There is an alternate World Peace Force that just got started recently because I believe, as regimes change, the UN will audit what happened. The issue is there will now be another international body now that will argue the other way. It’s not exactly 3d chess, but, it is chess.
I don't know why you're using the past tense here, I was still trying to talk some sense into these people barely two days ago. It's hopeless at this point.
If you have 3 hours, there's a documentary you can watch, about a man who was sanctioned by the government to kill a lot of "communists" in 1960's Indonesia: The Act of Killing (available at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q ).
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.
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).
A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Israel did not have a habit of drastically overstating their case and quietly walking it back after they end up killing more journalists and toddlers than active combatants in hospital bombings. Also if reports didn't deliberately conflate 'armed man' with 'Hamas militant' and euphemize about the 'Hamas-run Interior Ministry' like that one does.
> Israeli forces dressed in doctors’ scrubs and women’s clothes have killed three Palestinian militants in an undercover operation in a hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.
> It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy… The following acts are examples of perfidy… The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status...
(Assassinating a paralyzed patient in a hospital is also not typically - ahem - kosher. Even if you're in uniform!)
Why was it decided that feigning of civilian, non-combatant status is bad? because it led to death of civilians who had no part in the fight; pretending to be your enemy's civilians bring no such issue. Although assassinating a patient is also not kosher it less relevant to the discussion about use of uniforms.
- 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.
Because of literally years of terrorist acts from Hamas? Because the action initially had overwhelming public support? Because, as any military action without proper planning, they promised a quick victory and had no plans beyond "bomb, bomb, bomb"? And had no plans for "what do we do if we don't succeed"?
For an exactly same "military action with no planning but a lot of bravado" scenario see Russia's invasion into Ukraine.
> Israel and it's defenders have been lying about the death toll this entire time and Hamas was not.
Lol if you believe that Hamas has not been lying about the death toll. Including immediate precise counts split by women and children within minutes of each Israeli strike.
> - Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning,
You’re being generous. There’s zero chance Israel didn’t know it’d happen and it let it happen anyway. The one country which all but brags about tying off loose ends.
> Hamas was insane to think that Bibi would NOT BOMB the Gaza in retaliation.
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.
I also almost believe that top echelons of Israeli intelligence knew about the upcoming attack, but they didn't expect THAT many fatalities and that Hamas were going to take hostages alive.
What in actuality was happening long-term is the increasing integration and cooperation of Gazans with Israel, reduction of tensions and hopes for eventual peace. Which is an existencial threat to Hamas.
With a specificity of the number of shots and the spatial reconstruction of the scene, there's some impressive uses of tech to bolster reporting:
>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.
Forensic Architecture, the people who did the spatial reconstruction, have been around for a while. You can see more examples of their investigations here: https://forensic-architecture.org/
Forensic Architecture are great. I remember their work being very hot in the international art scene around ~2018 (when they were nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize, among others - https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/turner-prize-2...).
Not sure if they're still fêted as artists or have moved away from that label. I still find their approach completely mesmerizing nevertheless.
What digital reconstruction? They took a witness and basically did what they said in a 3D editor. I don't see anything sophisticated about this. They also did things like count weapon sounds in audio, which might be the only factual reliable data point on this report.
Forensic Architecture is a truly remarkable work. If anybody is unfamiliar with Eyal Weizman, I would highly recommend checking out more of his work. Including the 2014 series Rebel Architecture and some of his talks. He recently did a presentation called "Conditions of Life Calculated" at the David Graeber Memorial Lecture at CIIS that I think gives a lot of insight into why the work being done at Forensic Architecture is so remarkable. He also talks about his work with David Wengrow and the Nebelivka Hypothesis based on novel archeology of ancient Ukrainian cities
> case seems pretty clear, especially since the soldiers tried
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.
Yes and no. It does matter because it illustrates both malicious intent and evidence of guilt, as in the guilty party knew they were perpetrating a criminal action.
However, you are also correct, the IDF has little or no accountability for criminal behavior.
> the guilty party knew they were perpetrating a criminal action ... 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)
People in places like this generally don't feel the need to condemn Hamas because it's understood that they are bad. Hamas is not an ally of the United States, it's troops and police force don't train with the United States military, it does not buy weapons from United States factories, and it does not receive government aid from the United States. If you feel the need to, you can add a condemnation of Hamas to basically every post here and it'll be accurate. Hell if you want to add a condemnation to the Iranian and North Korean governments too while you're there, that'd be fine too.
I just wanna say it's nice to see more people finally waking up and smelling the ashes. I can only hope in the future this genocide will be studied to better understand the main points of failure to not repeat such a widely event covered event.
The media organizations and people who pushed the pro-Israel narrative already understand all of this - it's not a failure, it was their intended goal.
The problem is that both sides lie flagrantly with such frequency that very few claims about the war can be taken at face value.
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.
But not the video in the OP which demonstrates that the IDF were, in fact firing on aid workers and refugees as they had been accused of, and certainly not the hours of footage of the IDF brazenly taking human shields over the years while insisting they didn't, or the reports of the IDF arming settlers. Curious that you can't enumerate any of these, and you're happy to take at face value a claim the IDF makes but doesn't allow independent third parties to verify (a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza) while abjuring such behaviour.
