“How many times has Israel violated the Gaza ceasefire? Here are the numbers: Since the ceasefire took effect, Israeli attacks have killed at least 615 Palestinians and injured 1,658.” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/11/how-many-times-has...
“UN experts urge States to act as Israeli violations threaten fragile Gaza ceasefire” https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/11/un-experts-u...
“Israel has violated ceasefire 47 times and killed 38 Palestinians” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/18/israel-has-vio...
“Fact Sheet: Israel’s History of Breaking Ceasefires” https://imeu.org/resources/resources/fact-sheet-israels-hist...
The full statement is something like "to end the war, Hamas only need to return the hostages and surrender".
Surrendering is typically what the losing side needs to do to end a war.
To save the people they claim to protect. Just like in WW2, had the Germans and the Japanese surrendered earlier, the Allies wouldn't have had to kill so many of them.
If the Allies surrendered to the Axis, it would have also saved lives.
Did the ceasefire not coincide with the return of the hostages? What am I missing?
Nor has the genocide stopped.
It was covered by UK media for a short period and they would gloss over the veterans and focus more broadly on WCK, there is lots of examples of UK media weird coverage like this which no doubt was intentional. It was also barely spoken about by UK politicians
RIP John Chapman, James Henderson, and James Kirby.
Damn…
That is a LOT of shooting.
A normal mag holds 30 rounds, that's 30 full magazines worth of bullets they dumped into these people.
They were really trying to make sure there were no survivors.
What should be done with it?
Nothing helps as much as speaking out vigorously and unambiguously though and without equivocation. We have to stop killing Palestinians first.
His arguments were all very zero sum, "if we didn't do it to them they'd do it to us," and from conversations with friends I'm thinking that what's happening here is the Israeli media apparatus focuses heavily on creating an "us vs them" mentality for diaspora Jewish people, which has now backfired to create a whole lot of Islamophobic and racist people.
It's interesting because one may think that people with a historical trauma of one of the worst things ever carried out in human history would be the least likely to do something like that and the most likely to see the writing on the wall if something like that was about to happen again, but sadly that was too optimistic: the opposite happened.
And he didn’t think that Hamas could use the same lame excuse for their terror?
Like if you grow up living inside the Star Wars mythology and suddenly you get a chance to fight The Empire, do you do it? Do you really care if people outside the Shared Mythos Group (TM) disagree with you doing it?
(Note that I’m not saying anyone in this framing is “The Empire”, I’m just using the Star Wars mythology as a familiar example of a mythic framing)
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not the IDF's fault.
And if it was, they didn't mean it.
And if they did, Gaza deserved it.
Do you: 1 - Think that it is something different? 2 - Think that it is, but Jewish people specifically do not have it? (I believe this is racist) 3 - Think that no people have it? 4 - Something else?
If you think that Jewish people have it but just not in Palestine, where in the world do you think they should have had it?
The problem is when you try to forcefully displace an entire civilian population to make way for a colonial movement.
In the same way I, as a Finn, would not have the right to take over any region in the Urals and kick out the people who live there, the Zionists had no right to do just that in Palestine since over a hundred years ago.
A piece of land isn't yours because you were born there or your grandpa did. There's one Earth in we need to share it. No one can deny the connection of Jews to the land of Israel, in a same way that no one can deny the connection of Palestinians to the same place. The Palestinians Arab don't need to move back to the Arab Pennisula, where they came from, and the Israelis don't need to move back to Poland, Yemen, Russia, Morocco, you name it. "The times they are a-changin'".
Zionism, then, is just support for a specific state (Israel), and support or lack or support for a state given its actions (colonial oppression) is not bigotry. Disliking a genocidal ethnostate does not influence in any way how you feel about the Jewish people as an ethnic and religious group. As such, anti-zionism and anti-semitism are not the same.
Anti-zionism is being against the colonization of Palestine and being against nationalism and supremacism.
Anti-semitism is hating someone because of the are jew.
When is a migration of people to a land isn't colonization, in your book?
Yes, they are. Being a European movement doesn't mean non-european cannot be zionist. Fascism is also a European movement as it emerged in Italy.
