This is very thorough. Thanks for the direct link.
The case seems pretty clear, especially since the soldiers tried to hide all evidence.
ignoramous•Feb 24, 2026
> case seems pretty clear, especially since the soldiers tried
Even if the 'soldiers' didn't, it wouldn't have mattered as the governing apparatus usually goes out of its way to protect their own militants.
Ex A:
Detainees executed, unarmed civilians killed in their sleep, a child, handcuffed and shot, all covered up by the chain of command – this is the testimony of more than 30 eyewitnesses, former members of UK Special Forces ... Panorama – Special Forces: I Saw War Crimes ... reported a series of cold-blooded murders by UK military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan over a period of ten years, followed by years of official cover-up.
Yes and no. It does matter because it illustrates both malicious intent and evidence of guilt, as in the guilty party knew they were perpetrating a criminal action.
However, you are also correct, the IDF has little or no accountability for criminal behavior.
ignoramous•Feb 24, 2026
> the guilty party knew they were perpetrating a criminal action ... the IDF has little or no accountability for criminal behavior.
May be the brazenness is why they make the best Tech CXOs?
"The Israeli tank commander who has fought in one of the Syrian wars is the best engineering executive in the world. The tank commanders are operationally the best, and are extremely detail oriented. This is based on twenty years of experience — working with them and observing them."
Eric Schmidt (Start-up Nation / Saul Singer et al / pg. 41)
actionfromafar•Feb 24, 2026
The tank commanders of another, bygone war also had the reputation for attention to detail. Funny how history rhymes.
culi•Feb 24, 2026
Forensic Architecture is a truly remarkable work. If anybody is unfamiliar with Eyal Weizman, I would highly recommend checking out more of his work. Including the 2014 series Rebel Architecture and some of his talks. He recently did a presentation called "Conditions of Life Calculated" at the David Graeber Memorial Lecture at CIIS that I think gives a lot of insight into why the work being done at Forensic Architecture is so remarkable. He also talks about his work with David Wengrow and the Nebelivka Hypothesis based on novel archeology of ancient Ukrainian cities
> The Israeli soldiers remained on the sandbank while firing continuously at the aid workers for four minutes.
Damn…
epolanski•Feb 24, 2026
There's plenty of live footage of IDF forces targeting international aid workers and journalists.
"fun" fact: more journalists died in the Gaza than in every conflict since ww2 combined.
pcthrowaway•Feb 24, 2026
And WW2 only has more journalist deaths because some number of the genocide casualties had been journalists before the Holocaust.
Being a journalist typically provides you some protection in times of war, but for journalists who are part of a group suffering genocide, it's a liability.
forvelin•Feb 24, 2026
why is this flagged ?
appreciatorBus•Feb 24, 2026
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This is most certainly not something that is covered on TV news. Seems on topic to me.
glenstein•Feb 24, 2026
I think it also touches on issues of interest to the hn crowd (it's being reported on a YC-incubated platform!), and one especially unique things about the reporting is the spatial reconstruction of the scene, which is not a degree of detail you typically get, and limits the number of variations of interpretations possible.
I also think issues of censorship are very high on the list of topics of interest on HN and few topics are subject to more extensive censorship than reporting on events in Israel and Palestine.
appreciatorBus•Feb 24, 2026
Israel and Palestine is one of the most obsessively covered topics in every form of western media. All the more the reason it doesn’t belong on HN. I’ll grant that there’s a tech angle to this specific story, but past experience with such articles on HN is that they reliably devolve into endless repetition of fixed talking points on each side. No useful information or opinion is conveyed, just endless insinuation and infective.
Furthermore, there are handful of accounts who sole purpose seems to be to pump the HN feed full of Israel and Palestine. People who want so badly to talk about a single political topic should probably go to Bluesky.
glenstein•Feb 24, 2026
I agree that Bluesky is a great place to go into more depth about it, and in many respects a better place than HN to get good discussion. But I think there's equivocation going on here.