Independent 3rd parties were brought in to verify, though.
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).
>Independent 3rd parties were brought in to verify, though.
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.
And one side started it by killing 1,200 civilians and kidnapping 250. Which doesn't justify genocide. But it does factor into the response when one side is governed by a death cult that has no problem letting scores of their own civilians die if it furthers their cause.
About 700 israeli civilians were killed, out of which an unknown number was killed by the IDF. Quite a few, if the large amount of hellfired cars are anything to go by, and the kibbutzim inhabitants weren't very happy about being shelled by tanks.
Are you referring to the jewish israelis by "death cult"?
October 7th was genocide, though. You cannot possibly in good faith argue that what Israel is doing is genocide but what Hamas did wasn't.
Also, to be perfectly honest, we've seen 4x as many people killed in Sudan as in Gaza in the same timeframe, including entire cities being wiped out by gunmen filming themselves literally going door to door and shooting people begging for their lives, lying on the ground or in hospital beds. 6,000 people were killed over a single weekend in el-Fasher and barely a peep from the media.
What Israel is doing in Gaza is more similar to what Russia did to Grozny during the 2nd Chechen war than it is to most of the events historically termed "genocides". Which, to be extremely clear, is not at all a sympathetic comparison. The conduct of the Russians was incredibly brutal and disgusting and unjustified (then and now). I would not want to be compared to them.
But, like, you do have to have standards for what words mean. If the low-tech butchers of the RSF have killed hundreds of thousands in the same timeframe, it's not crazy to be more cautious with the "genocide" label.
The difference between Hamas and Israel is the magnitude of effect. And that for most of the war one party had much more capacity to change its course than the other. But either way criticism of the semantics and focus of media just seems irrelevant and overly abstract. It focuses too much on the group and not enough on the individual. Which drags the argument into the realm that ethno-nationalists of either side occupy. Death is always a tragedy and unnecessary killing is immoral. Anything deeper than that stinks of ignorance and is grotesque.
Even then, Gaza is far more dense than Grozny; almost certainly the Grozny campaign was conducted with far more deliberate indifference to any concept of morality.
What Israel is doing is genocide. The International Association of Genocide Scholars say so https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS... . Is there anyone who is arguing, in ”good faith” as you say, that the atrocities of October 7th were a genocide?
> 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.
Why have this topic on HN? I mean, search this page for the word "flagged", and while doing that also look at all the grayed-out, downvoted comments that are within an inch of being flagged. Obviously, this is not suitable for HN.
> If this was happening against the west, people would care a lot more
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.
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.
I hear this sentiment a lot when it comes to people trying to justify why Ukrainians or Iranians are somehow less deserving of their attentions, and it infuriates me every time. If the goal is to try to prevent unjustified killings, then it makes no sense.
And WW2 only has more journalist deaths because some number of the genocide casualties had been journalists before the Holocaust.
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.
> 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.
Its not automatic due to bot activity. It is from people actively suppressing stories that don't want other people to see.
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.
Indeed, and try suggesting there should be minimal accountability for flagging[0] and you'll likewise be flagged. Sure maybe the data says there's not some cartel flagging conspiracy but it starts to seem awful suspicious that even reasonable discussion of this misfeature gets flagged.
You always have plenty of excuses when you get called out. Looking the other way while bot armies mass downvote pro Palestine / anti ICE / anti PayPal mafia content is complicity. I’m sure you have the data to suss out what is obvious to anyone watching these threads in real time.
Think about what you are saying for a moment. Why would "bot armies" come to Hacker News of all places to flag pro-Palestine articles? Don't you think it's a much more reasonable conclusion that people read the site guidelines[1], which clearly say that political posts are off-topic, and then flagged for that reason instead?
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.
In 2026 I don't for one second think it organized inauthentic activity is implausible. I think in fact it's probably pretty extensive these days, though I'm not especially sure about penetration of HN in particular. But everything from marketing to state actors to organized political actors to anarchic but politically motivated online groups are mobilized to influence online forums and I think these phenomena are reasonably well characterized by academic research. It can also be people who aren't organized but abuse flagging out of political commitments.
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.
I mean doesn't your take strain credulity as well? Let's actually think where most discussion happens these days, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, the few remaining newspaper comments sections. I'd struggle to list more off the top of my head.
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.
Mike Huckabee said yesterday that all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates should be taken by Israel. That would involve a cleansing of hundreds of millions of people.
Mike Huckabee is a clown who was more or less strategically plonked into Israel to feed soothing quotes to the settler minority. I think it'd be an error to assume that his particularly evil flavor of Christian eschatology reflects the political or military policies of Israel (which is saying a lot, since Israel's military policy is very clearly good at producing war crimes).
This is commonly misconstrued as christianity, but in christian tradition it would bring about the coming of the antichrist, massive persecutions globally, and armageddon.
Keep in mind that these powerful men believe that Jewish people coming back to Israel is the first step of the Apocalypse, and the return of Christ. It is a death cult quite literally trying to bring about the end of the world, and they're ruling the world. Also, they are insanely antisemitic and believe most Jews will go to hell.
> Also, they are insanely antisemitic and believe most Jews will go to hell.
