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."
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."
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.
Technology is not a form of control at all. Technology is the practical application of things you know, to achieve things that don't happen naturally. Here's what the wiki says:
> Technology is the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way.
By this definition, the earliest wooden and stone tools, use of fire, wheel, agriculture, housing and clothing were all legitimate technology. It's no more 'a form of control' than medical science, any form of economics and commerce or any arts are.
It's true that technology is being used as a tool of oppression. But there are several reasons for it. Controlling its access is one of the easiest ways to control a society - either by gatekeeping access to its building blocks or through draconian legislations. This is possible and done with medical science and arts too.
We can live quite comfortably without the 'modern technology' that only the rich can control. But we are subjected to peer pressure by statements like "you can't compete in this era without smartphones", " you will be jobless without AI", etc. And we fall for all of it without any questions. It enrages me when I suggest that people should choose freedom over convenience, and people reject it flippantly citing market forces and supporting the abusive companies that make them.
Mischaracterizing and vilifying technology in response to its hijack like this will not serve us in any manner. People already have a negative response when they hear technology. But it's a discipline that we must own, instead of being the just the consumer of. Technology is one of the components we need to fight back against control.
> (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.)
Or much more most recently than WWII: not knowing that 1200 civilians were slaughtered by Hamas terrorists, whom palestinians did vote in power.
Or even more recently: not knowing that the islamic republic of Iran slaughtered 30 000 unarmed civilians and went as far as sending its guards into hospitals to finish the wounded.
Not that anything excuse shooting kids at point blank: but we all know the BBC --and oh so many other media-- prefer to cover a family of muslim kids being shot by the IDF than to cover the slaughter of 30 000 civilians. When it's muslims killing muslims: that's not newsworthy to them. A missile landing on a school and killing kids? That's ground for lots of coverage. But 30 000 civilians getting slaughtered? Let's not talk about that.
That's the main issue with politics on HN: it's slanted towards making one side look evil while making excuses or being lip-sealed about the causes of all this mess.
Case in point: where are the stories with 1000 upvotes frontpage on HN about islamic guards going into hospital to kill the wounded?
Where are the stories with 1000 upvotes about all the iranian diaspora manifesting and asking for a regime change in Iran? Where are the stories about people dancing in Iran next to sites that were bombed because they hope the islamist regime shall fall?
Those stories aren't very visible because they are BS. Few people are dumb enough to think than a puppet government set up by an occupying force will improve their lives. Those dancers are either paid actors or not very bright.
The double standard I would like to see addressed is this: will any country have enough cojones to boycott the World Cup this year. My guess is no.
Like the other commenter has said, the reason there are no such stories is that they would be hypocritical BS, and I'll add, designed to manufacture consent for unlawful military action against a sovereign nation.
The perennially genocidal occupying force controlling all aspects of Palestinian life including forcing them into a subsistence diet, "mowing the lawn" in Gaza every so often, shooting down peaceful unarmed protesters - some of them disabled - and all that before 7/Oct - has no right to complain about terrorism, for it's what it has inflicted on Palestinians for decades.
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 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.
Yep. But the War on Drugs has been around much longer and is more relevant to people's day to day lives. And people buy into it. I hear this all the time "Sure, weed should be legal, and cocaine too because I like to party now and then, but the 'hard stuff' should definitely be illegal because its dangerous".
To make matters worse -- people think that those who advocate against it are doing so because they want to do drugs (and some may) but it's a civil liberties issue and is the foundation for the militarization of the police.
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.
> When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card?
It only works if you deploy it against someone lower-status than you. The tactic is largely irrelevant and can be seamlessly replaced with any of a number of other tactics as needed. It's just enforcement of power hierarchies.
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.
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.
(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."
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'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"
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.
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!
Politics is how you make decisions collectively. In other words the market is political, LLCs are political, and common rules about how work is licensed is political.
AI is also being used (unfortunately) to make decisions. AI is therefore political (massively so).
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 wouldn't care about it being a German or American or Chinese national any more than I care about it being a family of Palestinians, and more importantly it wouldn't belong on HN in any of those cases.