Framing it as "obsessive" is an attempt to shift away from subject matter toward an attitude of journalists or consumers, like it's borne of the same attitude as paparazzi. But I think it merits significant coverage not for that reason, but because it so frequently meets criteria for meriting journalistic attention.
I agree that comment sections can be bad, but they aren't always, and to some degree I would rather trust moderation than suppress reporting on a topic of legitimate interest. You're exactly right that a lot of reaction is toxic and politicized, and sometimes the way that manifests is by trying to cook up rationales to suppress stories by flagging them. Out of respect for the concern you've identified, it would be a huge mistake to let politicization win by allowing politically motivated abuse of flagging.
anigbrowl•Feb 24, 2026
The forensic reconstruction to this level of detail is novel and interesting, both for the methods deployed and for the likelihood that the half-life of unsolved war crimes appears to be decreasing.
jLaForest•Feb 24, 2026
@dang any explanation for this being flagged?
Am I still allowed to ask why the moderators don't want people to read and discuss this particular technology story?
glenstein•Feb 24, 2026
I also would appreciate knowing if the mods see this. I'm worried that flagging is possibly automated and vulnerable to campaigning.
dang•Feb 24, 2026
We eventually saw it, but only randomly.
In case you didn't see them yet, here are some of my other comments in this thread:
Re the concern about flagging, the situation is much as I've described in these past threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Specifically, when I looked through who had flagged the current post, I saw the usual coalition between users who appear to be consistently flagging for political reasons, and other users who have quite different flagging patterns than that. In any case, virtually all of the accounts that flagged the thread were established HN users.
Sometimes when people bring this concern up, I go through and make a list of other stories that the same accounts had flagged, to illustrate the point that their flags are not exclusively targeting one specific topic or vector. I've done that here in a collapsed reply, if anyone wants to take a look.
I hope this explanation helps - your posts in this thread seemed to me to be in good faith so I wanted to respond in kind. If you still have a question that my comments and links to past explanations haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
dang•Feb 24, 2026
Here are some stories that flaggers of this submission also flagged. I have no idea why, except for the handful of obvious spam, but it illustrates the point I made in the parent comment.
It seems that people, even "established HN users" will flag literally anything. Do you feel that there is any remaining article quality signal that can be obtained from the current flagging mechanism?
dang•Feb 24, 2026
If the above list gives the mistaken impression that flagging is basically random, that's an artifact of the way I cherry-picked the list. The flagging system has problems, for sure, but it's a vital part of how HN's system functions.
If you squint and look closely, though, I think you can detect this in the above list. The weirdest "wtf?" cases of flagging are ones where the threads had a lot of comments and were on the frontpage. That means upvotes won the tug-of-war with flags, as they should have in most of those cases.
Conversely, it you look at the submissions in the list which had 0 comments or very few, it looks to me like most were either spam, low-quality articles, or dupes.
Remember, also, that some flags are just mistakes - the link is easy to fat-finger or misclick, and the UI doesn't provide feedback about that. That's likely to change soon as part of work that tomhow and I are planning.
I'll give you the "party line" (i.e. best-effort understanding of HN-moderators perspective) for why articles like this are frequently flagged:
1) The entire discussion is a rehashing of the exact same points every time the topic is posted, and not very insightful
2) The participation rate for experts (or even authors) in the discussed field/topic is very low (compared to programming topics)
3) The discussion rarely stays civil and requires excessive moderation
An observation (have no verbatim quote, but believe from dang) is that there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective and exact topic (presumably for above reasons). You can certainly still blame the flagging on bots or Zionists, but it's almost certainly not only those.
dang•Feb 24, 2026
You left out the parts about how and when we turn flags off, about how a certain amount of political overlap is both necessary and inevitable, but that it also can't be too much. All of those are important factors, and I've posted many explanations of them:
We can't, however, turn off flags on threads we don't know about. You guys (I don't mean you personally!) unintentionally assume that we're omniscient. We aren't, so we need people to tell us about cases like this.