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.
In https://hckrnews.com these flagged items appear listed. With https://hckrnews.com as my entry into HN I don't see the need for HackerNewsRemovals other than curiosity to see what is removed.
I'll give you the "party line" (i.e. best-effort understanding of HN-moderators perspective) for why articles like this are frequently flagged:
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.
You left out the parts about how and when we turn flags off, about how a certain amount of political overlap is both necessary and inevitable, but that it also can't be too much. All of those are important factors, and I've posted many explanations of them:
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.
This is such a garbage assessment. I have don't see post of pro-Israel companies and startups that fund/enable this massacre being flagged for political content?
What is this facade of impartialness and too much politics? Tell that to the people massacred.
> there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective
I'm always sceptical of this given it doesn't happen to similar posts about Iran.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
The forensic reconstruction to this level of detail is novel and interesting, both for the methods deployed and for the likelihood that the half-life of unsolved war crimes appears to be decreasing.
I think it also touches on issues of interest to the hn crowd (it's being reported on a YC-incubated platform!), and one especially unique things about the reporting is the spatial reconstruction of the scene, which is not a degree of detail you typically get, and limits the number of variations of interpretations possible.
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.
Israel and Palestine is one of the most obsessively covered topics in every form of western media. All the more the reason it doesn’t belong on HN. I’ll grant that there’s a tech angle to this specific story, but past experience with such articles on HN is that they reliably devolve into endless repetition of fixed talking points on each side. No useful information or opinion is conveyed, just endless insinuation and infective.
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.
I agree that Bluesky is a great place to go into more depth about it, and in many respects a better place than HN to get good discussion. But I think there's equivocation going on here.
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.
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.
Here are some stories that flaggers of this submission also flagged. I have no idea why, except for the handful of obvious spam, but it illustrates the point I made in the parent comment.
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 the above list gives the mistaken impression that flagging is basically random, that's an artifact of the way I cherry-picked the list. The flagging system has problems, for sure, but it's a vital part of how HN's system functions.
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.
Funny to see the complaints of this being flagged but no complaints about people posting here flagged. If these aren't going to be open discussions and responses get flagged to invisibility what is the purpose?
There's 4chan but for leftists (leftypol) and there's reddit for leftists (lemmy or raddle). I'd also argue Mastodon is kind of twitter for leftists/hackers
I think The Atlantic is actually pretty close to the mark. Committed, hardcore ideologues frequently turn out to be authoritarian, even if they refer to themselves as "anarchists". Most of these ideologues are busy administering ever more stringent purity tests to anyone they encounter lest someone in their vicinity commit wrongthink.
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".
Of course, that's because Qatar actually is an authoritarian state, unlike the US. It hasn't stopped Al-Jazeera from challenging the authority of other nations or claiming that they are authoritarian. Pot, meet kettle and all that.
I wouldn’t point to Epstein, but there is a very powerful lobby that will protect the image of any Israeli government. A lot of Evangelicals also consider Israel important in bringing about the apocalypse, without which they can’t access eternal life. I wish I was kidding on that last one, but there are people actively trying to bring down civilisation so they can go to heaven.
I think when people say "West", they automatically think US and UK - and given their war crimes in recent history, you do get this sentiment, yes. I suspect, however, that this view has exacerbated and now includes other "western" countries that are silent/complicit in current horrific war crimes.
Isn't mass murder of civilians the most Israeli thing ever? For those out of the loop, this isn't an anomaly.
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.
The problem is majority of Israeli citizens think the government isn't doing enough.
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 citizens that protested because the Israeli military arrested (after a lot of international pressure) soldiers that were caught raping Palestinian prisoners.
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.)
Might behoove you to know how schooling in that "country" is handled..especially when it comes to Palestinians. Below is an excellent insight as to how this is a "country" wide homegrown effort to raise unhinged cilivians that celebrate the murder of children & women.
Exactly. I replied to the comment above, but a lot of people don't appreciate the right-left divide in Israel is very different to that in other western nations. A leftist in Israel would probably be considered extreme right in some other nations.
A stat I came across recently is that over 60% of Israeli's don't support a two state solution - i.e. they don't support the idea of Palestinians having a state.
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.
> A stat I came across recently is that over 60% of Israeli's don't support a two state solution - i.e. they don't support the idea of Palestinians having a state.
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.
Not sure how much I'm going to trust this source or report. Seems like there's always a motive behind them, and when counter reports come out actually showing it was Hamas murdering their own citizens again there's no redactions or updates.
> The Israeli military was forced to change its story about the ambush several times, following the discovery of the bodies in a mass grave, along with their flattened vehicles, and the emergence of video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers. An internal military inquiry ultimately did not recommend any criminal action against the army units responsible for the incident.
Unfortunately, the takeaway here will be "be better at destroying the evidence". The video is quite damning against their initial claims; it includes an uninterrupted view of their arrival, in marked emergency vehicles with lights on and uniformed personnel, and the gunfire beginning: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
That's literally the opposite of how the media game around this genocide has played out. And Forensic Architecture has proven to be a reliable source thoughout the conflict.