> When is a migration of people to a land isn't colonization
When there are no settlements, no oppression of indigenous people, no land exploitation, no discrimination law made by the colonizer. It's not "in my book", it's in every books not made by a colonizer.
when you write something like this ask yourself if were Palestinian if you would be happy if you son or daughter said they are moving to Israel to live there. if you answer Yes, we good. but of course no way you’d ever say yes…
And Judaism is a religion founded on the idea of a "chosen people" formed from the "seed of Israel" after all. And the Tanakh says this chosen people is entitled to the Palestine region. So we can easily see how this is a mythos made of an ethnostate, when interpreted through an extremist (Zionist) lens.
I think the notion that any group has rights is problematic at best. Individuals have rights, not groups. Individuals can act collectively as a group, but the idea that that somehow imbues the group with some sort of right seems strange or confused to say the least.
This matches the "individuality thesis" [1] (often debated among philosophers).
For those who haven't explored the territory, I recommend the journey. There is no rush to figure it out. I suggest trying out various viewpoints and taking your time with it: maybe even remaining a bit uncertain for your entire life!
- Uncertainty often takes an unfair beating. Uncertainty is preferable to confused or premature certainty. I would actually go further and say there is deep virtue in uncertainty -- there is an openness there. Absolute certainty closes doors; in a way it closes its eyes to new experience.
- There is value in being uncertain about one's values! For individuals, locking in one's ethics can be unwise. [2] For cultures, value lock-in can be stifling or even oppressive. For AI, value lock-in is sometimes called incorrigibility and can be problematic or worse. Humans have a tendency to grow and change, all the way down to our value systems.
Anyhow, I digress. Here are some relevant selections from Wikipedia's entry on Will Kymlicka:
> In Multicultural Citizenship (1995), Kymlicka argues that group-specific rights are consistent with liberalism, and are particularly appropriate, if not outright demanded, in certain situations.
> For Kymlicka, the standard liberal criticism, which states that group rights are problematic because they often treat individuals as mere carriers of group identities, rather than autonomous social agents, is overstated or oversimplified. The actual problem of minorities and how they should be viewed in liberal democracies is much more complex. There is a distinction between good group rights, bad group rights, and intolerable group rights.
[1]: https://philarchive.org/archive/HABTIT-2
[2]: I learned this from What We Owe The Future by William MacAskill. Did he borrow it from someone else? Maybe Derek Parfit? I'll need to research more.
Read that and tell me that Israel is acting proportionally...
I think it’s become pretty apparent that they would not face any repercussions and might even be rewarded.
But at this point the DoJ acts more like Trump's personal law firm.
A few gaps that matter if we’re trying to reason beyond the single event:
Framing / conclusion baked in: terms like “executions” and “concealment” may ultimately be correct, but they’re also strong legal/moral claims that can bias interpretation unless the alternative hypotheses are seriously stress-tested. Its a dead giveaway of the writers bias. From this point on it looks like most biased readers do not try to critically tackle the reports claims.
Limited “steelman” of operational context - without full access to military comms, ISR feeds, ROE, intel context, and command decisions in real time, it’s hard to evaluate what soldiers believed they were responding to (even if they were wrong, negligent, or violating orders). Its a known practice that Hamas militants travel undercover using civilian/emergency vehicles - I think its really pathetic this report does not analyze nor even addresses this claim. This is not being objective, and most of you guys here are too critical-thinking to miss this one out (or is it a bot swamp here? i really dont know).
Evidence asymmetry - open-source reconstructions can be rigorous, but they inherently rely on what’s available (videos/audio/witness accounts). That’s different from having the complete internal dataset that would settle key disputes. I know this is the best effort available, but still, it leaves a lot of room for speculation. My expectations of FA were higher than that.
Conflation risk - a brutal case study can be an important data point, but it’s not automatically a comprehensive model of the war or the incentives/constraints on both sides.
“Here’s a detailed claim about what happened at Tel al-Sultan on that night.” would be a correct title for this report.
Curious what you think: what specific pieces of primary data would most change your confidence/speculations here? (e.g., full comms logs, drone video, ROE brief for that unit, chain-of-command timeline, etc.)
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.
If you back someone into a corner with no escape valve, they will just double down.
Look at the size of the country, the natural resources and where they are positioned.
They are dependent on Western imports for pretty much everything, and only export technology that Europe and the US can easily replace with domestic or other foreign sources.
Doubtful. You’d just get another Iran. Israel is rich and a weapons buyer and exporter. That gives it many friends of opportunity, from Russia to India.
Rich doesn't mean much if you're under international financial sanctions and can't use your assets.
>You'd just get another Iran.