In this case, no one told us; I ran across it randomly. Randomness is only good for partial results. For reliable message delivery, someone needs to email hn@ycombinator.com, and please remember that it takes time to work through that (er) rather active inbox.
EvgeniyZh•Feb 24, 2026
Can you remember any pro-Israeli posts you turned flags off for since the October 7 attack?
computerex•Feb 24, 2026
They don’t get flagged though.
EvgeniyZh•Feb 24, 2026
Yes they are, just like the comment you answered to will.
underdeserver•Feb 24, 2026
Can you point to any pro-Israeli posts on HN since October 7, flagged or not?
a456463•Feb 24, 2026
This is such a garbage assessment. I have don't see post of pro-Israel companies and startups that fund/enable this massacre being flagged for political content?
What is this facade of impartialness and too much politics? Tell that to the people massacred.
computerex•Feb 24, 2026
I literally can’t say anything pro humanity without it being flagged even if it hints negativity towards Israel.
RobotToaster•Feb 24, 2026
> there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective
I'm always sceptical of this given it doesn't happen to similar posts about Iran.
_DeadFred_•Feb 24, 2026
What are you talking about? Iran topics get flagged at least as often as Gaza (in proportion to the amount to posts on the topic).
* Most US politicians are blackmailed via Epstein who worked for Israel, with high probability, including Trump
* ICE is just the beginning, they're trained by IDF, send more people and 1940 is not too far away from us
7952•Feb 24, 2026
> * No one accepts high western "morality" anymore
Is that an accurate trend on an individual basis?
throwaw12•Feb 24, 2026
Travel to Middle East, some parts of Africa and China, ask what people think. Most say have similar opinion that west is not "morally" superior.
spwa4•Feb 24, 2026
Travel to anywhere, anywhere at all, ask people if they consider themselves morally superior ...
vcryan•Feb 24, 2026
Well, in this case, they are correct
spwa4•Feb 24, 2026
suuure
rbanffy•Feb 24, 2026
South America as well, in particular with regard to the US. Too many coups and sponsorship of military dictatorships will do that.
ebbi•Feb 24, 2026
I think when people say "West", they automatically think US and UK - and given their war crimes in recent history, you do get this sentiment, yes. I suspect, however, that this view has exacerbated and now includes other "western" countries that are silent/complicit in current horrific war crimes.
kvgr•Feb 24, 2026
Not Israel, but Russia - good old KGB honeytrap.
glenstein•Feb 24, 2026
>Most US politicians are blackmailed via Epstein
??? Most? His network was certainly extensive but "most politicians" seems like a significantly overextended extrapolation.
rbanffy•Feb 24, 2026
I wouldn’t point to Epstein, but there is a very powerful lobby that will protect the image of any Israeli government. A lot of Evangelicals also consider Israel important in bringing about the apocalypse, without which they can’t access eternal life. I wish I was kidding on that last one, but there are people actively trying to bring down civilisation so they can go to heaven.
glenstein•Feb 24, 2026
With a specificity of the number of shots and the spatial reconstruction of the scene, there's some impressive uses of tech to bolster reporting:
>A digital reconstruction of the scene shows that the soldiers would have had an uninterrupted view of the arrival of the convoy.
>The reconstruction was jointly achieved with the two survivors of the incident, with an immersive spatial model they could walk through and amend. Together with spatial and audio analysis we established the position of the soldiers on an elevated ground with an unobstructed line of sight to the emergency vehicles.
NicuCalcea•Feb 24, 2026
Forensic Architecture, the people who did the spatial reconstruction, have been around for a while. You can see more examples of their investigations here: https://forensic-architecture.org/
lilytweed•Feb 24, 2026
Forensic Architecture are great. I remember their work being very hot in the international art scene around ~2018 (when they were nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize, among others - https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/turner-prize-2...).
Not sure if they're still fêted as artists or have moved away from that label. I still find their approach completely mesmerizing nevertheless.