This has nothing to do with tech, isn't something hackers would find interesting, and doesn't satisfy intellectual curiosity, end of story. It's generic run of the mill nightly news slop that I could get from literally anywhere else if I wanted to waste my time reading/watching uninteresting news that doesn't affect me.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Same thing in Austria, everyone in mainstream politics basically ignores the topic and when pressured parrot something like "Israel has the right to defend itself" or "It is very complicated"
Repression against students and demonstrators is happening regularly
Germany is cucked, what Hitler did was outrageous and destroyed any rational ability for generations - and yes while I am heavily critical of Israel and the demonstrably true supremacy and nepotism they have created outside of Israel, I am strongly against the "rounding up of Anne Franks". Germany must now tread the difficult tightrope between standing up for themselves and going full-on loony right, and every time they fall they simply reset to loony left. This is why the establishment just puts their head in the sand.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, almost entire society participates in (what they believe is the "most moral") military service. It is scary to think folks with murderous rage might not be minority.
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.
> they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination
This is the biggest lie of all.
Israeli Jews constantly dream about eliminating the Palestinian people. We talk about it openly and without shame.
We discuss pros and cons in terms of security, legality, world public opinion, etc. These are the only considerations. We don’t see any humanity there. We just need their land.
That said, it’s true that some Palestinians have dreams of defending themselves from us.
“ 82 percent of respondents supported the expulsion of Gaza's residents, while 56 percent favored expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel.”
“ Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents agreed that "when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho under Joshua's command – killing all its inhabitants."
Israeli society has a very, very strong genocidal current.
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.
That's a legitimate question and it has no good answer. Not just Sudan. There is an ongoing genocide in Myanmar, against the Rohingya. There is an ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs in china. None of those get nearly the amount of coverage the genocide in Gaza gets, or, now the war in Iran and Lebanon.
I have no idea why. I have recently started to grow a bit paranoid and wonder whether I am being manipulated by the media I consume. That would not be a huge surprise, I'm willing to bet most people are influenced by some of the things they read online.
Anyway this is an interesting question that has to be answered: why only Gaza, and not the other genocides?
Super easy answer: because only on Gaza your government openly sides with the perpetrators, arms and finances them, the media justify them, laws are passed to curb criticism and punish boycotts, and people in online discussion forums bring up always the same debunked arguments and rhetorical devices to divert the attention [1], blame the victims and justify the perpetrators. It's the disagreement that fuels the discussion, the obvious contrast between the right position and the official statements and public propaganda.
1- of which yours is a classic example: "why talk about this and not about something else?"
If you really cared about those other conflicts, I'd expect to see you mention them more often in your comments. Are you sure you actually care about them or you just want people to stop talking about Gaza?
Yes. I would much rather do that. This stuff is all over all of the other information sources. What is wrong with having HN purely tech focused? Politics with way more of a direct intersection with tech - for example the E2EE "bans", chat control, meta's misadventures - makes sense. But not unrelated crap.
Nobody is "raising awareness" here (saw this mentioned above in this thread). Trust me people will still hear about these things if HN doesn't post them. We're just sharing a BBC article for heaven's sake. Its not like we have some new information source like say a former-IDF tech founder whistleblowing. Its all so performative.
There is zero new information any HN reader gains from this post. Its a BBC article, the comments are the same as what you see on instagram twitter or reddit, and the responses from the "defenders" are the same as what you see on instagram twitter or reddit as well.
I've commented before[1] about the weird lack of moderation/enforcement of this guideline:
> 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.
This one is politics or crime depending on which side you're on.
Never seen it enforced. Not for gaza,iran,venezuela,pakistan,ukraine. The US elections, random nonsense trump does, US govt shutdowns, greenland too.
All of those have been covered here extensively with zero net benefit/net information transacted.
I'm not saying we should only talk about Flash Attention version 6546272. Like if you see the health insurance thread on the front page today, you can see a CFO, a tech worker in the space, etc, commenting and contributing net new information.
This simply doesn't (and I don't see how it can ever) happen on these gaza threads.
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.
> 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.
I disagree with this. The tech bros building these dystopian systems for big paychecks need to be informed somehow, this is the best way to reach them. They do care what their peers think of them and if we can reach their conscious in between bouts of agentic blogs and vibe coded hopes and dreams, then that is what we should do.