The sanctions have crippled Iran making it a much less powerful and influential version of what it would have been without sanctions. And by the looks of it is now on the verge of collapse. So I guess this kinda reinforces the point that Western sanctions on Israel would be effective?
Yes, like Russia and Iran, the fanatics in charge could continue in their direction for years, but they would be much less potent and the reaction of their population (who largely have dual nationalities and have extensive business and family ties abroad) may end up forcing a change in direction from the state policy of slow genocide and gradual ethnic cleansing of their indigenous population.
America has global force projection power. It has about as much influence in Gaza as it does in e.g. Venezuela or even, arguably, Iran.
Everyone has good reasons for why their pet war is the most central to our interests. I think it’s fair to accept that there are multiple good answers.
Who do you think supplies the weapons to most of the world's conflicts? They just appear out of thin air?
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.
Sure. Though Western arms absolutely play heavily in Sudan and across South America. My point is it’s odd to single out Gaza as a case where the West doesn’t care. It’s more that it uniquely has folks in the West who care strongly about both sides.
Ukraine isn't part of the West.
> to a lesser scale but precisely the same in type, Minneapolis
What was happening in Minneapolis is not only much smaller in scale than what's happening in Palestine, it's also just a completely different thing.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/21/middleeast/gaza-war-israe...
You have to read pretty far into this very sympathetic piece to discover he was running over hundreds of living people with a bullzdozer:
> In a testimony to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in June, Zaken said that on many occasions, soldiers had to “run over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds.”
> “Everything squirts out,” he added.
From Palestine I want to send you all the best wishes for freedom in Iran. It's time.
And to my Jewish sisters and brothers and siblings in general I want to send a wish for for freedom and end of this stupid hatred..
There is not actually a good reason for all this violence.
"fun" fact: more journalists died in the Gaza than in every conflict since ww2 combined.
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.
Of course, I assume, the answer is — no one. (And I'm hoping somebody will tell me I'm wrong.) So, what's the point? Is somebody gonna be held accountable? Will Israel be treated differently as a country from now on? If no, what's the point?
And if that’s a question you have to ask, then clearly something is very wrong.
Gell-Mann: 1) disbelieve a bogus story, then 2) turn the page and blithely believe the next story
You: 1) believe bona fide investigative journalism, then 0) ask what the point of journalism even is.
However, peoples' opinions often change, and when that happens, it has to happen somewhere.
Mine wasn't on reading this article, but I believe when someone on HN shared the wikipedia article on journalist deaths in Gaza, maybe around January or February 2024
On the tech side I’m wondering if any LLMs were used for the investigation, they don't seem to mention any by name at least.
That makes no sense.
- Likud is an evil political party
- Natanyahu is a wanted war criminal
- IDF committed many atrocities
- Hamas was insane to think that Bibi would NOT BOMB the Gaza in retaliation.
- Hamas was the first to cast the stone.
- Israel ALWAYS gonna retaliate with non proportional force when it comes to security of its citizens.
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.
So what did they really lost? Do they even care that some Europeans don't like them ? Europeans are not the one who sell them 99% of their weapons.
Yes, US is supporting them to. They are losing from both sides, though. They may have part of the remaining generation in power and that's it.
Witness Tucker Carlson dismantling Huckabee, and Zionist ideology, recently.
Where it ends up, no one knows. But this is different.
[0] https://www.politico.com/media/story/2012/01/tucker-carlson-...
[1] https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/archbishop-pelosi-says-walls...
On the flip side, I'm not saying they are pro-Palestine, it is definitely an America First agenda. However, the unified front on Israel is finally broken. For the best, I'd say.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/2/10/israel-used-wea...
Maybe. I actually think they didnt expect to be so successful also.
It continues to be strange to me that "not choosing death" was apparently never an option.
> - Hamas was the first to cast the stone.
Saying that it was Hamas who casted the first stone on 7 oct, is basically saying nothing happened before. Which is plain wrong. It's the consequence of decades of oppression, crimes, and unstopping massacre from the colonial occupier.
Before that, of course, they colonized Palestine under the shield of the British empire.
An easier way to disarm this argument is: Why did the Zionists come and displace the Palestinians? And who would respond peacefully if you try to displace them?
Stop diverting attention from the causes of what happened.
