The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
The New York Times describes it as such:
"Ali Bani Odeh’s wife and four young boys hadn’t seen him in a month and a half when he came home to Tammun, in the West Bank, from his construction job in Israel late on Friday to spend the last few days of Ramadan with his family.
On Saturday night, the boys persuaded him to take them out for a drive. Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, was coming, so there were new clothes to buy. The day’s fast had been broken, so there were sweets to be had, too.
They picked up fried doughnut holes in Tubas, saving them for later, but the clothing shop they went to in Nablus was closed. It was already past midnight, so they headed back to Tammun: Khaled, 11, the oldest, in the back with Mustafa, 8, and Muhammad, 5. Othman, 6, blind and incapable of walking or feeding himself, was in his mother’s lap in front.
As they rounded a corner slowly, a few minutes from home, young Khaled and Mustafa recounted on Sunday, their mother, Waad, 35, asked her husband to pull over and take Othman from her so she could get something from her bag on the floor. Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire."
The situation in the West Bank (and similar forces are at play in Gaza, too) remind me of what's wrong with American policing, at a far more extreme scale.
The people charged with enforcing the peace deploy lethal force with near impunity at the slightest "provocation" (a child throwing a stone, a car driving too fast); I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are, to operate in constant fear and perceive absolutely everything and everyone as a deadly threat to be neutralized. The soldiers themselves are raised in a culture with deeply racist undertones, making them all too ready to view any random Palestinian as a terrorist. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy that should be overseeing them works only to protect them. It's no surprise that things like this happen as often as they do.
Reform in the US is imaginable, I can and do believe, but it's much harder for me to imagine it in Israel - even much of the so-called left in Israel is too radicalized against Palestinians after 100 years of conflict, the Second Intifada, and October 7.
That's a huge problem (immediate, unjustified escalation to violence becoming the norm) and:
> The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
"I feel unsafe" has become the catch-all excuse for everything in the recent decade. It's used to justify everything from Karen complaining about someone's behavior in public to people calling the cops on someone for looking at them wrong, to making a scene on a public bus, to police officers jumping the gun and escalating to violence, all the way to war crimes. When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card? Like a magic spell that you can cast before doing something crazy. It's like that old "He's coming right for us" South Park joke, but instead of being a joke it has real life and death consequences.
Most people will never interact with a cop on duty outside of a speeding ticket or some other mundane encounter. A major chuck of what many people think about police comes from TV and movies.
It's impossible to overstate the influence of Dragnet (the OG police procedural from the early 50s) alone on the widely held idea that police are mostly heroic and good. Police procedurals are still extremely popular, they overwhelmingly portray law enforcement in an extremely idealized way.
There are exceptions (The Wire, The Shield), but they are noteworty in that police are not heroes.
That checks out. Although the history of "Warrior Policing" in the US predates this (going back to the 60s) and extends far beyond IDF training programs:
David Simon and others have written extensively for decades about the problems with the Baltimore Police Department, and other departments around the country. They trace these problems back to the war on drugs and other purely American factors.
The Amnesty article that you're citing is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The Baltimore Police Department did not need to learn about constitutional violations from the Israelis.
The IDF is a foreign occupation army, not the police.
At least in the US, the police come from much the same communities as they patrol, and there's some sort of democratic accountability. Don't like the police? You can vote for local government candidates who will implement reforms.
In the West Bank, Palestinians are subject to arbitrary violence at the hands of foreign soldiers. The IDF is not there to protect Palestinians. It's there to protect the Israeli settlers who are taking Palestinian land. If Palestinians don't like how the IDF behaves, tough luck. Palestinians can't vote in Israeli elections, so they have zero say in the government that exercises ultimate authority over their lives.
This is a fundamentally different situation from policing in the US.
Their media is non stop hammering the citizen with scary Muslim stories since the beginning of the country, every day since birth, with a density as if nothing else ever happened in the world.
Deprogramming is possible. Just tell them it is impossible to argue it was their own idea. They know how hard it was rubbed in their face.
Yes, American police use these kinds of justifications when innocent people are killed too. It's absurd (watch Surviving Edged Weapons [0] some time) either way.
The reality is, if you have soldiers mowing down children throwing rocks, mowing down families driving around, mowing down kids playing football, mowing down toddlers in their bedrooms, mowing down hundreds of people each year [1], you've over-indexed on vigilance and under-indexed on the value of human life. You're not trigger-ready, you're trigger-happy.
A professional looks at and understands the situation as it exists now. A professional is trained to not get into situations where fear controls them. Your argument is a compelling one that either these are not professionals or that they are professionals and are doing this on purpose. The stats today clearly show the massive difference between danger to Israeli personnel and Palestinians. Israel at this point has either failed to train professional forces that seek to deescalate and avoid dangerous situations or is training forces to find situations they can claim fear as a justification for murder. So, pick. They are either amateurs at which point it is a deplorable to put amateurs with this much force near a vulnerable population or they are professionals trained to do exactly this, find ways to kill a vulnerable population and claim self defense.
A professional is not obligated to risk death (or die) on the off chance that you are belligerent but not actually dangerous. Do not ever act belligerent around law enforcement, in any country, especially in a country where they LITERALLY EXPECT to be ambushed by people who act like that, because such people have been doing it for decades.
Be calm. Do not run. Talk clearly. Keep your hands visible. Did your parents not teach you?
Nothing, and that is very bad luck. My heart breaks for the kid.
But unless you are suggesting that laws should be not applied to those with kids, I am not sure why that matters? What do you suggest? I cannot wait for "kid" to be a number one accessory to bring to a heist then.
Or in democratic societies we can insist that our "public servants" actually serve the public interest of law and order rather than merely using it as a pretext to be able to commit their own violent crimes.
Your rationalization is nothing more than a product of a failed society. Bringing it up as pragmatic advice might make sense, although still not for this incident where the "offense" seems to have been merely stopping a car on the side of the road. But invoking it as some universal value of "what ought" is a pure crab bucket mentality.
I'll repeat the bit about professionals being trained to avoid and deescalate. That is the point. I think the details of this, and many similar incidents clearly show a lack of attempt to deescalate or avoid. That was the clear argument I made in my post and am re-emphasizing now. This clear trend shows either malicious intent by professionals or amateurs put in a situation they shouldn't have been allowed near and those above them should be held accountable for it.
The IDF is not law enforcement. It's a foreign army. It treats Palestinians with utter contempt and has no problem with killing them. Its job is to protect Israeli settlers who are taking Palestinian land and to prevent the Palestinians from resisting Israeli rule.
Comparing the IDF to law enforcement in a democratic country is not relevant.
A certain amount of politics should/must be tolerated on HN, because you cannot compartmentalize technology, politics and morality.
No-one, not even people who say they like technology but do not care about politics, should be able to live their life wihtout knowing that we live in a world where six-year old blind children are murdered with automatic assault rifles.
(For the same reason that no-one should be able to live not knowing that jewish once were murdered in the millions in gas chambers.)
Technology is a form of control. And in the capitalist system, this control is mostly exerted by private companies, on which the rules of democracy do not apply.
Trying hard to embellish your language I see. Might I suggest "military style automatic tactical assault rifle"?
My impression is that topics that involve politics are tolerated, even encouraged. It's politically charged discourse such as yours that's not welcome. It's near impossible to have an intellectual exchange with a political pundit.