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.
> 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.
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 feel something very similar. I have strong views that what Israel is doing is wrong. But I look around at our politics (in the UK), and there is such a well oiled Israeli PR operation that is very happy making career ending accusations that talking publicly about this is actually quite dangerous (Not helped by the loonies who are, and have always been disgusting anti-semites). And you look at our politician's stance on it - and the career of people like Lord Walney, and it's clear we're in a very dangerous place. I think there is a very wide gap between what the average British person actually believes about Israel and what is happening to the Palestinians, and the acceptable positions you can express in Westminster. I also fear that once the dam breaks, and it's no longer the case, that the swing back against Israel is going to be quick harsh, and that's difficult because I have friends and family in Israel - I would like to see Israel be a free and open liberal democracy that shares what used to be western values, but maybe we're too late for that.
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
Also there's barely a tech industry to talk about as our economy collapses through $100 oil and private equity backed destruction of our way of life - what else are we supposed to discuss now - it might as well be Israel.
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.
I was going to say I disagree, that I think that at least some level of discussion on HN about important things going on is important. Israel is actually a tech powerhouse and a lot of this is seriously shaping the defence technology policy and is telling a lot about how power dynamics actually can play out.
Having said that, my settings show me all comments that are flagged. HN is apparently not capable of having a respectful conversation about this. Almost anything expressed on the actual topic has been flagged. The only thing left are comments rules lawyering to say we shouldn't discuss the topic at all.
It's kind of an indictment of the users of HN. It might be the right move to remove the article, but it becomes the right move because the users of this site can't be trusted to actually conduct a conversation about it.
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.
This kid will grow up and fight, and I don't blame him. Gaza is a concentration camp, West Bank is an apartheid. These people have the audacity to bribe and threaten our governments to do their nationalist ethno-state bidding in one hand while pushing the narrative that the west must not have any identity or borders in the other. They fund PACs that threaten 80% of congress with "we'll front an opposition candidate and BTW 97% of them win". They fund NGOs who offload the people they don't want onto Europe and muddy the political waters allowing both far left and far right extremists to thrive. When TikTok woke the kids, they bought it. When Epstein died they fought tooth and nail to cover it up. Oil is $100, they do not understand the pure rage and anger they have dredged up.
Sad story. War is sad. 2 countries in a war that cannot end otherwise.
Its either Palestine or Israel unfortunately.
Put your good will and emotions somewhere it can actually make a sensible difference guys
It feels appropriate to post this on HN as American technology supports this genocidal country. It could influence some readers to avoid working for certain companies like Palantir etc.
zingley | 19 hours ago
bhouston | 19 hours ago
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.
oa335 | 19 hours ago
> 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."
Stevvo | 19 hours ago
Daishiman | 19 hours ago
monegator | 19 hours ago
pipes | 19 hours ago
layer8 | 18 hours ago
DANmode | 14 hours ago
or just recycled points?
handfuloflight | 16 hours ago
monegator | 6 hours ago
bhouston | 19 hours ago
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...
jll29 | 18 hours ago
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.)
oulipo2 | 17 hours ago
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
goku12 | 5 hours ago
> Technology is the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way.
By this definition, the earliest wooden and stone tools, use of fire, wheel, agriculture, housing and clothing were all legitimate technology. It's no more 'a form of control' than medical science, any form of economics and commerce or any arts are.
It's true that technology is being used as a tool of oppression. But there are several reasons for it. Controlling its access is one of the easiest ways to control a society - either by gatekeeping access to its building blocks or through draconian legislations. This is possible and done with medical science and arts too.
We can live quite comfortably without the 'modern technology' that only the rich can control. But we are subjected to peer pressure by statements like "you can't compete in this era without smartphones", " you will be jobless without AI", etc. And we fall for all of it without any questions. It enrages me when I suggest that people should choose freedom over convenience, and people reject it flippantly citing market forces and supporting the abusive companies that make them.
Mischaracterizing and vilifying technology in response to its hijack like this will not serve us in any manner. People already have a negative response when they hear technology. But it's a discipline that we must own, instead of being the just the consumer of. Technology is one of the components we need to fight back against control.