The military objectives were entirely justified though (taking out IDF bases, attempting to capture IDF soldiers, and attempting to liberate several-thousand Palestinians being held by Israel)
Of the 6000 people from Gaza who entered Israel that day, at most 12% were responsible for one of the 800 civilian casualties in Israel. If you consider that the minority who decided to target civilians were likely responsible for targeting multiple civilians, and that some number (at least 4 who are known) of those deaths resulted from the actions of the IDF, it's entirely possible fewer than 8% of insurgents targeted and killed civilians.
All told, fewer civilians were killed proportionately than have been killed in Israel's response.
What type of resistance would you have recommended Palestinians engage in prior to October 7? They tried non-violent resistance and were met with lethal force.
Thanks for saying that (not sarcasm, I mean it). Peace can only start when both sides admit they’ve done wrong too.
Your failure to see things through the eyes of the other side is exactly the kind of thing that makes the Middle East a terrible place to live in.
The "influence over the US" metric is ridiculous, the US was an enemy of the Nazis, of course they didn't have control over it. It's like saying the Nazis never had such a strong influence over Iran as the Palestinians do.
That is ignoring many decades of history.
Palestine is a country under a brutal military occupation and progressive illegal colonisation that has been going on for 80 years. Before October 7, Israel had already killed many, many more civilians in Gaza than Hamas did in Israel with that attack.
Uhg, too bad its not taught in school coz history is written by winners and you have to search for it yourself.
Yes Israel commits an ongoing genocide.
And I look at this only by lens of history.
If Mexico had started attacking the US across the border, what would the US do? I'm curious to hear what you think a country should do in this circumstance.
And if that were the case, would you say that Mexico had started attacking the US across the border? Or would you say that the US are waging war against Mexico and Mexico is fighting back?
But more in general, there's no point in following a tit-for-tat that goes back 80 years or more with the intent of finding "who was the first". Each event further down the chain completely reverses the assessment, and you can't base any solid reasoning on such grounds. What you have to look at is the big picture: who is occupying someone else's territory? Who is oppressing the other with overwhelming force? Which side keeps taking and which keeps losing?
Yes, but they were doing it by legally purchasing land, not through violent displacement. Arabs then rioted against Jewish communities, and that started the cycle of violence.
And note how this push for Zionism coincides with a global expansion of antisemitism after WWI. The only place Jews could find reliable support was among their people and protected by the British who were bound to uphold the Barfour declaration.
> What you have to look at is the big picture: who is occupying someone else's territory?
But if you ignore the history, you can't actually determine whose territory it is can you? Jews purchased land from Arabs, Arabs repeatedly started conflicts with them and Jews repeatedly beat them back. Losers in a conflict lose territory, and the armistice following Israel's founding drew the expanded lines.
As for the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank today, I agree it's problematic, but what exactly Israel supposed to do when they keep getting attacked? They were attacked after the armistice with Jordan and Egypt, so once again, they didn't start anything.
If Mexico repeatedly attacked the US, they would do the same thing. Hamas continues to have over 70% support among Gazans, even now, and Hamas murders anyone who speaks against them.
This is false- the land they purchased was only 12% of what they claimed at the moment of independence. Besides, privately buying land doesn't give you any right to declare sovereignty over it- try that in your country.
> The only place Jews could find reliable support was among their people
Sucks for them, but absolutely can't be used to justify a crime against a third party- the Palestinians.
> Jews purchased land from Arabs, Arabs repeatedly started conflicts with them and Jews repeatedly beat them back
This is entirely false and even a cursory reading of actual history (not the passively repeated Zionist propaganda points that you're exposing here) would change your mind.
> As for the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank today, I agree it's problematic, but what exactly Israel supposed to do when they keep getting attacked?
First of all they should not occupy any territory that doesn't belong to them, because that makes the attacks entirely reasonable and justified.
Are the US currently illegally occupying large parts of Mexico
And how does it justify Hamas killing unarmed civilians? How does it justify Hamas lobbing grenades at Nepali students?
HAMAS is an entity formed by refugees having fled the nakba and been stored on top of each other in an open air prison.
This is the logic of conflicts in the middle east and many or probably most parts of the world. If you don't retaliate hard and defend yourself thoroughly, it is seen as weakness. Not much more sophisticated than how bullying works.
But that's what you're apparently supporting, looking at how you're writing.
Plus you are misrepresenting what I said.
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 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.)
https://electronicintifada.net/content/book-review-how-israe...
I suggest reading Hamas' 2017 charter in full for proper context.