This is highly disappointing. The sad fact that everyone seems to forget is that Hamas is a cruel, cynical terrorist organization which has been caught _repeatedly_ using ambulances, hospitals, schools, UN and press facades to mobilize forces and ammunition. In documents recoverd from Hamas tunnels this shows to be a clear and deliberate strategy.
Then, even this report mentions 6 people in this convoy were suspected Hamas militants, but this is quickly dismissed. Real journalist would see this as the key factor in the incident and try to get to the truth (was this really the case?) instead of just assuming everything is a "massacre" and move on. This is poor form.
Then, you take a look at who exactly is writing for the "drop news" and what their stance is, and suddenly it's just another article in a long line of what appears to be glaringly biased, strongly worded articles that pretty much echo some tiktok videos and lean very heavily on "eye witness accounts" or the "gaza health administration" (which is run by the gaza "government", which is Hamas). So, not too far from Hamas propaganda on the HN top page.
I hope we get to see better times, and I hope Hamas gets what they deserve.
I remember when folks here were shilling the "Israel promises they'd never bomb a hospital" and "Hamas is lying about the death toll" lines.
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...
There is an alternate World Peace Force that just got started recently because I believe, as regimes change, the UN will audit what happened. The issue is there will now be another international body now that will argue the other way. It’s not exactly 3d chess, but, it is chess.
Purchase of TikTok (chess moves).
It's pretty clear that Israel is ethnically cleansing so that they can live in a pure Jewish state.
You know who reminds me of that? Fucking Serbia and they got bombed for it.
It should be reminding you of something which happened a few decades earlier and was much, much worse than Serbia.
Serbia wasn’t on a good terms with Big Genocide lobby
I don't know why you're using the past tense here, I was still trying to talk some sense into these people barely two days ago. It's hopeless at this point.
If you have 3 hours, there's a documentary you can watch, about a man who was sanctioned by the government to kill a lot of "communists" in 1960's Indonesia: The Act of Killing (available at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q ).
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/
It's one of my favourite documentaries, almost as good as The Death of Yugoslavia.
For whatever reason YouTube has put age limits on some of the uploads of it, here's the start of one without it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj9Zw5fN3rE
> All the hospitals are now rubble
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/...
Not sure I understand the mass downvotes on this one. I didn't take it as endorsing the action but summarizing the rationale.
FSB downvotes anti-Russia comments as a matter of course. Can’t really be more direct about the analogy to not get bot-flagged.
People have had good reasons for downvoting the above, but it's unclear how many and what those reasons might be.
A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Israel did not have a habit of drastically overstating their case and quietly walking it back after they end up killing more journalists and toddlers than active combatants in hospital bombings. Also if reports didn't deliberately conflate 'armed man' with 'Hamas militant' and euphemize about the 'Hamas-run Interior Ministry' like that one does.
A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Hamas did not have a habit of not putting uniforms in combat
> Israeli forces dressed in doctors’ scrubs and women’s clothes have killed three Palestinian militants in an undercover operation in a hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/30/israel-forces-...
Hmm.
Do you understand the difference between being not in uniform in order to infiltrate enemy territory and being not in uniform in your own territory?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidy
> It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy… The following acts are examples of perfidy… The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status...
(Assassinating a paralyzed patient in a hospital is also not typically - ahem - kosher. Even if you're in uniform!)
Why was it decided that feigning of civilian, non-combatant status is bad? because it led to death of civilians who had no part in the fight; pretending to be your enemy's civilians bring no such issue. Although assassinating a patient is also not kosher it less relevant to the discussion about use of uniforms.
> pretending to be your enemy's civilians bring no such issue
Could you clarify where in the Geneva Conventions this very important exemption is stated?
> Why was it decided that feigning of civilian, non-combatant status is bad?
Because people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators, and even enemy civilians are protected persons.
The israelis must stop the occupation regardless of whether the al-Qassam brigades wear uniform or not.
They should also pay reparations, and send their leaders to the Hague.
> according to accepted conventions
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.
Two things are valid at once:
- 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.
I am entirely behind this take.
> and it quickly grew beyond any reason
Why did it quickly grow?
Because of literally years of terrorist acts from Hamas? Because the action initially had overwhelming public support? Because, as any military action without proper planning, they promised a quick victory and had no plans beyond "bomb, bomb, bomb"? And had no plans for "what do we do if we don't succeed"?
For an exactly same "military action with no planning but a lot of bravado" scenario see Russia's invasion into Ukraine.
You didn't actually address the actual point. Israel and it's defenders have been lying about the death toll this entire time and Hamas was not.
> - 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.
> Israel and it's defenders have been lying about the death toll this entire time and Hamas was not.
Lol if you believe that Hamas has not been lying about the death toll. Including immediate precise counts split by women and children within minutes of each Israeli strike.
The evidence that their numbers were accurate was just presented to you in this very thread.
> - Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning,
You’re being generous. There’s zero chance Israel didn’t know it’d happen and it let it happen anyway. The one country which all but brags about tying off loose ends.
That didn't happen.
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.
My stance is Mossad reading:
- 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.
> Hamas was insane to think that Bibi would NOT BOMB the Gaza in retaliation.
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.
I also almost believe that top echelons of Israeli intelligence knew about the upcoming attack, but they didn't expect THAT many fatalities and that Hamas were going to take hostages alive.