I wonder if any VC out there would fund my pitch for an AI enhanced military style automatic tactical assault rifle with a copilot 360 targeting integration to ensure our troops can noscope420 at all times as well as a blockchain layer for auditing discharge events.
There are many objections that could be raised to both my tone and content there but I don't think "pedantic" is one of them.
It's certainly mocking. The subject matter is overly political. It's even plausible that it strays across the line laid down by the HN guidelines, although personally I think it's acceptable given the context. Something about fighting fire with fire.
Eh, tbh I've given up. Can't point out the terrible things that the IDF are up to without being labelled an apologist, or terrorist supporter, or just getting a massively negative reaction.
Now I'm not one to fall prey to the conspiracy theories around Judaism...but like...is it not possible to say that both hamas and the IDF do terrible things? And that innocent civilians are caught in between, with the usual bad faith reasons of "they were hiding hamas members" aka the exact same rhetoric that Russia used when accused of something terrible that they obviously did, deflection and formal outrage.
The very fact I feel I have to tread so carefully with my comment is an indication that something is seriously, seriously wrong. I don't live in China, I don't live in Russia. But when speaking about Israel or the IDF, I feel like I do.
> is it not possible to say that both hamas and the IDF do terrible things?
I agree. Hamas and IDF do terrible things - the ICC issued warrants for the leaders of both. This is why an external party has to impose a solution and it should involve in my opinion separation (two-states.) Both parties are radicalized at least for now and need to be separated and allowed to manage their own affairs while allowing the other to exist.
I have followed this conflict since Operation Cast Lead and the beginnings of the siege on Gaza.
Israel has been using enormous amounts of force against the Palestinian people since then, with death tolls of _at least_ 100 dead Palestinians for every dead Israeli.
For a very good account of life in Israel around the time of Cast Lead I recommend Guy Delisle, brilliant diary in comic form.
His partner was working for Doctors Without Borders, the Israeli Army refused to let them enter Gaza to help the people suffering under their bombardments.
I think the middle eastern conflicts are a tragedy. That said, this story does not belong on HN. As others called out this is a tech community and while there is sometimes an overlap with politics, it should at least be somewhat related like mass surveillance or AI being used for war.
HN is one of the most informative and least toxic communities and I’d appreciate if it would stay this way.
Why? Everyone has alternative news sources where they can find such stories, and there’s nothing new here. There’s always some tragedy that you could argue deserves more attention, I don’t think we should hold our guidelines hostage to pleas for the heart.
> I don’t think we should hold our guidelines hostage to pleas for the heart.
I don't think that's an accurate framing of the situation. It's a single post that enough people decided was worthy of being upvoted to the front page. I think allowing the community to decide is far more inline with the spirit of hacker news than the outright banning a category of posts.
Without taking one side or the other I just want to point out that a large part of the utility of guidelines or rules is that communities left to their own devices typically develop toxic patterns that are detrimental on the whole. They enable the community to decide not to leave something up to the community in the future.
It's a large part of the idea behind countries having constitutions for example.
Because there is often a large tech component to it. The United States and Israel have two of the most advanced high-tech sectors in the world and they are playing a large role in this conflict.
Because the west (our political and economic system) supports this war, and does so much more loudly than the war in Sudan,which is funded by the UAE, also a US ally, but a far less visible and consequential one. Nobody is visible working the media or politicians to win people over for the UAE every day, unlike Israel.
The aggressor in the Gaza genocide is also pulling the rest of the west into new wars in the region. The war is also deeply connected with our defense and tech industries.
Also, the conflict around "the area from the river to the sea" in it's entirety is something like 140 years old, with western countries having played a driving role since the very beginning. The Sudan conflict on its own has no such history. (The colonial history of Africa is a different story)
Generally, I think it's reasonable to pay more attention to conflicts where the own side is in the wrong. I don't need to demonstrate or raise awareness if my government is already acting like I'd want it to.
> it should at least be somewhat related like mass surveillance or AI being used for war
Sure. Let's spin the story on developments in laser-guided sniper rifle accuracy:
> Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire.
The tech community props up these regimes by continuing to serve their tech needs. Everything is political in this day.
Toxic is saying politics needs to be kept separate. If we can't discuss how tech is literally fueling genocide, enslavement, and exploitation of people, then all other discussions tacitly serve those functions.
The scale of these atrocities and our governments' support are the reason why this story should be on HN. We elect people who support this, therefore it's only right it follows us and comes up often, even when it's not convenient. That "inconvenience" (skipping a story in HN feed every now and then) is nothing compared to the oppression our democracies support
Imagine, this is just one of thousands upon thousands of incredibly tragic and similar stories of the last few years (going back much further than October 7th).
Most such stories never see the light of day. Hind Rajab is one such story which got some reasonable exposure [0]. I suppose this one will as well get due exposure at some point.
But the vast majority of similar atrocities will just vanish in the sands of time.
Life is so cheap. Especially when both sides look at each other as something lower than animals. That dehumanization is manifested in every breath and action a Palestinian or Israeli takes every single day. These feelings won't dissipate for generations. It's a terribly sad state that we got here and it never gets better.
As an Israeli, this is an inexcusable crime by IDF soldiers. Appallingly, I expect them to receive no punishment. My country's government is criminally racist.
> Israel's most senior military lawyer has said all charges against five soldiers accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee from Gaza have been dropped.
Don't worry, they punished someone.
> It later emerged the CCTV video had been leaked by the then-Israeli Military Advocate General, Maj Gen Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, leading to her resignation and arrest.
Can't say I'm glad to have read that, but at the same time it's good that male victims of wartime sexual assault/rape get covered. It's just a shame that the response is still incredibly muted. It's like men just don't want to think about it.
Whereas I feel pure, hot rage at the lack of coverage, the lack of anybody caring. Raped men being offered paracetamol because the clinics after only for women has been seared into my brain for a long time now: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/jul/17/the-rape-of-....
It is good that it gets covered, but the antagonistic and accelerated nature of modern media means that such coverage is rapidly subjected to spin, repackaging and so on. This opinionated but imho fair article summarizes how one of the self-admitted participants in the incident was treated as a mini0celebrity by one of the right-aligned Israeli TV channels:-
I am German. My government does not acknowledge the tragedy that has been unfolding in Gaza since the Hamas attack in October 2023. It’s absurd. Since then, Jewish people in Berlin who were demonstrating alongside Palestinians against the war in Gaza have been beaten down by the German police. In 2021, Esther Bejarano, the last survivor of the Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra, passed away in Hamburg. Whenever she commented on the culture of remembrance, the media was eager to report on it. Whenever she commented on the situation of the Palestinians, it was not reported in the media. People sometimes ask how it was possible that the vast majority of so-called ordinary people in this country back then could simply tolerate these crimes against Jews and look the other way. Now that should be clear to everyone. The Max Planck Institute in Rostock estimates that well over 100,000 people have been killed in Gaza. But nobody here gives a damn (at least not publicly). We’re even supplying weapons there. Everyone acts as if they’ve forgotten what was written in German newspapers about the current Israeli government when it took office, and as if there were no connection to what’s happening in Gaza right now. I am deeply and profoundly disappointed in the elected officials and public servants of my country. They have learned nothing from the atrocities committed by their grandfathers.