[1]: https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/our-mission-our-values/
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.
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.
[1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/695582/peace-distant-prospect-i...
They were optimistic!
Looking at the long term history of Israel, the left was more optimistic in general about hopes for peace with the Palestinians, while the right more suspected that Arafat never really wanted peace, and was just being sneaky. But let it be noted that the Prime Minister who ordered the withdrawal from Gaza was right-wing Gen. Ariel Sharon, Likud member and previous advocate of settlements everywhere.
After the actions of Hamas in subsequent years, particularly Oct 7, 2023, that hope and optimism was completely eliminated.
Let's not pretend that the 2005 'withdrawal' was a chance for a fresh start for the Palestinians that they floundered. The various negotiations were very one sided, and the offers were also unacceptable.
IMO a one-state solution where everyone has equal rights is the only just and reasonable path forward. Like with the dismantling of apartheid, a transition plan will be needed.
Partition of disputed territory is the least bad solution in the world we live in. "One world" government remains a utopian fantasy. Dividing the world up according to a mix of consideration of peoplehood, self-determination, and whoever won the most recent war is what humankind has figured out so far.
People who disagree with that will want to start wars. Wars are bad.
The American civil war occurred, in part, because Lincoln decided to end the institution of slavery. I know this is an oversimplification and justifies the means with the end, but I think if "bad"-ness of the civil war is compared to the "bad"-ness of an eternity of black people being enslavement in the U.S., I'd argue the war was significantly less "bad".
I think your other point about Hamas's supposed desire to genocide Jews lacks nuance, and your resignation to a world of ethno-nationalist states is a just-so story bordering on nihilism, but I suspect addressing those enters territory of tightly-held opinion, so I will just leave it at that.
Every Arab I've spoken with on the topic, states that Israel should have hit Gaza harder and sooner. That's from Arabs in the south (Bedouins) and along the coastal plain and Haifa ('48ers). The Israeli Arabs are more extreme in their viewpoint towards Gaza (not only Hamas) than are the Jewish Israelis.
The Arabs are not coy - they tell it exactly as it is. I'll be speaking to someone in what I perceive a pleasant conversation, and he'll mention something that I'll realise this guy would murder me under slightly different circumstances - while being hospitable. Their culture is not easy for us to comprehend.
Arab society has power struggles as a feature. There is always punching and slapping between family members, and there are always fueds with other extended families. For example, if one wants to find a wife or a job, his family needs honour. So he or his brothers go out and shoot up another family's complex. They are not trying to kill anybody, there are huge consequences if somebody dies. But they do some damage to display that they are an honourable (I guess tough) family, and now the younger family member can find a job or a wife. And this is how, they say, Israel should handle Gaza. When Gaza tries to gain honour in the eyes of their society, they need to be put back in place in a way that they understand culturally. Otherwise Israel will be the family that everybody shoots at.
There’s a small but courageous peace movement in Israel. They don’t have the kind of sway it would take to stop anything.
And all of them, without fail, when convenient, without consequence, will lie and act like they were against it. Once the genocidaires have built waterfront property upon the fresh tiny bones once the Board of Holocaust Profiteering is done with its demonic mandate.
The entirety of the upper echelons of the tech industry, now in bed with the death industry, is that one swimming pool scene from "The Zone of Interest". Shame on all of you. And shame on the rest of us.
We have failed as a peoples in history.
https://www.earshot.ngo/what-we-do/audio-ballistics
https://forensic-architecture.org/
https://content.forensic-architecture.org/wp-content/uploads...
> 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.
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.
Turn on showdead and you'll find much, much weirder wastes of time here.
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.
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.
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.
What if they only act once it reaches the front page?
Correct! The same people behind the US purchase of TikTok, for the same reason.
I can't downvote becuase though I've read HN since 2007ish, this is a new account. I would, however, probably downvote threads like this becuase out of all 600 comments, I don't think very many people have learned anything and a lot of blatantly false and sometimes racist stuff has been shared by people of every persuasion. I don't think these discussions are productive at all, but it makes people feel good because they're "fighting" for a cause, but they're still just a rate in a cage.
Is the cause of Gaza or Israel bettered by this comment section?
So, yes, Gaza is bettered by comments like these.