TacticalCoder | 12 hours ago
Or much more most recently than WWII: not knowing that 1200 civilians were slaughtered by Hamas terrorists, whom palestinians did vote in power.
Or even more recently: not knowing that the islamic republic of Iran slaughtered 30 000 unarmed civilians and went as far as sending its guards into hospitals to finish the wounded.
Not that anything excuse shooting kids at point blank: but we all know the BBC --and oh so many other media-- prefer to cover a family of muslim kids being shot by the IDF than to cover the slaughter of 30 000 civilians. When it's muslims killing muslims: that's not newsworthy to them. A missile landing on a school and killing kids? That's ground for lots of coverage. But 30 000 civilians getting slaughtered? Let's not talk about that.
That's the main issue with politics on HN: it's slanted towards making one side look evil while making excuses or being lip-sealed about the causes of all this mess.
Case in point: where are the stories with 1000 upvotes frontpage on HN about islamic guards going into hospital to kill the wounded?
Where are the stories with 1000 upvotes about all the iranian diaspora manifesting and asking for a regime change in Iran? Where are the stories about people dancing in Iran next to sites that were bombed because they hope the islamist regime shall fall?
It's the crazy double standards.
temp8830 | 12 hours ago
The double standard I would like to see addressed is this: will any country have enough cojones to boycott the World Cup this year. My guess is no.
mcphage | 11 hours ago
And if you want to go even more recently, check out what the IDF is doing in Gaza.
vortegne | 7 hours ago
alee08 | 6 hours ago
AFAIK, his points are all well-documented and properly referenced on Wikipedia: 1) 1200 people slaughtered, referenced over 450 times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_7_attacks 2) Islamic Republic of Iran slaughtered 30 000 unarmed civilians, referenced over 240 times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacres
ngcazz | 6 hours ago
The perennially genocidal occupying force controlling all aspects of Palestinian life including forcing them into a subsistence diet, "mowing the lawn" in Gaza every so often, shooting down peaceful unarmed protesters - some of them disabled - and all that before 7/Oct - has no right to complain about terrorism, for it's what it has inflicted on Palestinians for decades.
mojtabak | 34 minutes ago
wk_end | 18 hours ago
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.
C6JEsQeQa5fCjE | 18 hours ago
IDF trains them.
https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/with-whom-are-many-u-s-polic...
wk_end | 18 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrior_policing
apical_dendrite | 17 hours ago
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.
pstuart | 17 hours ago
convolvatron | 15 hours ago
nielsbot | 14 hours ago
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...
pstuart | 13 hours ago
To make matters worse -- people think that those who advocate against it are doing so because they want to do drugs (and some may) but it's a civil liberties issue and is the foundation for the militarization of the police.
mupuff1234 | 17 hours ago
ryandrake | 17 hours ago
> 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.
xnyan | 14 hours ago
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.
banannaise | 37 minutes ago
It only works if you deploy it against someone lower-status than you. The tactic is largely irrelevant and can be seamlessly replaced with any of a number of other tactics as needed. It's just enforcement of power hierarchies.
dustractor | 17 hours ago
American police officers ARE trained much like IDF forces. By the IDF! https://jinsa.org/jinsa_program/homeland-security-program/
6510 | 16 hours ago
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.
DiogenesKynikos | 16 hours ago
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.
igonvalue | 15 hours ago
bhouston | 15 hours ago
https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/03/13/in-the-shadow-of-war-set...
jazz9k | an hour ago
Funny way of saying trying to run someone over.
oa335 | 19 hours ago
(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."
itsangaris | 19 hours ago
dijit | 19 hours ago
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.
MisterTea | 19 hours ago
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.
dijit | 18 hours ago
appreciatorBus | 18 hours ago
actionfromafar | 18 hours ago
polski-g | 19 hours ago
itsangaris | 18 hours ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45202200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47136179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46543457
twiclo | 19 hours ago
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.
haunter | 19 hours ago
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.
itsangaris | 18 hours ago
crote | 16 hours ago
Ban all politics, and you ban >99% of HN content. Heck, the very concept of HN itself is political!
jamesnorden | an hour ago
tovej | 58 minutes ago
AI is also being used (unfortunately) to make decisions. AI is therefore political (massively so).