It's terrifying everywhere, really shines a light on the insane levels of propaganda we live under. I don't really know what can be done about it, it's really just hard to wrap my head around living in a country that so explicitly and directly supports an ethnostate and their active genocide.
I find this bewildering. Im not German. Im not Israeli.
Yet I have known that Israel sails German subs (the best in the world) since.... the Greek financial crisis (the subs were part of the scandal) ? Certainly since the mid 2010s.
While I agree with you on the case of Esther Bejerano (a recent example from public broadcasting shows that her own communist beliefs and support for BDS are seemingly 'censored' [0]), I find the general situation complicated. Although it should be easy for any half intellectual being to contextualize the recent Israeli aggression by mentioning October 7, like you did, this is often not done. At the same time I think that the coverage of likely Israeli war crimes also happens in German media and I think nobody is looking away. Still Germany is the reason why the whole mess exists in the first place. I feel, that Germany, has quite some problems like many other countries to find it's
role in a world where particularly the UN is failing and international law/human rights seem not enforcable.
It's even more insidious, I know activists in your country and they not only abhor the current support for Israel's genocide but they are terrified of their activism being criminalized under anti-nazi laws. How ironic.
The last time I was in Berlin (2018), I was actually somewhat shocked by the amount of antisemitic graffiti that I saw just about everywhere (especially on lamp posts). Especially given the strictness of the laws against such speech.
(The eyewitness) told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account.
I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired.
"No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
Regarding rules of whether or not this should be posted here - I think it's less about whether it's important and more about whether it causes arguments.
As the saying goes, religion and politics.
People are going to have varying and at times oppositional views to things like this, and frankly the rest of the internet is often flooded with those discussions, so bubbles isolated from them can be a positive.
We don't need to mourn the woes of the world every hour of every day.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I see people saying this story doesn't belong on HN. genuine question, if this story were about a german national would it be considered as political? is palestinian existence inherently more political than other peoples' existence?
I'm saying this as someone who doesn't really care about this certain topic:
Either we allow _all_ political content or nothing.
The HN guidelines are incredibly grey and handwave-y
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
To me HN became to big for its own good since the Covid days. It's like the reddit front page except there are no subs with mods but one big flood (basically /r/all).
If I got to /r/linux, /r/selfhosted/, /r/networking/ or other tech subs I'll probably find what I saw on HN 15 years ago. But less and less here.
Banning all political content means banning all mention of open-source software, self-driving cars, anything involving a Big Tech company, anything concerning AI, anything to do with EU or US legislation, anything involving hacking or right to repair, anything about copyright...
Ban all politics, and you ban >99% of HN content. Heck, the very concept of HN itself is political!
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
If the story was about a German national then yes, I would still say this is political and doesn't gratify my intellectual curiosity.
Every time these sorts of articles get posted people that express a differing opinion from the standard get flagged (making it so you can't read their post at all) pretty quickly making it seem more like the intention isn't to start discussion. It seems like it's gotten to the point that the people that just get flagged into oblivion stopped trying to post.
I'll bite: If for any reason, probably because it's neither technically interesting nor entrepreneurial in nature.
US Politics seems to get more of a pass, probably due to Silicon Valley being there (and nearly all the major tech outlets), similarly some China news gets a pass, also largely when it relates to supply chain and Taiwan.
This goes beyond US politics. The US and Israel do not exist in a bubble. This conflict can and will have big repercussions which will impact our technical and entrepreneurial institutions.
All events in the universe are connected to all others. If the rule is that anything that could affect anyone is fair game, then there simply are no rules, to subject guidelines, no filter whatsoever. It's hackernews.com without the "hacker"
Mainstream world news has a place on HN if it contains "significant new information", and as much as this site is primarily for curious conversation and gratifying intellectual curiosity, we don't want to pretend that horrific events like this aren't happening.
Horrific events happen almost every hour of every day. This is political, and the events that are upvoted are always from the same political perspective. If you don't see this, you're blind. But from my perspective, mods do see it, are ok with it, and that is unfortunate. There are few places left online without explicit political bias. HN used to be one of them.
These are not even a isolated or a new pattern that Palestinian people are enduring such atrocities by the rogue israeli regime with full impunity from the western super powers. In fact, the Palestinian people have been suffering such oppression and injustice everyday at the hand of zionist society on a regular basis since 1948.
In fact, here are some more such equally horrible actions of the israelis just in the recent days that you may not find on the western media ever.
Historically, the western news media have always downplayed or completely ignored the persecution of Palestinians at every cost. Now due to rise of social media and citizen journalism, the israeli and zionist atrocities are coming out every single day hundreds of times, causing the abysmal distrust in these media outlets across the globe. To salvage their credibility, the western media now picking up some stories here and there, yet use the very artistic and convoluted language not to damage the image of the rogue zionist regime as much as possible. Journalists with conscience, who could not take anymore such order from their bosses, kept resigning from these news outlets:
* The New York Times
- Anne Boyer: The Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry editor for The New York Times Magazine resigned in November 2023. In her resignation letter, she wrote that she could no longer work for the publication amidst the "reasonable tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering" and "verbally sanitized hellscapes."
- Jazmine Hughes: An award-winning staff writer for The New York Times Magazine resigned in November 2023 after signing an open letter by "Writers Against the War on Gaza." The outlet stated the signing violated its policies on public protest.
- Jamie Lauren Keiles: A frequent contributor and writer for the magazine also resigned in solidarity with Hughes after signing the same open letter.
* BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation)
- Karishma Patel: A presenter and journalist who walked out of the BBC in October 2024. She later published an essay in The Guardian criticizing the broadcaster's "obstructive editorial policy" and its decision to shelf the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack.
- Bassam Bounenni: A veteran North Africa correspondent for BBC Arabic resigned in October 2023. He announced his departure on social media, stating it was for the sake of his "professional integrity" regarding the coverage of the escalation in Gaza.
- Noah Abrahams: A freelance sports reporter for the BBC resigned in October 2023 in protest of the broadcaster's refusal to use the word "terrorist" to describe Hamas, highlighting the internal friction over language and terminology.
* Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)
- Nour Haydar: A political reporter in the Canberra bureau resigned in early 2024. She cited concerns over the broadcaster's coverage of the Gaza conflict and its treatment of culturally diverse staff as primary reasons for her departure.
* Reuters
- Valerie Zink: A Canadian photojournalist who resigned from Reuters in August 2025. She publicly denounced the agency's coverage as a "betrayal of journalists," specifically citing an instance where the outlet allegedly published unsubstantiated claims from the Israeli military to justify the killing of a Palestinian colleague.
Reminder that whatever you think, war, terrorism, questions of "the right/wrong target," etc are all insperable from AI and technology these days. These soldiers were where they were for concrete reasons dictated across vast automated networks; their choices of engagement are insperable from the tools either side (army and occupied population to be clear) here has or is perceived to have. War is simply many different "user stories," to put it coldly, and there is ethical and/or practical reasons, as technologists/scientists/academics, to see it that way (even if the goal is to just know thy enemy).
This is all why Anthropic is now a "supply-chain risk", why Thiel and Musk are particularly powerful persons-qua-tech-CEOs, why embedded microcontrollers getting so cheap (or whatever) enables drones instead of suicide bombs.
