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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

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> The US didn't know about the change because of imperfect intelligence.

One needs to execute many mental contortions to believe that. Many things needed to have gone wrong simultaneously to get to that outcome.

When it is a repeat, it's probably policy. Occam's razor would agree.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/3/questions-over-minab...

To this address the fact that Hegseth has repeatedly claimed that the US will not be constrained by stupid rules of engagement, that's more or less is an encouragement for war crimes.

More of my thoughts here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47553343

> Shannon Bosch, an associate professor of law at Edith Cowan University, analyzed the strike from the perspective of international humanitarian law (IHL). Without drawing firm conclusions, Bosch noted that schools and children under 18 are especially protected under IHL, concluding that "the legality of that strike turns on whether the expected harm to children and the school was excessive compared to the military advantage gained by striking the target."[36] UN human rights experts characterized the strike as a potential war crime under the Rome Statute.[87] Regarding the attack, international humanitarian law expert Janina Dill said that attackers are required to "verify the status" of targets to avoid harming civilians. Beth Van Schaack said the US "should have known that a school was in the vicinity".[30] HRW said the same, adding that beyond the laws of war requiring precise intelligence, the strike's proximity to civilian infrastructure required advanced notice.[3]

From the wikipedia. Honestly with this kind of disregard for human life exhibited by the above commenter, the aggressors deserve everything thats coming to them. Absolutely disgusting.

What about unguided bombs? When they strike an apartment building, the person firing it can't be guilty. He never aimed at an apartment building. Right? The real rule here is that only the people with precision weapons can be seen as guilty.

Exactly. And the inverse holds too. Precision capability raises the duty to verify, which is precisely what Van Schaack and HRW argue the US failed to do here.

If having precision weapons raises the duty to verify, does it follow that having unguided weapons raises the duty to not use them at all, since the operator doesn't know what it will strike?

IHL applies to all parties and all weapon types. Using unguided weapons in populated areas carries its own legal exposure, yes. But that's a separate analysis.

The discussion here is about a specific strike by the state with the most advanced intelligence and precision strike capability on earth, where multiple legal experts have concluded the duty to verify was not met. The question of what other actors do with less precise weapons doesn't mitigate that failure.

You may be right, but I think it's important to realize that there is no IHL and what these experts say doesn't change anything in practice. Pointing to some law that doesn't exist/not enforced only highlights how irrelevant it is. If there was a military force behind the pleadings of the experts of IHL, which would enforced it, then it would mean something. Alas, that's not the case.

The enforcement gap is real. That doesn't mean IHL doesn't exist.

Legal norms and international courts still influence state behavior, slow and relatively toothless as they may be. That's why you haven't seen Netanyahu or Ben Gvir doing much travel lately, for example.

That's why Israel and the US work so, so hard to delegitimize and demonize the UN, the ICC and the ICJ - and here you are helping them do it. Please, stop doing that.

Yes, there are real problems with IHL. Throwing it out and declaring it meaningless doesn't solve any of those problems, and makes many of them worse.

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