What in actuality was happening long-term is the increasing integration and cooperation of Gazans with Israel, reduction of tensions and hopes for eventual peace. Which is an existencial threat to Hamas.
That's not a counterpoint to what I said.
With a specificity of the number of shots and the spatial reconstruction of the scene, there's some impressive uses of tech to bolster reporting:
>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.
Forensic Architecture, the people who did the spatial reconstruction, have been around for a while. You can see more examples of their investigations here: https://forensic-architecture.org/
Forensic Architecture are great. I remember their work being very hot in the international art scene around ~2018 (when they were nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize, among others - https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/turner-prize-2...).
Not sure if they're still fêted as artists or have moved away from that label. I still find their approach completely mesmerizing nevertheless.
What a depressing portfolio...
Their reconstruction of the Beirut Port explosion was incredible though: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/beirut-port-...
What digital reconstruction? They took a witness and basically did what they said in a 3D editor. I don't see anything sophisticated about this. They also did things like count weapon sounds in audio, which might be the only factual reliable data point on this report.
Full report: https://content.forensic-architecture.org/wp-content/uploads...
Forensic Architecture is a truly remarkable work. If anybody is unfamiliar with Eyal Weizman, I would highly recommend checking out more of his work. Including the 2014 series Rebel Architecture and some of his talks. He recently did a presentation called "Conditions of Life Calculated" at the David Graeber Memorial Lecture at CIIS that I think gives a lot of insight into why the work being done at Forensic Architecture is so remarkable. He also talks about his work with David Wengrow and the Nebelivka Hypothesis based on novel archeology of ancient Ukrainian cities
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfD1y7WZLpM
alternative FE: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=bfD1y7WZLpM
This is very thorough. Thanks for the direct link.
The case seems pretty clear, especially since the soldiers tried to hide all evidence.
> case seems pretty clear, especially since the soldiers tried
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:
https://www.counterfire.org/article/cold-blooded-murder-and-...Yes and no. It does matter because it illustrates both malicious intent and evidence of guilt, as in the guilty party knew they were perpetrating a criminal action.
However, you are also correct, the IDF has little or no accountability for criminal behavior.
> the guilty party knew they were perpetrating a criminal action ... the IDF has little or no accountability for criminal behavior.
May be the brazenness is why they make the best Tech CXOs?
The tank commanders of another, bygone war also had the reputation for attention to detail. Funny how history rhymes.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/09/the-gaza-famil...
Read that and tell me that Israel is acting proportionally...
The IDF are terrorists and war criminals.
Hamas ? All good?
People in places like this generally don't feel the need to condemn Hamas because it's understood that they are bad. Hamas is not an ally of the United States, it's troops and police force don't train with the United States military, it does not buy weapons from United States factories, and it does not receive government aid from the United States. If you feel the need to, you can add a condemnation of Hamas to basically every post here and it'll be accurate. Hell if you want to add a condemnation to the Iranian and North Korean governments too while you're there, that'd be fine too.
There are a bunch of people here who are university students and Hamas support isn't as low as you might think on western campuses.
Hamas support or Palestinian support?
If the only defense you can think up is that Hamas is worse, it's a bad sign.
Whataboutism.
> The Israeli soldiers remained on the sandbank while firing continuously at the aid workers for four minutes.
Damn…
FINALLY HN waking up
This account literally only spams this kind of stuff. It has zero relevance to HN. We already have Reddit.
It's horrible but is this tech news or news with global implications?
876 points in 9 hours, Iranian/Qatari bots are hard at work. The submitter Qem, is one of the main propaganda accounts on HN
I just wanna say it's nice to see more people finally waking up and smelling the ashes. I can only hope in the future this genocide will be studied to better understand the main points of failure to not repeat such a widely event covered event.
The media organizations and people who pushed the pro-Israel narrative already understand all of this - it's not a failure, it was their intended goal.
The problem is that both sides lie flagrantly with such frequency that very few claims about the war can be taken at face value.
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.
But not the video in the OP which demonstrates that the IDF were, in fact firing on aid workers and refugees as they had been accused of, and certainly not the hours of footage of the IDF brazenly taking human shields over the years while insisting they didn't, or the reports of the IDF arming settlers. Curious that you can't enumerate any of these, and you're happy to take at face value a claim the IDF makes but doesn't allow independent third parties to verify (a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza) while abjuring such behaviour.
Independent 3rd parties were brought in to verify, though.
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).
>Independent 3rd parties were brought in to verify, though.
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.
Can you link to those reports?
> problem is that both sides lie flagrantly
And yet one side is committing genocide.
And the other side just. won’t. stop. attacking.
That’s really the problem, innit? Palestine can’t stop poking, Israel overreact. 20 GOTO 10.
You could say that about Israel too you know. The other side just. Won’t. Stop. Attacking. Israelis can’t stop sniping children.
And one side started it by killing 1,200 civilians and kidnapping 250. Which doesn't justify genocide. But it does factor into the response when one side is governed by a death cult that has no problem letting scores of their own civilians die if it furthers their cause.
Oh, I didn’t know that the whole conflict started on October 6th.