If you listen to the news, Israel kills innocent people on a daily basis in Palestine and Lebanon. I am in no way justifying it, but it is a surprise that people choose to live in the West Bank despite such killings.
I think that's the point - to discourage (certain) people from living there at all. Except it turns out people are capable of never-ending suffering and persevering through it.
You would think Israelis would already know this very well.
What's surprising is how nonchalantly people like you suggest victims should just surrender and leave. Exactly the same thing was told to Ukrainians after the invasion. The fucking audacity you people have is staggering.
They can leave or they can fight. But they shouldn't just do nothing, which is what they're doing. Given how mismatched they are in power, the sensible thing to do is to merge the West Bank into Jordan if at all possible. As for Lebanon, it could merge into Syria or become an exclave of Turkey, etc.
Well, right now the "better technology" is Israel's use of the "Lavender" AI to designate people to kill because they are "likely" to be hamas supporters.
And yes, probably they could have used better technology to realize that people in the car are not a danger to them. But that would immply they actually want to avoid killing civilians instead of looking for any excuse to shoot them.
Given that the IDF involved were undercover agents (according to the reports), it seems unlikely that this family knew that driving fast would get them killed.
> He told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account.
I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired.
"No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
I have no doubt isreali forces are responsible for a lot of war crimes. At the same time i see how one they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination. All sides just need to stop with that hatred. It leads to so much pain.
> i see how one they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination. All sides just need to stop with that hatred. It leads to so much pain.
I think by now we all know this is a straw man, considering the disproportionate amount of power both parties have. There is absolutely no excuse left for what Israel has been doing in Gaza.
This will never stop, because on both sides there are people who benefit from the existence of the conflict and they are the ones with power.
The last time when Israel had a PM who was willing to find a way for ending the conflict, he was murdered and replaced by those who want a perpetual conflict.
I have worked in Israel for some years, and the vast majority of people that I have encountered were very nice, but I have also seen a few that were definitely evil, and of course, the evil ones were concentrated in positions like the government or the management of companies.
Because most Israelis live in constant fear that if they would ever lose their technological and financial superiority their neighbors will come and cut their throats, when I was there, and I assume that also today, the majority of the population was exploited in a way that would not be possible in any other country.
Everybody had to work very hard, much harder than in any other country, and prioritize work over anything else, because this was a patriotic duty, like one might have worked in USA during WWII or in Ukraine today or in any country that is at war and its survival depends on how everyone works, except that in Israel the war has been continuous for three quarters of a century.
For the elites of the country this war economy is extremely desirable because they can demand any sacrifices from the workers, since those are supposedly not for increasing the profits of the company owners, but for ensuring the survival of the nation, and anyone who would not want to do what is required would be seen as a traitor.
For ending the conflict, it is not possible to just say that from tomorrow the parties in conflict should stop hating each other. Reparations would be necessary, like Israel itself has received plenty from Germany and other countries.
However, it is very unlikely that Israel will ever have a government willing to end the conflict, instead of keeping it alive as long as possible, to have something with which to scare the population.
Even post Epstein revelations, Chomsky's core thesis in The Fateful Triangle from 1983 still holds. A minority of hateful, brutish war hawks and crazy people on all 3 sides perpetuate a never-ending cycle of violence. The challenge is removing them from power and holding them accountable.
For those wondering, it is verifiable story, it is covered as fact in Israeli newspapers:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-forces-kill-west-bank-...
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/p7mq5k5bs
The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
The New York Times describes it as such:
"Ali Bani Odeh’s wife and four young boys hadn’t seen him in a month and a half when he came home to Tammun, in the West Bank, from his construction job in Israel late on Friday to spend the last few days of Ramadan with his family.
On Saturday night, the boys persuaded him to take them out for a drive. Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, was coming, so there were new clothes to buy. The day’s fast had been broken, so there were sweets to be had, too.
They picked up fried doughnut holes in Tubas, saving them for later, but the clothing shop they went to in Nablus was closed. It was already past midnight, so they headed back to Tammun: Khaled, 11, the oldest, in the back with Mustafa, 8, and Muhammad, 5. Othman, 6, blind and incapable of walking or feeding himself, was in his mother’s lap in front.
As they rounded a corner slowly, a few minutes from home, young Khaled and Mustafa recounted on Sunday, their mother, Waad, 35, asked her husband to pull over and take Othman from her so she could get something from her bag on the floor. Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/world/middleeast/palestin...
The situation in the West Bank (and similar forces are at play in Gaza, too) remind me of what's wrong with American policing, at a far more extreme scale.
The people charged with enforcing the peace deploy lethal force with near impunity at the slightest "provocation" (a child throwing a stone, a car driving too fast); I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are, to operate in constant fear and perceive absolutely everything and everyone as a deadly threat to be neutralized. The soldiers themselves are raised in a culture with deeply racist undertones, making them all too ready to view any random Palestinian as a terrorist. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy that should be overseeing them works only to protect them. It's no surprise that things like this happen as often as they do.
Reform in the US is imaginable, I can and do believe, but it's much harder for me to imagine it in Israel - even much of the so-called left in Israel is too radicalized against Palestinians after 100 years of conflict, the Second Intifada, and October 7.
That's a huge problem (immediate, unjustified escalation to violence becoming the norm) and:
> The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
"I feel unsafe" has become the catch-all excuse for everything in the recent decade. It's used to justify everything from Karen complaining about someone's behavior in public to people calling the cops on someone for looking at them wrong, to making a scene on a public bus, to police officers jumping the gun and escalating to violence, all the way to war crimes. When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card? Like a magic spell that you can cast before doing something crazy. It's like that old "He's coming right for us" South Park joke, but instead of being a joke it has real life and death consequences.
Most people will never interact with a cop on duty outside of a speeding ticket or some other mundane encounter. A major chuck of what many people think about police comes from TV and movies.
It's impossible to overstate the influence of Dragnet (the OG police procedural from the early 50s) alone on the widely held idea that police are mostly heroic and good. Police procedurals are still extremely popular, they overwhelmingly portray law enforcement in an extremely idealized way.
There are exceptions (The Wire, The Shield), but they are noteworty in that police are not heroes.
> I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are
IDF trains them.
https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/with-whom-are-many-u-s-polic...
That checks out. Although the history of "Warrior Policing" in the US predates this (going back to the 60s) and extends far beyond IDF training programs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrior_policing
David Simon and others have written extensively for decades about the problems with the Baltimore Police Department, and other departments around the country. They trace these problems back to the war on drugs and other purely American factors.
The Amnesty article that you're citing is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The Baltimore Police Department did not need to learn about constitutional violations from the Israelis.
Everybody thinks the War on Drugs is about "keeping people safe". It never was, it was always about manufacturing a tool to oppress "others".
You can add The War On Terror to that list.
Where do think US police get all their fun toys to play with?
"How 9/11 helped to militarize American law enforcement": https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-9-11-helped-to-milita...
from that lens it was almost necessary to invent a pretense since people got all huffy about overt oppression at the end of Jim Crow.
Pretty sure police brutality was invented way before Israel existed.
> I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are'
American police officers ARE trained much like IDF forces. By the IDF! https://jinsa.org/jinsa_program/homeland-security-program/
The IDF is a foreign occupation army, not the police.