What digital reconstruction? They took a witness and basically did what they said in a 3D editor. I don't see anything sophisticated about this. They also did things like count weapon sounds in audio, which might be the only factual reliable data point on this report.
ceejayoz•Feb 24, 2026
> They took a witness…
And the satellite photos showing the scene, and the cell phone video showing the shooting...
churchill•Feb 24, 2026
Isn't mass murder of civilians the most Israeli thing ever? For those out of the loop, this isn't an anomaly.
It's a societal-level policy: 47% of Israeli Jews want all Palestinians killed; 82% want all Palestinians forcefully expelled (i.e., ethnically cleansed) [0] which would constitute genocide. 56% want the same for all Israeli Arabs.
So, it's pathetic when Westerners act surprised at Israel's antics: you can't support a genocidal state and then be shocked when it does genocidal stuff. This is just Tuesday for them.
Once you understand this, Israel's actions are not an anomaly. It's the natural expression of people who consider their neighbors beneath them, and barely even human.
> Earshot used echolocation to analyze the audio on the recordings in order to arrive at precise estimates of the shooters’ locations. Echolocation is the process of locating the source of a sound based on an analysis of the sound’s echoes and the environment in which the sound travels. The Israeli military destroyed and cleared so many buildings in the Tel Al-Sultan area where the ambush of the aid workers took place that very few structures remained. This destruction actually strengthened Earshot’s ability to determine the positions and movements of Israeli soldiers, based on identifying the surfaces responsible for clearly distinguishable gunshot echoes. Rather than having multiple buildings reflecting the sound waves, there were only a few standing walls and the emergency vehicles themselves.
> “Earshot forensically analyzed over 900 gunshots fired at aid workers. It took one whole year of careful listening to reconstruct an auditory picture of what happened that dark night,” Lawrence Abu Hamdan, the director of Earshot, told Drop Site.
I'm not sure how much this was actually necessary to the eventual verdict if this is ever adjudicated, though, if "hiding the evidence" is a factor:
> Following the ambush, Israeli forces crushed all eight vehicles using heavy machinery and attempted to bury them under the sand.
> The body of Anwar al-Attar was found near the ambush site on March 27, and the bodies of the other 14 aid workers, all wearing identifying uniforms or volunteer vests of their respective organizations, were found in a mass grave near the site on March 30.
But the understanding that they were advanced upon in a walking wave of fire, and then the survivors were executed one by one at close range, may help.
lma21•Feb 24, 2026
Any posts linked to the IDF committing crimes are automatically flagged on this site (and others). Many bots are at play here.
You always have plenty of excuses when you get called out. Looking the other way while bot armies mass downvote pro Palestine / anti ICE / anti PayPal mafia content is complicity. I’m sure you have the data to suss out what is obvious to anyone watching these threads in real time.
johnfn•Feb 24, 2026
Think about what you are saying for a moment. Why would "bot armies" come to Hacker News of all places to flag pro-Palestine articles? Don't you think it's a much more reasonable conclusion that people read the site guidelines[1], which clearly say that political posts are off-topic, and then flagged for that reason instead?
There are a million places to discuss politics online. If I wanted to discuss politics, I would go to any one of them. Claiming any HN moderator is 'complicit' in atrocities is absurd.
> Why would "bot armies" come to Hacker News of all places to flag pro-Palestine articles?
Turn on showdead and you'll find much, much weirder wastes of time here.
Guid_NewGuid•Feb 24, 2026
I mean doesn't your take strain credulity as well? Let's actually think where most discussion happens these days, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, the few remaining newspaper comments sections. I'd struggle to list more off the top of my head.