One side is governed by a death cult for sure, if you look at how many children they indiscriminately kill.
When do you suppose the conflict started?
When the first Israeli settler stole the home of a Palestinian.
About 700 israeli civilians were killed, out of which an unknown number was killed by the IDF. Quite a few, if the large amount of hellfired cars are anything to go by, and the kibbutzim inhabitants weren't very happy about being shelled by tanks.
Are you referring to the jewish israelis by "death cult"?
October 7th was genocide, though. You cannot possibly in good faith argue that what Israel is doing is genocide but what Hamas did wasn't.
Also, to be perfectly honest, we've seen 4x as many people killed in Sudan as in Gaza in the same timeframe, including entire cities being wiped out by gunmen filming themselves literally going door to door and shooting people begging for their lives, lying on the ground or in hospital beds. 6,000 people were killed over a single weekend in el-Fasher and barely a peep from the media.
What Israel is doing in Gaza is more similar to what Russia did to Grozny during the 2nd Chechen war than it is to most of the events historically termed "genocides". Which, to be extremely clear, is not at all a sympathetic comparison. The conduct of the Russians was incredibly brutal and disgusting and unjustified (then and now). I would not want to be compared to them.
But, like, you do have to have standards for what words mean. If the low-tech butchers of the RSF have killed hundreds of thousands in the same timeframe, it's not crazy to be more cautious with the "genocide" label.
The difference between Hamas and Israel is the magnitude of effect. And that for most of the war one party had much more capacity to change its course than the other. But either way criticism of the semantics and focus of media just seems irrelevant and overly abstract. It focuses too much on the group and not enough on the individual. Which drags the argument into the realm that ethno-nationalists of either side occupy. Death is always a tragedy and unnecessary killing is immoral. Anything deeper than that stinks of ignorance and is grotesque.
Even then, Gaza is far more dense than Grozny; almost certainly the Grozny campaign was conducted with far more deliberate indifference to any concept of morality.
Here I thought leaving reddit would provide a break of low quality bait, yet here we are.
Exactly! Wtf
What Israel is doing is genocide. The International Association of Genocide Scholars say so https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS... . Is there anyone who is arguing, in ”good faith” as you say, that the atrocities of October 7th were a genocide?
It's gonna happen again and again and again until the end of humanity.
And this is relevant for HN, because?
> 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.
Seems like interesting tech.
Much discussion of the tech here, lots of it. Should be definitely flagged.
Why have this topic on HN? I mean, search this page for the word "flagged", and while doing that also look at all the grayed-out, downvoted comments that are within an inch of being flagged. Obviously, this is not suitable for HN.
That battle's been fought and lost. The moderators' suggestion, which I recommend, is to email the moderators.
If this was happening against the west, people would care a lot more. Unfortunately, nothing seems to be happening to Israel.
> If this was happening against the west, people would care a lot more
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.
> 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.
> Because the West doesn't fund and shield the perpetrators unlike Israel.
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.
> Because the West doesn't fund and shield the perpetrators unlike Israel.
Who do you think supplies the weapons to most of the world's conflicts? They just appear out of thin air?
I hear this sentiment a lot when it comes to people trying to justify why Ukrainians or Iranians are somehow less deserving of their attentions, and it infuriates me every time. If the goal is to try to prevent unjustified killings, then it makes no sense.
There's plenty of live footage of IDF forces targeting international aid workers and journalists.
"fun" fact: more journalists died in the Gaza than in every conflict since ww2 combined.
And WW2 only has more journalist deaths because some number of the genocide casualties had been journalists before the Holocaust.
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.
Why was this flagged? Automatically / without review? This is a novel tech story, albeit one without a lot of technical detail.
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.
I didn’t flag. But the top comments are nothing to do with the tech, and aren’t dissimilar from any Gaza War commentary online.
Any posts linked to the IDF committing crimes are automatically flagged on this site (and others). Many bots are at play here.
Its not automatic due to bot activity. It is from people actively suppressing stories that don't want other people to see.
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.
> on the new submissions page
What if they only act once it reaches the front page?
Indeed, and try suggesting there should be minimal accountability for flagging[0] and you'll likewise be flagged. Sure maybe the data says there's not some cartel flagging conspiracy but it starts to seem awful suspicious that even reasonable discussion of this misfeature gets flagged.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962005
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flags%20off%20turn%20by%3Adang...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443
You always have plenty of excuses when you get called out. Looking the other way while bot armies mass downvote pro Palestine / anti ICE / anti PayPal mafia content is complicity. I’m sure you have the data to suss out what is obvious to anyone watching these threads in real time.
Think about what you are saying for a moment. Why would "bot armies" come to Hacker News of all places to flag pro-Palestine articles? Don't you think it's a much more reasonable conclusion that people read the site guidelines[1], which clearly say that political posts are off-topic, and then flagged for that reason instead?
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.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Why would "bot armies" come to Hacker News of all places to flag pro-Palestine articles?
Turn on showdead and you'll find much, much weirder wastes of time here.