At least in the US, the police come from much the same communities as they patrol, and there's some sort of democratic accountability. Don't like the police? You can vote for local government candidates who will implement reforms.
In the West Bank, Palestinians are subject to arbitrary violence at the hands of foreign soldiers. The IDF is not there to protect Palestinians. It's there to protect the Israeli settlers who are taking Palestinian land. If Palestinians don't like how the IDF behaves, tough luck. Palestinians can't vote in Israeli elections, so they have zero say in the government that exercises ultimate authority over their lives.
This is a fundamentally different situation from policing in the US.
Their media is non stop hammering the citizen with scary Muslim stories since the beginning of the country, every day since birth, with a density as if nothing else ever happened in the world.
Deprogramming is possible. Just tell them it is impossible to argue it was their own idea. They know how hard it was rubbed in their face.
> at the slightest "provocation"
Is that it though? When one has historical reasons to expect being attacked, one must be vigilant and one must be trigger-ready.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_suicide_at...
Yes, American police use these kinds of justifications when innocent people are killed too. It's absurd (watch Surviving Edged Weapons [0] some time) either way.
The reality is, if you have soldiers mowing down children throwing rocks, mowing down families driving around, mowing down kids playing football, mowing down toddlers in their bedrooms, mowing down hundreds of people each year [1], you've over-indexed on vigilance and under-indexed on the value of human life. You're not trigger-ready, you're trigger-happy.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6jhru-EqDA
[1] https://www.un.org/unispal/document/ohchr-press-release-17oc...
A professional looks at and understands the situation as it exists now. A professional is trained to not get into situations where fear controls them. Your argument is a compelling one that either these are not professionals or that they are professionals and are doing this on purpose. The stats today clearly show the massive difference between danger to Israeli personnel and Palestinians. Israel at this point has either failed to train professional forces that seek to deescalate and avoid dangerous situations or is training forces to find situations they can claim fear as a justification for murder. So, pick. They are either amateurs at which point it is a deplorable to put amateurs with this much force near a vulnerable population or they are professionals trained to do exactly this, find ways to kill a vulnerable population and claim self defense.
A professional is not obligated to risk death (or die) on the off chance that you are belligerent but not actually dangerous. Do not ever act belligerent around law enforcement, in any country, especially in a country where they LITERALLY EXPECT to be ambushed by people who act like that, because such people have been doing it for decades.
Be calm. Do not run. Talk clearly. Keep your hands visible. Did your parents not teach you?
So what exactly did the 8 year old boy sat in the back of his parents car do wrong?
Nothing, and that is very bad luck. My heart breaks for the kid.
But unless you are suggesting that laws should be not applied to those with kids, I am not sure why that matters? What do you suggest? I cannot wait for "kid" to be a number one accessory to bring to a heist then.
Again, what law was broken here? By anyone in the car? I'm struggling to understand how this wasn't outright execution.
Or in democratic societies we can insist that our "public servants" actually serve the public interest of law and order rather than merely using it as a pretext to be able to commit their own violent crimes.
Your rationalization is nothing more than a product of a failed society. Bringing it up as pragmatic advice might make sense, although still not for this incident where the "offense" seems to have been merely stopping a car on the side of the road. But invoking it as some universal value of "what ought" is a pure crab bucket mentality.
I'll repeat the bit about professionals being trained to avoid and deescalate. That is the point. I think the details of this, and many similar incidents clearly show a lack of attempt to deescalate or avoid. That was the clear argument I made in my post and am re-emphasizing now. This clear trend shows either malicious intent by professionals or amateurs put in a situation they shouldn't have been allowed near and those above them should be held accountable for it.
The IDF is not law enforcement. It's a foreign army. It treats Palestinians with utter contempt and has no problem with killing them. Its job is to protect Israeli settlers who are taking Palestinian land and to prevent the Palestinians from resisting Israeli rule.
Comparing the IDF to law enforcement in a democratic country is not relevant.
A certain amount of politics should/must be tolerated on HN, because you cannot compartmentalize technology, politics and morality.
No-one, not even people who say they like technology but do not care about politics, should be able to live their life wihtout knowing that we live in a world where six-year old blind children are murdered with automatic assault rifles.
(For the same reason that no-one should be able to live not knowing that jewish once were murdered in the millions in gas chambers.)
Please do not mix events that happened 80 years ago on different contiment, with current situation.
Arabs are not responsible for WW2. Germans should give up their land!
Technology IS politics.
Technology is a form of control. And in the capitalist system, this control is mostly exerted by private companies, on which the rules of democracy do not apply.
There must be guardrails
> automatic assault rifles
Trying hard to embellish your language I see. Might I suggest "military style automatic tactical assault rifle"?
My impression is that topics that involve politics are tolerated, even encouraged. It's politically charged discourse such as yours that's not welcome. It's near impossible to have an intellectual exchange with a political pundit.
I wonder if any VC out there would fund my pitch for an AI enhanced military style automatic tactical assault rifle with a copilot 360 targeting integration to ensure our troops can noscope420 at all times as well as a blockchain layer for auditing discharge events.
this comment is very pedantic
There are many objections that could be raised to both my tone and content there but I don't think "pedantic" is one of them.
It's certainly mocking. The subject matter is overly political. It's even plausible that it strays across the line laid down by the HN guidelines, although personally I think it's acceptable given the context. Something about fighting fire with fire.
I'm wondering about the broader context here: Are stories like this rare or common? Are they increasing or decreasing in frequency?
Yeah it is getting worse. This was written 3 days ago before this event by Human Rights Watch:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/03/13/in-the-shadow-of-war-set...
Eh, tbh I've given up. Can't point out the terrible things that the IDF are up to without being labelled an apologist, or terrorist supporter, or just getting a massively negative reaction.
Now I'm not one to fall prey to the conspiracy theories around Judaism...but like...is it not possible to say that both hamas and the IDF do terrible things? And that innocent civilians are caught in between, with the usual bad faith reasons of "they were hiding hamas members" aka the exact same rhetoric that Russia used when accused of something terrible that they obviously did, deflection and formal outrage.
The very fact I feel I have to tread so carefully with my comment is an indication that something is seriously, seriously wrong. I don't live in China, I don't live in Russia. But when speaking about Israel or the IDF, I feel like I do.
> is it not possible to say that both hamas and the IDF do terrible things?
I agree. Hamas and IDF do terrible things - the ICC issued warrants for the leaders of both. This is why an external party has to impose a solution and it should involve in my opinion separation (two-states.) Both parties are radicalized at least for now and need to be separated and allowed to manage their own affairs while allowing the other to exist.
Two states solutions have been offered to and rejected by Arab nationalists since Palestine was partitioned in 1947.
HN being HN: this is a verifiable fact at any source you name.
100% not true. Abbas wants a Palestinian state beside Israel. This is what he has supported for a long time. And why many states in the last two years have recognized a Palestinian state: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/mahmoud-abbas-palestinian-pres...
While there was rejectionists in the past, Netanyahu has been the rejectionist for the last two decades. He says so himself:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-boasts-of-thwarting-...
He and his cronies boosted Hamas in part to split the Palestinians so as to avoid having to negotiate a two-state solution:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...
I have followed this conflict since Operation Cast Lead and the beginnings of the siege on Gaza.