_DeadFred_ | 18 hours ago
layer8 | 18 hours ago
iinnPP | 17 hours ago
It's as far from hacking interest as it gets for me.
nailer | 14 hours ago
It wouldn’t make the front page. Like the Iranian massacres. No jews, no news.
avazhi | 5 hours ago
This has nothing to do with tech, isn't something hackers would find interesting, and doesn't satisfy intellectual curiosity, end of story. It's generic run of the mill nightly news slop that I could get from literally anywhere else if I wanted to waste my time reading/watching uninteresting news that doesn't affect me.
beepbooptheory | 19 hours ago
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.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai | 19 hours ago
iwontberude | 18 hours ago
olelele | 18 hours ago
The Israeli navy ships were built in German shipyards and subsidized 30%...
shdudns | 17 hours ago
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?
thot_experiment | 14 hours ago
tim333 | 29 minutes ago
thot_experiment | 14 hours ago
olelele | 2 hours ago
noworriesnate | 18 hours ago
Is this something from the post-war or did that really exist?
layer8 | 18 hours ago
“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.
busterarm | 18 hours ago
riedel | 16 hours ago
[0] https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/koepfe/Esther-Bejarano-Das-Erb...
mfru | 5 hours ago
Repression against students and demonstrators is happening regularly
jiaosdjf | 5 hours ago
ngcazz | 4 hours ago
perfmode | 19 hours ago
noumenon1111 | 18 hours ago
delecti | 18 hours ago
itsangaris | 18 hours ago
gambiting | 18 hours ago
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.
olelele | 18 hours ago
otikik | 17 hours ago
No, we need better people controlling the tools.
olelele | 18 hours ago
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.
quirk | 18 hours ago
surgical_fire | 18 hours ago
tomhow | 18 hours ago
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
tomhow | 18 hours ago
quirk | 18 hours ago
drraah | 17 hours ago
jenders | 7 hours ago
xg15 | 18 hours ago
urig | 17 hours ago
ignoramous | 17 hours ago
Hopefully, such trigger-happy soldiers are in the minority.
oulipo2 | 17 hours ago
ignoramous | 37 minutes ago
morgengold | 17 hours ago
wreath | 17 hours ago
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.
adrian_b | 16 hours ago
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.
burnt-resistor | 14 hours ago
hjkl0 | 9 hours ago
This is the biggest lie of all.
Israeli Jews constantly dream about eliminating the Palestinian people. We talk about it openly and without shame.
We discuss pros and cons in terms of security, legality, world public opinion, etc. These are the only considerations. We don’t see any humanity there. We just need their land.
That said, it’s true that some Palestinians have dreams of defending themselves from us.
I believe they need all the help they can get.
poisonarena | 6 hours ago
We? speak for yourself loser
oa335 | 48 minutes ago
“ Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents agreed that "when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho under Joshua's command – killing all its inhabitants."
Israeli society has a very, very strong genocidal current.
https://archive.is/QvrVu
mattfrommars | 17 hours ago
jakeinspace | 17 hours ago
gravisultra | 17 hours ago
shell0x | 17 hours ago
HN is one of the most informative and least toxic communities and I’d appreciate if it would stay this way.
diego_moita | 17 hours ago
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?
oulipo2 | 17 hours ago
Sparkle-san | 17 hours ago
therealdrag0 | 16 hours ago
Sparkle-san | 16 hours ago
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.
fc417fc802 | 15 hours ago
It's a large part of the idea behind countries having constitutions for example.
IncreasePosts | 16 hours ago
(The 10x coverage number is from algolia hn search, the 10x worse number is from reported killings in the past year)
awnird | 16 hours ago
Sparkle-san | 16 hours ago
muzani | 15 hours ago
If Microsoft, Meta, Palantir, OpenAI, etc, were complicit in genocide in Sudan, Sudan would have much more attention.
tovej | 16 hours ago
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.
xg15 | 16 hours ago
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.
anigbrowl | 16 hours ago
YeGoblynQueenne | 13 hours ago
I have no idea why. I have recently started to grow a bit paranoid and wonder whether I am being manipulated by the media I consume. That would not be a huge surprise, I'm willing to bet most people are influenced by some of the things they read online.