In 2026 I don't for one second think it organized inauthentic activity is implausible. I think in fact it's probably pretty extensive these days, though I'm not especially sure about penetration of HN in particular. But everything from marketing to state actors to organized political actors to anarchic but politically motivated online groups are mobilized to influence online forums and I think these phenomena are reasonably well characterized by academic research. It can also be people who aren't organized but abuse flagging out of political commitments.
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.
I mean doesn't your take strain credulity as well? Let's actually think where most discussion happens these days, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, the few remaining newspaper comments sections. I'd struggle to list more off the top of my head.
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.
Mike Huckabee said yesterday that all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates should be taken by Israel. That would involve a cleansing of hundreds of millions of people.
Mike Huckabee is a clown who was more or less strategically plonked into Israel to feed soothing quotes to the settler minority. I think it'd be an error to assume that his particularly evil flavor of Christian eschatology reflects the political or military policies of Israel (which is saying a lot, since Israel's military policy is very clearly good at producing war crimes).
Huckabee is a Christian Zionist.
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.
This is commonly misconstrued as christianity, but in christian tradition it would bring about the coming of the antichrist, massive persecutions globally, and armageddon.
Keep in mind that these powerful men believe that Jewish people coming back to Israel is the first step of the Apocalypse, and the return of Christ. It is a death cult quite literally trying to bring about the end of the world, and they're ruling the world. Also, they are insanely antisemitic and believe most Jews will go to hell.
https://religiondispatches.org/2025/12/04/mike-huckabee-trie...
> Also, they are insanely antisemitic and believe most Jews will go to hell.
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 reached this post via https://github.com/vitoplantamura/HackerNewsRemovals
I recommend any hackernews users to check that site frequently, plenty of interesting posts on hackernews that get flagged and hidden daily.
They also appear on https://hn.algolia.com/
In https://hckrnews.com these flagged items appear listed. With https://hckrnews.com as my entry into HN I don't see the need for HackerNewsRemovals other than curiosity to see what is removed.
why is this flagged ?
I'll give you the "party line" (i.e. best-effort understanding of HN-moderators perspective) for why articles like this are frequently flagged:
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.
You left out the parts about how and when we turn flags off, about how a certain amount of political overlap is both necessary and inevitable, but that it also can't be too much. All of those are important factors, and I've posted many explanations of them:
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.
I literally can’t say anything pro humanity without it being flagged even if it hints negativity towards Israel.
Can you remember any pro-Israeli posts you turned flags off for since the October 7 attack?
Can you point to any pro-Israeli posts on HN since October 7, flagged or not?
They don’t get flagged though.
Yes they are, just like the comment you answered to will.
This is such a garbage assessment. I have don't see post of pro-Israel companies and startups that fund/enable this massacre being flagged for political content?
What is this facade of impartialness and too much politics? Tell that to the people massacred.
> there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective
I'm always sceptical of this given it doesn't happen to similar posts about Iran.
What are you talking about? Iran topics get flagged at least as often as Gaza (in proportion to the amount to posts on the topic).
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754132
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624529
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The forensic reconstruction to this level of detail is novel and interesting, both for the methods deployed and for the likelihood that the half-life of unsolved war crimes appears to be decreasing.
This is most certainly not something that is covered on TV news. Seems on topic to me.
I think it also touches on issues of interest to the hn crowd (it's being reported on a YC-incubated platform!), and one especially unique things about the reporting is the spatial reconstruction of the scene, which is not a degree of detail you typically get, and limits the number of variations of interpretations possible.
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.
Israel and Palestine is one of the most obsessively covered topics in every form of western media. All the more the reason it doesn’t belong on HN. I’ll grant that there’s a tech angle to this specific story, but past experience with such articles on HN is that they reliably devolve into endless repetition of fixed talking points on each side. No useful information or opinion is conveyed, just endless insinuation and infective.
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.
I agree that Bluesky is a great place to go into more depth about it, and in many respects a better place than HN to get good discussion. But I think there's equivocation going on here.
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.
@dang any explanation for this being flagged?
Am I still allowed to ask why the moderators don't want people to read and discuss this particular technology story?
(@dang doesn't work. I only saw this randomly.)
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.
I also would appreciate knowing if the mods see this. I'm worried that flagging is possibly automated and vulnerable to campaigning.
We eventually saw it, but only randomly.
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.
Here are some stories that flaggers of this submission also flagged. I have no idea why, except for the handful of obvious spam, but it illustrates the point I made in the parent comment.
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)
As always, thanks for the transparency.
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 the above list gives the mistaken impression that flagging is basically random, that's an artifact of the way I cherry-picked the list. The flagging system has problems, for sure, but it's a vital part of how HN's system functions.
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.
Funny to see the complaints of this being flagged but no complaints about people posting here flagged. If these aren't going to be open discussions and responses get flagged to invisibility what is the purpose?
Real shame this got flagged so quickly, too. This is prime HN material.
Isn't this a tech news site?
Did you click on the link? It's a pretty amazing technological investigation.
Even just technologically it's more interesting than 90% of the stuff posted here.
this is prime material for HN to flag...
Is there an HN but for anarchists? Or maybe just anti-authoritarians?
There's 4chan but for leftists (leftypol) and there's reddit for leftists (lemmy or raddle). I'd also argue Mastodon is kind of twitter for leftists/hackers
The Atlantic? I kid. I really mean Al-Jazeera.
