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Comment by gershy | Hacker News Reader

I was trying to pay attention to the actual claim and I got: 1. Children died during the ceasefire 2. Israel is using larger bomb payloads than it should (according to who?) in civilian areas 3. Higher percentage of child deaths than in earlier conflicts

Still, for me, doesn't add up to "Israel deliberately targetted gaza children" - is the claim that this is systemic? Or rampant? Or just by some individuals? And how do we know?

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The European Press Prize this year went to "What the wounds are telling us", an investigation into the wounds of Palestinian dead children. I recommend you read it.

https://www.europeanpressprize.com/article/what-the-wounds-a...

I am interested to know the overall scale at which this is happening. Disturbing but illuminating, thanks for the link!

I'm digging into this a bit. Looks like the 114 figure (certainly a conservative number) occurred early in the conflict, in the period of late Oct 2023 until March 2024 - in the same time the hamas health ministry reported ~25000 casualties; the deliberately targeted children account for ~0.4% of all the casualties, and ~1.5% of all child casualties. Enough to say "Israel is deliberately targeting"?

After 20.000 children assasinated, with the necessary support and complicity of Biden and Trump governments, yes. Is more than enough.

I have to force myself to read that link until the end. And it says what everybody in Europe has been saying for years, but Israel people still refuses to see.

We need to develop technology able to register this events even from a big distance. Even if the phones are forbbiden. And the war criminals must be judged and jailed, as they are not clearly part of the humanity anymore. A drone able to snatch and remove snippers alive if they are killing children is required.

Tragic as it is, 20,000 children can be lost even in a justified war. It looks like historically, retaliatory wars are initially especially aggressive, lethal and indiscriminate (likely due in part to emotional soldiers who desire to punish whoever they are retaliating against). Is Israel conducting a war here that aligns with the historical trend?

It's pretty clear Israel systematically kills Palestinian children to those paying attention. According to a public statement by the United Nations, Gaza has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world. At least 21,289 children have been killed. They starve the population, drive them out of their homes. (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...) This is the modus operandi of the Zionist belief system. It is a colonial settler ideology and they have to eradicate the natives, much like American settlers killed the native people and destroyed their way of life until they could keep them in tiny """sovereign nations""" where they would be crushed if they every truly tried to display any real sense of sovereignty. To be sovereign is to have a government with a monopoly on violence, the "reservations" are occupied.

I gotta be honest, the phrase “colonial settler ideology” gets an instant eye roll and detracts from the rest of your statements. Most nations on the planet are formed of settlers unless you think there were always Russians in Siberia, or there were always Anglo-Saxons on Albion.

Those happened many lifetimes ago. Much like the slave trade we recognize these actions by our ancestors to be wrong. There are many different conversations about "Land Back" or reparations for those affected by these systems, which often lead to nowhere. The distinction is this is happening today.

Yes for example if a religious extremist British faction were trying to colonize Native American america today, I'd gladly support funding and arming them against the invaders. Whats centuries past is past, what is happening today is important.

This positions israel as the invader, but pro-israelis (like myself) will argue that historically israeli jews+arabs are the indigenous population, and have been the target of invasion, and israeli territorial expansion has been through arguably defensive wars. In your example I immediately think "you'd never support a native movement that willfully and indiscriminately murdered a bunch of british citizens". And to me it's an even weaker argument, as jews are indigenous to not-too-far-off from the borders of modern day israel - in a way that does not correspond to brits in america.

The issue isn't the historical Jews living there (now Palestinian) the issues are the European Jews moving there claiming that they have some sort of connection to the land over say Poland.

Those european jews descend from judea (levant) - genetic tests confirm this. It's a rare instance of a displaced population returning home after centuries.

I have some few percent of French dna. Does this permit me to conquer France and displace the Frenchmen, whether whites of gaulish descent or african legal immigrants or anyone else? Unless I have a legal land purchase deed to some patch of land in France and a visa or other permit to live there, I have no rights to it. The jews living in israel are free to produce valid land deeds and an unbroken valid series of inheritance documents from any of the previous governments of the region if they can.

And what's the percentage of levant dna in them btw? If someone is 90% Polish, 10% Arab, why does it make sense to emphasize the 10% part over the 90% part?