Israel has been using enormous amounts of force against the Palestinian people since then, with death tolls of _at least_ 100 dead Palestinians for every dead Israeli.
For a very good account of life in Israel around the time of Cast Lead I recommend Guy Delisle, brilliant diary in comic form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem:_Chronicles_from_the...
His partner was working for Doctors Without Borders, the Israeli Army refused to let them enter Gaza to help the people suffering under their bombardments.
I think the middle eastern conflicts are a tragedy. That said, this story does not belong on HN. As others called out this is a tech community and while there is sometimes an overlap with politics, it should at least be somewhat related like mass surveillance or AI being used for war.
HN is one of the most informative and least toxic communities and I’d appreciate if it would stay this way.
At the same time, there must be a point where general humanity overrides community guidelines.
Why? Everyone has alternative news sources where they can find such stories, and there’s nothing new here. There’s always some tragedy that you could argue deserves more attention, I don’t think we should hold our guidelines hostage to pleas for the heart.
> I don’t think we should hold our guidelines hostage to pleas for the heart.
I don't think that's an accurate framing of the situation. It's a single post that enough people decided was worthy of being upvoted to the front page. I think allowing the community to decide is far more inline with the spirit of hacker news than the outright banning a category of posts.
Without taking one side or the other I just want to point out that a large part of the utility of guidelines or rules is that communities left to their own devices typically develop toxic patterns that are detrimental on the whole. They enable the community to decide not to leave something up to the community in the future.
It's a large part of the idea behind countries having constitutions for example.
Why does Gaza get 10x the coverage on HN and other social media well, when what has been happening in Sudan in the same time period is 10x worse?
(The 10x coverage number is from algolia hn search, the 10x worse number is from reported killings in the past year)
Because there is often a large tech component to it. The United States and Israel have two of the most advanced high-tech sectors in the world and they are playing a large role in this conflict.
And the people on HN work disproportionately in such companies, so it hits closer to home.
If Microsoft, Meta, Palantir, OpenAI, etc, were complicit in genocide in Sudan, Sudan would have much more attention.
Because Sudan isn't a tech/investment hub, and there's no overlap betweent he US and Sudanese defense industries.
The atrocities in Gaza are funded by, and sometimes even committed by, Americans. That’s why a predominantly American forum is interested in it.
Because the west (our political and economic system) supports this war, and does so much more loudly than the war in Sudan,which is funded by the UAE, also a US ally, but a far less visible and consequential one. Nobody is visible working the media or politicians to win people over for the UAE every day, unlike Israel.
The aggressor in the Gaza genocide is also pulling the rest of the west into new wars in the region. The war is also deeply connected with our defense and tech industries.
There is plenty of reason to discuss this war.
Also, the conflict around "the area from the river to the sea" in it's entirety is something like 140 years old, with western countries having played a driving role since the very beginning. The Sudan conflict on its own has no such history. (The colonial history of Africa is a different story)
Generally, I think it's reasonable to pay more attention to conflicts where the own side is in the wrong. I don't need to demonstrate or raise awareness if my government is already acting like I'd want it to.
> it should at least be somewhat related like mass surveillance or AI being used for war
Sure. Let's spin the story on developments in laser-guided sniper rifle accuracy:
> Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire.
HN routinely talks about politics. Thinking that technology and politics can be understood in isolation is a pipe dream
Israel has its hands in many tech companies and circles. The tech community deserves to know who they're dealing with.
The tech community props up these regimes by continuing to serve their tech needs. Everything is political in this day.
Toxic is saying politics needs to be kept separate. If we can't discuss how tech is literally fueling genocide, enslavement, and exploitation of people, then all other discussions tacitly serve those functions.
> and least toxic communities
Your comment sounds toxic to me. It endorses silence in face of a genocide.
We discussed a lot other wars here without immediate technological or economic consequences: Ukraine, Iraq, etc.
Why not the genocide in Gaza & West Bank?
Exactly! Don't bring politics into HN. Everyone and their dog have grievances. There's a time and place for them.
Exactly, we shouldn’t waste the precious time of HNers so that they can instead… checks notes… read about the nth vibevcoded side project!
I come here to escape these reddit style cesspools.. hacker news is literally for tech news and nth vibecoding side projects
The scale of these atrocities and our governments' support are the reason why this story should be on HN. We elect people who support this, therefore it's only right it follows us and comes up often, even when it's not convenient. That "inconvenience" (skipping a story in HN feed every now and then) is nothing compared to the oppression our democracies support
Imagine, this is just one of thousands upon thousands of incredibly tragic and similar stories of the last few years (going back much further than October 7th).
Most such stories never see the light of day. Hind Rajab is one such story which got some reasonable exposure [0]. I suppose this one will as well get due exposure at some point.
But the vast majority of similar atrocities will just vanish in the sands of time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Hind_Rajab
Life is so cheap. Especially when both sides look at each other as something lower than animals. That dehumanization is manifested in every breath and action a Palestinian or Israeli takes every single day. These feelings won't dissipate for generations. It's a terribly sad state that we got here and it never gets better.
https://www.haaretz.com/west-bank/2026-03-16/ty-article/.pre...
This wouldn't have happened if they didn't dehumanize their enemies. This should be considered a crime in itself.
Who exactly are you blaming here, the IDF or the boys family?
As an Israeli, this is an inexcusable crime by IDF soldiers. Appallingly, I expect them to receive no punishment. My country's government is criminally racist.
See also: raping a detainee with a knife.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2xrz71zm3o
> Israel's most senior military lawyer has said all charges against five soldiers accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee from Gaza have been dropped.
Don't worry, they punished someone.
> It later emerged the CCTV video had been leaked by the then-Israeli Military Advocate General, Maj Gen Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, leading to her resignation and arrest.
Can't say I'm glad to have read that, but at the same time it's good that male victims of wartime sexual assault/rape get covered. It's just a shame that the response is still incredibly muted. It's like men just don't want to think about it.
Whereas I feel pure, hot rage at the lack of coverage, the lack of anybody caring. Raped men being offered paracetamol because the clinics after only for women has been seared into my brain for a long time now: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2011/jul/17/the-rape-of-....
Nothing has changed since then either.
It is good that it gets covered, but the antagonistic and accelerated nature of modern media means that such coverage is rapidly subjected to spin, repackaging and so on. This opinionated but imho fair article summarizes how one of the self-admitted participants in the incident was treated as a mini0celebrity by one of the right-aligned Israeli TV channels:-
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/08/the-main-suspect-in-the-sde-t...
> IDF soldiers
Hopefully, such trigger-happy soldiers are in the minority.
They are not. And they are incited by their hierarchy to commit more crimes, because they are not held accountable
I am German. My government does not acknowledge the tragedy that has been unfolding in Gaza since the Hamas attack in October 2023. It’s absurd. Since then, Jewish people in Berlin who were demonstrating alongside Palestinians against the war in Gaza have been beaten down by the German police. In 2021, Esther Bejarano, the last survivor of the Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra, passed away in Hamburg. Whenever she commented on the culture of remembrance, the media was eager to report on it. Whenever she commented on the situation of the Palestinians, it was not reported in the media. People sometimes ask how it was possible that the vast majority of so-called ordinary people in this country back then could simply tolerate these crimes against Jews and look the other way. Now that should be clear to everyone. The Max Planck Institute in Rostock estimates that well over 100,000 people have been killed in Gaza. But nobody here gives a damn (at least not publicly). We’re even supplying weapons there. Everyone acts as if they’ve forgotten what was written in German newspapers about the current Israeli government when it took office, and as if there were no connection to what’s happening in Gaza right now. I am deeply and profoundly disappointed in the elected officials and public servants of my country. They have learned nothing from the atrocities committed by their grandfathers.