I think The Atlantic is actually pretty close to the mark. Committed, hardcore ideologues frequently turn out to be authoritarian, even if they refer to themselves as "anarchists". Most of these ideologues are busy administering ever more stringent purity tests to anyone they encounter lest someone in their vicinity commit wrongthink.
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".
There are no anti-authoritarian news outlets in Qatar, for obvious reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Qatar
Of course, that's because Qatar actually is an authoritarian state, unlike the US. It hasn't stopped Al-Jazeera from challenging the authority of other nations or claiming that they are authoritarian. Pot, meet kettle and all that.
No, its not. And I gladly flagged it.
Redirects set to: talk.politics.misc.
> No, it’s not. And I gladly flagged it. > Redirects set to: talk.politics.misc.
So you don’t think anyone should discuss topics that touch on politics, including this war, on HN?
Things are in terrible state in the world.
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
>Most US politicians are blackmailed via Epstein
??? Most? His network was certainly extensive but "most politicians" seems like a significantly overextended extrapolation.
I wouldn’t point to Epstein, but there is a very powerful lobby that will protect the image of any Israeli government. A lot of Evangelicals also consider Israel important in bringing about the apocalypse, without which they can’t access eternal life. I wish I was kidding on that last one, but there are people actively trying to bring down civilisation so they can go to heaven.
Not Israel, but Russia - good old KGB honeytrap.
> * No one accepts high western "morality" anymore
Is that an accurate trend on an individual basis?
I think when people say "West", they automatically think US and UK - and given their war crimes in recent history, you do get this sentiment, yes. I suspect, however, that this view has exacerbated and now includes other "western" countries that are silent/complicit in current horrific war crimes.
Travel to Middle East, some parts of Africa and China, ask what people think. Most say have similar opinion that west is not "morally" superior.
South America as well, in particular with regard to the US. Too many coups and sponsorship of military dictatorships will do that.
Travel to anywhere, anywhere at all, ask people if they consider themselves morally superior ...
Well, in this case, they are correct
suuure
Isn't mass murder of civilians the most Israeli thing ever? For those out of the loop, this isn't an anomaly.
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...
Disgusted by this, I hope that the good people of Israel realize what their hideous regime is doing and stop it. I know for sure that
The problem is majority of Israeli citizens think the government isn't doing enough.
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 citizens that protested because the Israeli military arrested (after a lot of international pressure) soldiers that were caught raping Palestinian prisoners.
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.)
Might behoove you to know how schooling in that "country" is handled..especially when it comes to Palestinians. Below is an excellent insight as to how this is a "country" wide homegrown effort to raise unhinged cilivians that celebrate the murder of children & women.
https://electronicintifada.net/content/book-review-how-israe...
Exactly. I replied to the comment above, but a lot of people don't appreciate the right-left divide in Israel is very different to that in other western nations. A leftist in Israel would probably be considered extreme right in some other nations.
A stat I came across recently is that over 60% of Israeli's don't support a two state solution - i.e. they don't support the idea of Palestinians having a state.
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.
> A stat I came across recently is that over 60% of Israeli's don't support a two state solution - i.e. they don't support the idea of Palestinians having a state.
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...
Only 5% of Israelis believe that IDF used too much violence in Gaza..
Damn, the IDF got this guy mid-sentence...
WHAT DOES HE KNOW FOR SURE???
Not sure how much I'm going to trust this source or report. Seems like there's always a motive behind them, and when counter reports come out actually showing it was Hamas murdering their own citizens again there's no redactions or updates.
Oh, come on.
> The Israeli military was forced to change its story about the ambush several times, following the discovery of the bodies in a mass grave, along with their flattened vehicles, and the emergence of video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers. An internal military inquiry ultimately did not recommend any criminal action against the army units responsible for the incident.
Unfortunately, the takeaway here will be "be better at destroying the evidence". The video is quite damning against their initial claims; it includes an uninterrupted view of their arrival, in marked emergency vehicles with lights on and uniformed personnel, and the gunfire beginning: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
That's literally the opposite of how the media game around this genocide has played out. And Forensic Architecture has proven to be a reliable source thoughout the conflict.
[flagged]
Please don't cross into personal attack, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is highly disappointing. The sad fact that everyone seems to forget is that Hamas is a cruel, cynical terrorist organization which has been caught _repeatedly_ using ambulances, hospitals, schools, UN and press facades to mobilize forces and ammunition. In documents recoverd from Hamas tunnels this shows to be a clear and deliberate strategy.
Then, even this report mentions 6 people in this convoy were suspected Hamas militants, but this is quickly dismissed. Real journalist would see this as the key factor in the incident and try to get to the truth (was this really the case?) instead of just assuming everything is a "massacre" and move on. This is poor form.
Then, you take a look at who exactly is writing for the "drop news" and what their stance is, and suddenly it's just another article in a long line of what appears to be glaringly biased, strongly worded articles that pretty much echo some tiktok videos and lean very heavily on "eye witness accounts" or the "gaza health administration" (which is run by the gaza "government", which is Hamas). So, not too far from Hamas propaganda on the HN top page.
I hope we get to see better times, and I hope Hamas gets what they deserve.