Why wouldn't influence campaigns, we know every big country to be running, target this site? What reason would they have to leave it out from their list? Why not target a major news forum for the more wealthy and connected (predominantly) Americans in tech? This is not an uwu smol bean site anymore and the cost of (undetectably) botting any given site is rapidly approaching cents.
glenstein•Feb 24, 2026
In 2026 I don't for one second think it organized inauthentic activity is implausible. I think in fact it's probably pretty extensive these days, though I'm not especially sure about penetration of HN in particular. But everything from marketing to state actors to organized political actors to anarchic but politically motivated online groups are mobilized to influence online forums and I think these phenomena are reasonably well characterized by academic research. It can also be people who aren't organized but abuse flagging out of political commitments.
I also don't think your read of it as an organic outcome of a post that obviously violates guidelines is the natural conclusion here, I actually think that interpretation strains credulity more. Where I agree is that I don't think moderators are being heavy-handed on issues like this, but I do think high level political events do merit attention at least once in a while and I don't think the HN pattern has been toward oversaturation.
And in terms of things that make this story unique, I think it's the highest standard of specificity I've ever seen in reporting of this kind, it's using impressive technological reconstruction of the scene, it's actually quite unlike typical news reporting on the topic and it's hosted on a platform that was YC-incubated, and I think DropSite News is in an ascendant moment as a major news breaker. There's lots to talk about here imo.
austin-cheney•Feb 24, 2026
Its not automatic due to bot activity. It is from people actively suppressing stories that don't want other people to see.
This is discernible by watching how long it takes stories like these to reach a flagged state on the new submissions page. It is further evident by watching which comments within those submissions get flagged based upon their upvotes and visibility.
Guid_NewGuid•Feb 24, 2026
Indeed, and try suggesting there should be minimal accountability for flagging[0] and you'll likewise be flagged. Sure maybe the data says there's not some cartel flagging conspiracy but it starts to seem awful suspicious that even reasonable discussion of this misfeature gets flagged.
Of course, that's because Qatar actually is an authoritarian state, unlike the US. It hasn't stopped Al-Jazeera from challenging the authority of other nations or claiming that they are authoritarian. Pot, meet kettle and all that.
diffs•Feb 24, 2026
I think The Atlantic is actually pretty close to the mark. Committed, hardcore ideologues frequently turn out to be authoritarian, even if they refer to themselves as "anarchists". Most of these ideologues are busy administering ever more stringent purity tests to anyone they encounter lest someone in their vicinity commit wrongthink.
There is a name for people who build coalitions through compromise and diplomacy, and work towards pragmatic solutions to actual problems — they're called "centrists".
culi•Feb 24, 2026
There's 4chan but for leftists (leftypol) and there's reddit for leftists (lemmy or raddle). I'd also argue Mastodon is kind of twitter for leftists/hackers
indoordin0saur•Feb 24, 2026
Isn't this a tech news site?
estearum•Feb 24, 2026
Did you click on the link? It's a pretty amazing technological investigation.
Even just technologically it's more interesting than 90% of the stuff posted here.
I recommend any hackernews users to check that site frequently, plenty of interesting posts on hackernews that get flagged and hidden daily.
smartbit•Feb 24, 2026
In https://hckrnews.com these flagged items appear listed. With https://hckrnews.com as my entry into HN I don't see the need for HackerNewsRemovals other than curiosity to see what is removed.
Funny to see the complaints of this being flagged but no complaints about people posting here flagged. If these aren't going to be open discussions and responses get flagged to invisibility what is the purpose?
ceejayoz•Feb 24, 2026
I remember when folks here were shilling the "Israel promises they'd never bomb a hospital" and "Hamas is lying about the death toll" lines.
Hospitals may have been used for retaliation [0], but it is unclear how many & in what capacity (according to accepted conventions, using a hospital to treat wounded combatants wouldn't make it a valid military target, for example; but hiding weapons or personnel would).
Not sure I understand the mass downvotes on this one. I didn't take it as endorsing the action but summarizing the rationale.
mikkupikku•Feb 24, 2026
People have had good reasons for downvoting the above, but it's unclear how many and what those reasons might be.
baq•Feb 24, 2026
FSB downvotes anti-Russia comments as a matter of course. Can’t really be more direct about the analogy to not get bot-flagged.
themafia•Feb 24, 2026
> according to accepted conventions
Who accepted those? And did they have a right to do so on behalf of _all_ of humanity?