Absolutely the cause of Gaza has been bettered by the thousands of comment sections. Again, the US wouldn't have bought TikTok if it didn't.
r/thedonald boosted the cause of Trumpism, posters on X have boosted the cause of extreme right wing nationalism in Europe. Discourse matters, that's why so many try to influence it. Reputation with the masses matters, that's why countries like KSA spend hundreds of billions on trying to shore it up.
Israel long since stopped using smart bombs because a)they were too expensive and b)they didn't really give a shit who died in them executing someone a black-box AI decided was a terrorist (an AI they know is wildly inaccurate.) But even the smart bombs - they didn't care if they wiped out an entire family just to kill one person.
They even have snipers focusing on children. Doctors from international aid organizations working in the hospitals noticed that they were seeing a large number of children were showing up with few injuries/wounds except nearly identical head/chest wounds, and that not many adults were coming in with such injuries.
Targeting and prioritizing killing children has only one purpose: extermination.
I recommend any hackernews users to check that site frequently, plenty of interesting posts on hackernews that get flagged and hidden daily.
I'm sure he sees the death and displacement of millions as a small price to pay to bring about the Rapture in his lifetime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_Behind_(novel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapture's_Delight
It's all bullshit in the end, but I personally know many people that hold that view that consider themselves Christian. In fact, they think Catholics aren't Christian and are going to hell, because they worship idols.
More specifically, when talking about US politicians like Mike Huckabee that spout off weird religious stuff like this, you can assume protestantism at least, if not fundamentalism and associated woo.
Your disdain for Christians is noted, but my point is that your original comment is an oft-repeated, incorrect interpretation of what most Christians have believed since the very beginning of Christianity.
https://religiondispatches.org/2025/12/04/mike-huckabee-trie...
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.
I'm annoyed that I spent so much time growing up learning this tbh. But I still find it crazy to call all of your average misguided adherents to this ideology antisemites. The death cult running things, sure.
It's even more ridiculous to call the prosetylizers anti semites for trying to convert Jews, bc based on their world view, if they don't save as many Jews as they can, those Jews are going to suffer terribly instead of being raptured before the tribulation.
The fact that they did not react to such inflammatory statements strongly indicates that they support them.
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.
And yet one side is committing genocide.
One side is governed by a death cult for sure, if you look at how many children they indiscriminately kill.
Also look at what they did in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan.
Palestinians, Hamas and Hezbollah are not the good guys here. Not saying Israel is all good either, but let’s put it this way. Where would you want your wife or children to live if given the chance?
You can live as a Muslim in Israel, you can’t live as a Christian or Jew in Palestine.
1) Israel attacked Arab Palestine and the neighboring Arab states first, in plan Dalet.
2) Christians and Jews absolutely can live in Palestine. They were afforded that in the Ottoman empire (the Dhimmi) and they are afforded that now.
3) Muslims do not get to govern themselves in Israel. Every other religions can choose their own representatives in official matter, but Islam gets a token person selected by the Israeli state.
Add to this, Amira Haas (Jewish, anti-Zionist Haaretz journalist) lives in Ramallah. There was also a Palestinian man who converted to Judaism living in the West Bank, but he was killed... by the IDF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_David_Ben_Avraham
Local Christian communities have been living amongst Muslims there for centuries and continue to do so under Israeli occupation. About 25% of the population that calls themselves Palestinian are Christians, and are treated the same as Muslims by Israel, that is as second class citizens at best inside the Green Line and targets for ethnic cleansing outside of it.
Scores of foreign Christians and Jews go stay in Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank to provide some amount of protection to the Palestinian Muslims and Christians there. They are encouraged and welcome to come stay among them by Palestinians.
Christian percentage went from 10% to 1% in Palestine.
Parliament has 120 seats, 15 of which for Muslims, and Muslims have full rights.
Sorry, ya’ll are delusional if you think you have better life and more rights as a Christian in a Muslim country than a Muslim in Israel or a European country.
No they don't. Israel is a state with discrimination against non-Jews baked into its laws, with a couple of clever facades that don't stand up to basic scrutiny.
https://www.btselem.org/publications/fulltext/202101_this_is...
>Christian percentage went from 10% to 1% in Palestine.
And the decades of ethnic cleansing by Israel against Arabs, both Christians and Muslims, has nothing to do with this? How come those communities were there for millennia and started disappearing? What major event in the last 100 years in the region of Palestine led to the flight of Palestinian Christians?