I live in DE too, it's terrifying. I didn't realize the extent of the armaments shipped to Israel from Germany until recently.
The Israeli navy ships were built in German shipyards and subsidized 30%...
It's terrifying everywhere, really shines a light on the insane levels of propaganda we live under. I don't really know what can be done about it, it's really just hard to wrap my head around living in a country that so explicitly and directly supports an ethnostate and their active genocide.
I find this bewildering. Im not German. Im not Israeli.
Yet I have known that Israel sails German subs (the best in the world) since.... the Greek financial crisis (the subs were part of the scandal) ? Certainly since the mid 2010s.
Why is this?
https://xkcd.com/1053/
> Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra
Is this something from the post-war or did that really exist?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Orchestra_of_Auschwi...
“The Germans wanted a propaganda tool for [SS] visitors and camp newsreels and a tool to boost camp morale.”
There were also several men’s orchestras.
While I agree with you on the case of Esther Bejerano (a recent example from public broadcasting shows that her own communist beliefs and support for BDS are seemingly 'censored' [0]), I find the general situation complicated. Although it should be easy for any half intellectual being to contextualize the recent Israeli aggression by mentioning October 7, like you did, this is often not done. At the same time I think that the coverage of likely Israeli war crimes also happens in German media and I think nobody is looking away. Still Germany is the reason why the whole mess exists in the first place. I feel, that Germany, has quite some problems like many other countries to find it's role in a world where particularly the UN is failing and international law/human rights seem not enforcable.
[0] https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/koepfe/Esther-Bejarano-Das-Erb...
It's even more insidious, I know activists in your country and they not only abhor the current support for Israel's genocide but they are terrified of their activism being criminalized under anti-nazi laws. How ironic.
The last time I was in Berlin (2018), I was actually somewhat shocked by the amount of antisemitic graffiti that I saw just about everywhere (especially on lamp posts). Especially given the strictness of the laws against such speech.
An eyewitness account from the article:
(The eyewitness) told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account. I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired. "No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
Regarding rules of whether or not this should be posted here - I think it's less about whether it's important and more about whether it causes arguments.
As the saying goes, religion and politics.
People are going to have varying and at times oppositional views to things like this, and frankly the rest of the internet is often flooded with those discussions, so bubbles isolated from them can be a positive.
We don't need to mourn the woes of the world every hour of every day.
The question isn’t “why is this here?” but rather “are you OK with what happened?”
Honestly, it looks like a lot of you are.
Verbatum of the falsified excuse used to murder Reni Good in Miniapolis.
The ZGF, zionist genocide force are the most ethical perverts in the world.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I see people saying this story doesn't belong on HN. genuine question, if this story were about a german national would it be considered as political? is palestinian existence inherently more political than other peoples' existence?
I'm saying this as someone who doesn't really care about this certain topic:
Either we allow _all_ political content or nothing.
The HN guidelines are incredibly grey and handwave-y
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
To me HN became to big for its own good since the Covid days. It's like the reddit front page except there are no subs with mods but one big flood (basically /r/all).
If I got to /r/linux, /r/selfhosted/, /r/networking/ or other tech subs I'll probably find what I saw on HN 15 years ago. But less and less here.
Banning all political content means banning all mention of open-source software, self-driving cars, anything involving a Big Tech company, anything concerning AI, anything to do with EU or US legislation, anything involving hacking or right to repair, anything about copyright...
Ban all politics, and you ban >99% of HN content. Heck, the very concept of HN itself is political!
bingo
From the guidelines:
What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
If the story was about a German national then yes, I would still say this is political and doesn't gratify my intellectual curiosity.
> if this story were about a german national would it be considered as political?
It wouldn’t make the front page. Like the Iranian massacres. No jews, no news.
Every time these sorts of articles get posted people that express a differing opinion from the standard get flagged (making it so you can't read their post at all) pretty quickly making it seem more like the intention isn't to start discussion. It seems like it's gotten to the point that the people that just get flagged into oblivion stopped trying to post.
It's not just these articles. Having any differing opinions on basically anything now.
It's as far from hacking interest as it gets for me.
FWIW, you can read flagged posts and comments by turning on “showdead” in your profile.
News not connected to technology or VC doesn't belong on HN.
is that an opinion or a consistently enforced policy?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45202200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47136179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46543457
I'll bite: If for any reason, probably because it's neither technically interesting nor entrepreneurial in nature.
US Politics seems to get more of a pass, probably due to Silicon Valley being there (and nearly all the major tech outlets), similarly some China news gets a pass, also largely when it relates to supply chain and Taiwan.
> US Politics seems to get more of a pass,
This goes beyond US politics. The US and Israel do not exist in a bubble. This conflict can and will have big repercussions which will impact our technical and entrepreneurial institutions.
All events in the universe are connected to all others. If the rule is that anything that could affect anyone is fair game, then there simply are no rules, to subject guidelines, no filter whatsoever. It's hackernews.com without the "hacker"
All events are connected, but the only superpower is a little more connected.
Nothing exists in total isolation, you have to draw lines anyway.
[flagged]
Mainstream world news has a place on HN if it contains "significant new information", and as much as this site is primarily for curious conversation and gratifying intellectual curiosity, we don't want to pretend that horrific events like this aren't happening.
Horrific events happen almost every hour of every day. This is political, and the events that are upvoted are always from the same political perspective. If you don't see this, you're blind. But from my perspective, mods do see it, are ok with it, and that is unfortunate. There are few places left online without explicit political bias. HN used to be one of them.
and your comment is flagged, as is mine. This article has no relevance to HN, just more political activism
[flagged]
> The same reason your inane question is on HN.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
These are not even a isolated or a new pattern that Palestinian people are enduring such atrocities by the rogue israeli regime with full impunity from the western super powers. In fact, the Palestinian people have been suffering such oppression and injustice everyday at the hand of zionist society on a regular basis since 1948.
In fact, here are some more such equally horrible actions of the israelis just in the recent days that you may not find on the western media ever.
1. Either the illegal settlers or the israeli occupation force themselves set a Palestinian boy on fire in Ramallah: https://x.com/dillyhussain88/status/2033528694833127569
2. An israeli ran over a 6 years old in front of her home in Hebron while she was playing: https://x.com/anadoluagency/status/2033226719986069866
3. Another israeli settler deliberately ran his car over a Palestinian child in the Nablus: https://x.com/angeloinchina/status/2033402402062434589
Historically, the western news media have always downplayed or completely ignored the persecution of Palestinians at every cost. Now due to rise of social media and citizen journalism, the israeli and zionist atrocities are coming out every single day hundreds of times, causing the abysmal distrust in these media outlets across the globe. To salvage their credibility, the western media now picking up some stories here and there, yet use the very artistic and convoluted language not to damage the image of the rogue zionist regime as much as possible. Journalists with conscience, who could not take anymore such order from their bosses, kept resigning from these news outlets:
* The New York Times - Anne Boyer: The Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry editor for The New York Times Magazine resigned in November 2023. In her resignation letter, she wrote that she could no longer work for the publication amidst the "reasonable tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering" and "verbally sanitized hellscapes."