I don't mind the jews already living in the region. If European whites had immigrated peacefully and with consent of those already living then none of these problems would exist or would be much smaller. But no, we have Europeans forcibly carving out a chunk of that land and today we have classic "Levatine tribes" like the...Milejkowskis lording over that patch and killing the actual peoples who lived for centuries before them. These people are mostly Poles, Russians, Germans not natives.

(see above)

That is not much relevant to the legality of living there. I could have French dna and have lived in Canada for 5 generations (let alone however many tens of generations white jews have been europeans), does that grant me any special rights to taking over the landmass that is France?

I mean you could qualify it by saying e.g. "it's a post-19XX settler colonial movement" - that would be some refreshing nuance on what is otherwise glaringly ideological language, mostly parroted by those who don't know much about the history (hence, I suspect, the disregard you received from another commenter here).

But even then the implication of some global cutoff year after which certain actions are officially no longer "ethical" or "advisable" is pretty ridiculous. Our ethical standards shouldn't vary only by what year it is, but rather ideally by the broadest possible context we are able to fathom. Israel is a unique case with indigenous jews returning to their native land after unparalleled delay, except in terms of borders modern-day israel doesn't perfectly map to ancient judea, and the crazy history of british intervention, geopolitical tension, war, expansion, and attempted peace treaties.

I'm trying to see the argument for "Israel deliberately targets children", closest thing I got was "Israel has made lots of children into amputees" - can you provide more info?

I think its obvious that there will be a lot of children amputees in active denstly populated warzone.

I think there's an ethical difference between "we need to wage war on a densely populated area", and "we need to wage war on a densely populated area, let's make sure to harm the vulnerable people we encounter there". This is what I'm trying to differentiate between.

We won't know without analyzing protocols how Israel picks targets.

Also, harming civilians is the norm in modern world. Russia absolutely deliberately is targeting critical civilian infra in Ukraine (e.g. grid during cold winter).

If the effect of your actions is a war crime, you are a war criminal.

If the Russians also do it, that is additional evidence of war crimes.

> If the effect of your actions is a war crime, you are a war criminal.

war crimes usually defined by intent: were civilians targeted intentionally.

Were civilians targeted intentionally on 9/11? Or was it just a targeted assassination strike on some bankers? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13_July_2024_al-Mawasi_attack) If I am attacked and legally have the right to self defense, but kill the neighbors "in the process of" defending myself because I fired 300 rounds at the attacker. Is that okay? I didn't do it "intentionally". But it is convenient that I hate them.

We likely agree that individual military strikes ought to aim for collateral damage proportional to their war value. For example a strike with potential to kill enemy leadership (rapidly accelerating the end of the overall war) can justify high collateral damage, much higher than would be justified by a strike against frontline troops.

With this in mind, I don't follow your example at all. Are those bankers of wartime value? And if they are, is the collateral damage proportional to that value? It's possible there's a lot I don't know about those banker's links to military!

But of course you're not arguing that collateral damage proves war crime?

I would expect the UN to investigate what the IDF defines as collateral damage and draw their own conclusion. Their conclusion is genocide.

I'm not sure all the facts are in yet in relation to Ukraine, but I do not anticipate that Putin will be getting his yacht back in the immediate future.

Would you accept opinion that UN is politicized org which does work of varying quality and its conclusion can't be accepted as ground truth without trivial checks?

I do not accept your opinion, or assertion, that "harming civilians is the norm" nor the implication that normative violence serves as any kind of license or justification.

Harming civilians is absolutely the norm in warfare through all humans history, all/most nations including likely yours practiced it in multiple points of time. Its also norm pretending that its bad while actually practicing it.

The question was specifically about genocide allegations, and blind trust in UN sub-orgs reports.

Note "the UN" has no unified voice on an absence or presence of genocide - instead it's voiced by individual UN inquiries. Only the ICJ can legally convict a state of violating the genocide convention.

The claim in report is that Israel deliberately targeted newborn delivery hospitals and similar. I don't think they have proof of "deliberately", I assume hamas people could use those hospitals as potentially safe zones for gathering, weapons stashes, etc.

yes, unfortunately this is all evidence people here needed

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