>Christian Palestinians who are citizens of Israel suffer from the same widespread official and unofficial discrimination that other non-Jews do, in everything from land ownership and housing to employment and family reunification rights. [1]
[1] https://imeu.org/resources/resources/discrimination-hate-cri...
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/12/7/the-centuries-o...
https://mondoweiss.net/2026/01/mike-huckabee-is-interfering-...
You might want to read up on why this is.
That’s really the problem, innit? Palestine can’t stop poking, Israel overreact. 20 GOTO 10.
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).
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.
This is an Israeli lie. Not only has Israel bombed all of the hospitals, they murdered an entire NICU of infants. I can't believe people are still trying to justify blowing up hospitals!
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1207173798/fake-accounts-old-...
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/24/media/gaza-hospital-coverage-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/10/26/gaz...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/gaza-hospi...\
> Moreover, the crater left from the impact was relatively small, a fact that Israel has cited in arguing that none of its munitions caused the blast, and could be consistent with a number of different munitions. Hamas has not produced a remnant of an Israeli munition or any physical evidence to back up its claim that Israel is responsible.
...
> In addition, the videos show that the projectile in the Al Jazeera footage was launched after the barrage of Palestinian rockets Israeli officials assessed was responsible for the hospital explosion.
> From 6:59 p.m. on Oct. 17, barrages of Palestinian rockets are fired from two positions southwest and northwest of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, the videos show. Flames from the Palestinian rockets are visible in the nighttime sky as their engines propel them northeast toward Israel. More than 25 seconds elapse between the final Palestinian rocket and the hospital explosion.
The Al Jazeera footage does show an interception, not the rocket that hit the courtyard. This has been known for years, indeed. But there were like 5 different videos of the event, which were frequently confused for each other, and that's not the one I'm referring to. The AJ footage went the most "viral" even though it was pretty obvious that it wasn't the right event if you knew what you were looking at. I don't know why the Times didn't mention any of the others.
In any case literally all of the context around it remains a lie, and would still be a lie even if it ended up being a failed Iron Dome missile launched during the rocket barrage as the Times implied
Forensic-architecture published a report on that too: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/israeli-disi...
If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
Collective punishment, or a long term ethnic cleansing would be much more accurate, but you’re just repeating what you read unthinkingly if you say genocide.
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.
Israel has always said it doesn't have nuclear weapons. They would have absolutely zero sympathy going forward from any major nation if they decided to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza, and they want that land so rendering that land uninhabitable might not be a good idea.
Anyone who seriously speaks words 'nuclear weapon' and 'gaza' together is basically admitting he has 0 clue about the situation and is uninformed larper for either side.
Curious how that goes, especially since Israels ulterior motives are always implied, they're not taken by their word.
And Islamists, who share their motives openly with anyone willing to listen are ignored.
But let's not equate an inexperienced group of starved and impoverished guerilla fighters with a first-world, nuclear-armed genocidal ethnostate.
or, maybe because they came to the conclusion that the repercussions on the world stage of even more horrific media coming out of Gaza is too steep of a price to pay.
i don't know which, but i do know it is naive to conclude that because they COULD end the war in a day and did not, they are driven by morality and ethical concerns rather than pragmatic ones.
Genocide is an attempt to kill them all.
The Venn diagram has a lot of overlap for sure but they are not the same.
There's no comparison at all to the ease with which Israel could just drop a couple of bombs on Gaza, had it decided to do so.
Try reading a history book about the holocaust, or even just WW2, and you'll see just how ridiculous you sound.
It was a genocide because they tried to eliminate a specific ethnic group, for no other reason than its ethnicity.
You should go learn more about the subject, if it interests you so much.
The term "genocide" noes not mean "kill every single member of a group", it refers to the destruction of the group itself by whatever means.
> you’re just repeating what you read unthinkingly if you say genocide.
Your policy of deeming everybody who does not have the same opinion as you to be too stupid, is smug, self serving and lazy.
See, I could just also go ahead and tell you that you are too "unthinkingly" to know that "ethnic cleansing" is a euphemism for "genocide" and that "long term ethnic cleansing" is exactly congruent in meaning with "genocide" (look it up).
Instead of doing that, I would like you to consider that when I say that the state of Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian people, I have thought long and hard about whether that is the appropriate term, and without taking it lightly, I have for myself concluded that that is actually the correct term.
Which, again, is not dismissing war crimes, or denying that any have occurred. Just pointing out, this is not genocide but ethnic cleansing. Israel has a vocal right wing faction that advocates for ethnic cleansing, and a vocal left wing that is against it.