- Jazmine Hughes: An award-winning staff writer for The New York Times Magazine resigned in November 2023 after signing an open letter by "Writers Against the War on Gaza." The outlet stated the signing violated its policies on public protest.
- Jamie Lauren Keiles: A frequent contributor and writer for the magazine also resigned in solidarity with Hughes after signing the same open letter.
* BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) - Karishma Patel: A presenter and journalist who walked out of the BBC in October 2024. She later published an essay in The Guardian criticizing the broadcaster's "obstructive editorial policy" and its decision to shelf the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack.
- Bassam Bounenni: A veteran North Africa correspondent for BBC Arabic resigned in October 2023. He announced his departure on social media, stating it was for the sake of his "professional integrity" regarding the coverage of the escalation in Gaza.
- Noah Abrahams: A freelance sports reporter for the BBC resigned in October 2023 in protest of the broadcaster's refusal to use the word "terrorist" to describe Hamas, highlighting the internal friction over language and terminology.
* Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) - Nour Haydar: A political reporter in the Canberra bureau resigned in early 2024. She cited concerns over the broadcaster's coverage of the Gaza conflict and its treatment of culturally diverse staff as primary reasons for her departure.
* Reuters - Valerie Zink: A Canadian photojournalist who resigned from Reuters in August 2025. She publicly denounced the agency's coverage as a "betrayal of journalists," specifically citing an instance where the outlet allegedly published unsubstantiated claims from the Israeli military to justify the killing of a Palestinian colleague.
If anything, it's refreshing to see something that isn't about the latest apple / llm / current techbro trend bullshit
I can go to Reddit for that.
You can go to Reddit for everything. There’s even r/hackernews.
Any strong signal left?
or just recycled points?
You can also not click on links you are not interested in. Is that difficult?
Reminder that whatever you think, war, terrorism, questions of "the right/wrong target," etc are all insperable from AI and technology these days. These soldiers were where they were for concrete reasons dictated across vast automated networks; their choices of engagement are insperable from the tools either side (army and occupied population to be clear) here has or is perceived to have. War is simply many different "user stories," to put it coldly, and there is ethical and/or practical reasons, as technologists/scientists/academics, to see it that way (even if the goal is to just know thy enemy).
This is all why Anthropic is now a "supply-chain risk", why Thiel and Musk are particularly powerful persons-qua-tech-CEOs, why embedded microcontrollers getting so cheap (or whatever) enables drones instead of suicide bombs.
Sorry but this is so off topic. Does not belong here.
If you listen to the news, Israel kills innocent people on a daily basis in Palestine and Lebanon. I am in no way justifying it, but it is a surprise that people choose to live in the West Bank despite such killings.
I think that's the point - to discourage (certain) people from living there at all. Except it turns out people are capable of never-ending suffering and persevering through it.
You would think Israelis would already know this very well.
Choose?!
What's surprising is how nonchalantly people like you suggest victims should just surrender and leave. Exactly the same thing was told to Ukrainians after the invasion. The fucking audacity you people have is staggering.
They can leave or they can fight. But they shouldn't just do nothing, which is what they're doing. Given how mismatched they are in power, the sensible thing to do is to merge the West Bank into Jordan if at all possible. As for Lebanon, it could merge into Syria or become an exclave of Turkey, etc.
What you're talking about is called ethnic cleansing.
It’s hard not to wonder whether better technology could someday help stop tragedies like this.
No. Better technology is only making it more efficient. We need better humanity, better morals, better policing of criminals in power.
That's misguided. Technology is a tool. Tools can be used for good or bad. The hammer that builds a hospital can also crack a skull open.
No, we need better people controlling the tools.
The israeli army are famous for their tech?
The Holocaust was built on IBM, the genocide in Gaza is built on Azure. Technology won't be on the side of stopping these tragedies.
nothing has changed https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
Well, right now the "better technology" is Israel's use of the "Lavender" AI to designate people to kill because they are "likely" to be hamas supporters.
And yes, probably they could have used better technology to realize that people in the car are not a danger to them. But that would immply they actually want to avoid killing civilians instead of looking for any excuse to shoot them.
* * *
My understanding if you read the Israeli news articles is that the justification is that the car was going fast:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-forces-kill-west-bank-...
Given that the IDF involved were undercover agents (according to the reports), it seems unlikely that this family knew that driving fast would get them killed.
From the article, an eyewitness account:
> He told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account. I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired. "No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
Indeed. Often one of the key details omitted is that Israel has been illegally occupying the west bank since 1967 as part of an apartheid regime.
The BBC had a literal Israeli officer as the head of their Middle East department. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/high-court-rules-favour-j...
A classic "HN is not for politics unless it is about Palestine" post.
This is incredibly heart breaking, but unfortunately, in war, there are always casualties. This is the grim reality of war.
Wasn't aware Israel had declared war on the West Bank.
Another dangerously stupid Zionist fucking retard
There is no war in the West Bank, this is ethnic cleansing.
I have no doubt isreali forces are responsible for a lot of war crimes. At the same time i see how one they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination. All sides just need to stop with that hatred. It leads to so much pain.
> i see how one they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination. All sides just need to stop with that hatred. It leads to so much pain.
I think by now we all know this is a straw man, considering the disproportionate amount of power both parties have. There is absolutely no excuse left for what Israel has been doing in Gaza.
Has Hamas left Gaza, given up its weapons, surrendered, or changed its charter?
This will never stop, because on both sides there are people who benefit from the existence of the conflict and they are the ones with power.
The last time when Israel had a PM who was willing to find a way for ending the conflict, he was murdered and replaced by those who want a perpetual conflict.
I have worked in Israel for some years, and the vast majority of people that I have encountered were very nice, but I have also seen a few that were definitely evil, and of course, the evil ones were concentrated in positions like the government or the management of companies.
Because most Israelis live in constant fear that if they would ever lose their technological and financial superiority their neighbors will come and cut their throats, when I was there, and I assume that also today, the majority of the population was exploited in a way that would not be possible in any other country.
Everybody had to work very hard, much harder than in any other country, and prioritize work over anything else, because this was a patriotic duty, like one might have worked in USA during WWII or in Ukraine today or in any country that is at war and its survival depends on how everyone works, except that in Israel the war has been continuous for three quarters of a century.
For the elites of the country this war economy is extremely desirable because they can demand any sacrifices from the workers, since those are supposedly not for increasing the profits of the company owners, but for ensuring the survival of the nation, and anyone who would not want to do what is required would be seen as a traitor.
For ending the conflict, it is not possible to just say that from tomorrow the parties in conflict should stop hating each other. Reparations would be necessary, like Israel itself has received plenty from Germany and other countries.
However, it is very unlikely that Israel will ever have a government willing to end the conflict, instead of keeping it alive as long as possible, to have something with which to scare the population.
Even post Epstein revelations, Chomsky's core thesis in The Fateful Triangle from 1983 still holds. A minority of hateful, brutish war hawks and crazy people on all 3 sides perpetuate a never-ending cycle of violence. The challenge is removing them from power and holding them accountable.