Anyway this is an interesting question that has to be answered: why only Gaza, and not the other genocides?
throw310822 | 7 hours ago
Super easy answer: because only on Gaza your government openly sides with the perpetrators, arms and finances them, the media justify them, laws are passed to curb criticism and punish boycotts, and people in online discussion forums bring up always the same debunked arguments and rhetorical devices to divert the attention [1], blame the victims and justify the perpetrators. It's the disagreement that fuels the discussion, the obvious contrast between the right position and the official statements and public propaganda.
1- of which yours is a classic example: "why talk about this and not about something else?"
manyaoman | 6 hours ago
sreejithr | 17 hours ago
Ar-Curunir | 15 hours ago
poisonarena | 14 hours ago
porridgeraisin | 8 hours ago
Nobody is "raising awareness" here (saw this mentioned above in this thread). Trust me people will still hear about these things if HN doesn't post them. We're just sharing a BBC article for heaven's sake. Its not like we have some new information source like say a former-IDF tech founder whistleblowing. Its all so performative.
There is zero new information any HN reader gains from this post. Its a BBC article, the comments are the same as what you see on instagram twitter or reddit, and the responses from the "defenders" are the same as what you see on instagram twitter or reddit as well.
I've commented before[1] about the weird lack of moderation/enforcement of this guideline:
> 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.
This one is politics or crime depending on which side you're on.
Never seen it enforced. Not for gaza,iran,venezuela,pakistan,ukraine. The US elections, random nonsense trump does, US govt shutdowns, greenland too.
All of those have been covered here extensively with zero net benefit/net information transacted.
I'm not saying we should only talk about Flash Attention version 6546272. Like if you see the health insurance thread on the front page today, you can see a CFO, a tech worker in the space, etc, commenting and contributing net new information. This simply doesn't (and I don't see how it can ever) happen on these gaza threads.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45435109
crawfordcomeaux | 16 hours ago
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.
selcuka | 15 hours ago
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.
fud101 | 11 hours ago
proshno | 17 hours ago
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.
plutokras | 17 hours ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
fennecbutt | 17 hours ago
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.
bhouston | 16 hours ago
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.
catlifeonmars | 11 hours ago
There are plenty of good reasons to speak carefully, thoughtfully and compassionately, but avoiding criticism is not a good reason.
Traster | 5 hours ago
ndbdkskk | 5 hours ago
gljiva | 16 hours ago
jiaosdjf | 5 hours ago
tim333 | an hour ago
nirushiv | 16 hours ago
amelius | 16 hours ago
Ar-Curunir | 15 hours ago
ndbdkskk | 5 hours ago
tovej | 2 hours ago
amelius | 4 hours ago
alee08 | 2 hours ago
abcde666777 | 16 hours ago
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.
Traster | 5 hours ago
Having said that, my settings show me all comments that are flagged. HN is apparently not capable of having a respectful conversation about this. Almost anything expressed on the actual topic has been flagged. The only thing left are comments rules lawyering to say we shouldn't discuss the topic at all.
It's kind of an indictment of the users of HN. It might be the right move to remove the article, but it becomes the right move because the users of this site can't be trusted to actually conduct a conversation about it.
jiaosdjf | 5 hours ago
It should be on HN because we are human and once in a while it is good to see human interest break through and calibrate the room
hersko | 15 hours ago
karim79 | 15 hours ago
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
anonu | 13 hours ago
RuslanL | 11 hours ago
derelicta | 5 hours ago
jiaosdjf | 5 hours ago
ndbdkskk | 5 hours ago
ngcazz | 4 hours ago
ndbdkskk | 5 hours ago
kome | 3 hours ago
dplesh | 2 hours ago
tovej | 2 hours ago
This is just a regular tuesday massacre for the IDF, not an ongoing conflict, just occupation policing.
CommenterPerson | 2 hours ago
tt_dev | 2 hours ago