And the retaliation from the rest of the world in those circumstances would be swift and measured in hours, and there would be a smoking pile of rubble in that particular part of the world that would be uninhabitable for centuries.
So instead, Israel is cooking the frog.
They could have achieved genocide very quickly with conventional weapons and boots on the ground too.
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.
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.
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.
Am I still allowed to ask why the moderators don't want people to read and discuss this particular technology story?
In case you didn't see them yet, here are some of my other comments in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141678
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141517
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.
The rise and fall of peer review - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47123133 - Feb 2026 (0 comments)
Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120899 - Feb 2026 (692 comments)
Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119210 - Feb 2026 (440 comments)
Music Discovery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114672 - Feb 2026 (56 comments)
The 7-Year Bug That Took 3 Minutes to Fix - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47090261 - Feb 2026 (1 comment)
AI made coding more enjoyable - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47075400 - Feb 2026 (97 comments)
RFC 3092 – Etymology of “Foo” (2001) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46934499 - Feb 2026 (52 comments)
Launching My Side Project as a Solo Dev: The Walkthrough - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46845567 - Feb 2026 (9 comments)
There is an AI code review bubble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766961 - Jan 2026 (249 comments)
Proof of Corn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46735511 - Jan 2026 (307 comments)
XLibre XServer 25.1 Changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46474846 - Jan 2026 (4 comments)
Python Data Science Handbook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46120611 - Dec 2025 (61 comments)
NTSB Preliminary Report – UPS Boeing MD-11F Crash [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45995834 - Nov 2025 (228 comments)
Best shipping logistic aggregator in India - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45924139 - Nov 2025 (0 comments)
WebDAV isn't dead yet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698070 - Oct 2025 (128 comments)
Unicode Footguns in Python - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45689443 - Oct 2025 (20 comments)
AGI is not imminent, and LLMs are not the royal road to getting there - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45627171 - Oct 2025 (124 comments)
Super Ace: Your PH Home for Jili Slots and a 300% Welcome Bonus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45624939 - Oct 2025 (0 comments)
Pkgbase Removes FreeBSD Base System Feature - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44730021 - July 2025 (42 comments)
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 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.
That sort of flag is usually outweighed by other variables though.
Your question is answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443, but the short version is that your assumption that we see everything is incorrect.
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.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flags%20off%20turn%20by%3Adang...
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.
If you feel like the submission feed and/or the moderation decisions on top of it are biased, all I can tell you is that everyone feels that way, especially on any topic they are passionate about. You needn't look far for examples of commenters complaining that we're suppressing and censoring the Gaza story - there are some in this thread.
What I feel a lot more confident talking about, in terms of balanced moderation, is the comments. We've moderated, warned, and banned many accounts for breaking the site guidelines while posting anti-Israeli (and sometimes even anti-semitic) comments, and we'll continue to do that. That's something we take very seriously, and of course, we do the same the other way round as well.
I, of course, can't judge the intent or the effort. What I can say is that I read all captions of 150+ votes submission, rarely skipping any, and I saw 20+ pro-Palestine ones and zero pro-Israeli ones. I think this is quite objective measure.
At some point I thought it might be intentional but now I think it is just bias amplification: these submission are flagged too fast and upvoted too slow to get anywhere.
Thank you sincerely for your sacrifice, Dan. Whenever I have an urge to flame, I picture my impending comment as one more grain of sand speeding towards your cranium, and instead I step away from the keyboard.
What is this facade of impartialness and too much politics? Tell that to the people massacred.
I'm always sceptical of this given it doesn't happen to similar posts about Iran.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46599742
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46849715
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46553599
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46839106
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".
Collectively done via Israel's RiseApp and similar.
Even just technologically it's more interesting than 90% of the stuff posted here.
Redirects set to: talk.politics.misc.
So you don’t think anyone should discuss topics that touch on politics, including this war, on HN?
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.
[0]: https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/poll-show-most-jew...
Gaza exposed it even more:
* No one accepts high western "morality" anymore
* Most US politicians are blackmailed via Epstein who worked for Israel, with high probability, including Trump
* ICE is just the beginning, they're trained by IDF, send more people and 1940 is not too far away from us
Is that an accurate trend on an individual basis?
??? Most? His network was certainly extensive but "most politicians" seems like a significantly overextended extrapolation.