The conventions are a guideline. To use them as a blanket moral justification for your actions after the fact is extremely disingenuous.
cholantesh•Feb 24, 2026
A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Israel did not have a habit of drastically overstating their case and quietly walking it back after they end up killing more journalists and toddlers than active combatants in hospital bombings. Also if reports didn't deliberately conflate 'armed man' with 'Hamas militant' and euphemize about the 'Hamas-run Interior Ministry' like that one does.
HappyPanacea•Feb 24, 2026
A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Hamas did not have a habit of not putting uniforms in combat
ceejayoz•Feb 24, 2026
> Israeli forces dressed in doctors’ scrubs and women’s clothes have killed three Palestinian militants in an undercover operation in a hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.
> It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy… The following acts are examples of perfidy… The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status...
(Assassinating a paralyzed patient in a hospital is also not typically - ahem - kosher. Even if you're in uniform!)
HappyPanacea•Feb 24, 2026
Why was it decided that feigning of civilian, non-combatant status is bad? because it led to death of civilians who had no part in the fight; pretending to be your enemy's civilians bring no such issue. Although assassinating a patient is also not kosher it less relevant to the discussion about use of uniforms.
ceejayoz•Feb 24, 2026
> pretending to be your enemy's civilians bring no such issue
Could you clarify where in the Geneva Conventions this very important exemption is stated?
> Why was it decided that feigning of civilian, non-combatant status is bad?
Because people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators, and even enemy civilians are protected persons.
HappyPanacea•Feb 24, 2026
> Could you clarify where in the Geneva Conventions this very important exemption is stated?
The spirit of the law is more important then its letter. Also I think Israel never signed that part of the Geneva Conventions.
> Because people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators, and even enemy civilians are protected persons.
When did that happened in the Israel-Arab conflict? (When did that happened elsewhere? It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?)
ceejayoz•Feb 24, 2026
> Also I think Israel never signed that part of the Geneva Conventions.
You, earlier: "A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Hamas did not have a habit of not putting uniforms in combat."
Now it's suddenly not a problem? I can't imagine Hamas signed the Geneva Conventions.
> It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?
German Jews in the 1930s/1940s would probably disagree.
> When did that happened elsewhere? It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?
I mean, the IDF killed three Israeli hostages in Gaza, while with their hands up and holding a white flag, because they thought they were infiltrators.
Yeah, Israel has done some infiltration like that. Not proper, but you're pointing out a molehill while ignoring the mountain.
ceejayoz•Feb 24, 2026
When the molehill is a war crime, sure.
cess11•Feb 24, 2026
The israelis must stop the occupation regardless of whether the al-Qassam brigades wear uniform or not.
They should also pay reparations, and send their leaders to the Hague.
LorenPechtel•Feb 24, 2026
Drastically overstating their case? Israel estimates tend to be pretty close to accurate. What's been walked back?
And how do you even know how many active combatants have been hit? Hamas does not release such numbers, just pretends everyone is a civilian. The closest we have to a list of dead combatants is the Israeli list that leaked--but that's inherently quite an undercount as it's a list of those both identified as dead and identified as members of a terrorist group.
And note that "journalist" and "Hamas" are not exclusive. The majority of the "journalists" have been identified as members of terrorist organizations. They call their propaganda people "journalists". And how about that Al Jazzera reporter discovered holding one of the hostages?
And reports basically conflate "armed man" and "Hamas" as they are pretty much one in the same. (Other than "Hamas" actually includes allied terror organizations.) Think Hamas tolerates opposition in Gaza??
And "Hamas-run Interior Ministry" is accurate. It's admitting the figures are basically enemy propaganda.
ceejayoz•Feb 24, 2026
> Drastically overstating their case? Israel estimates tend to be pretty close to accurate. What's been walked back?
From the article we're discussing:
"The Israeli military was forced to change its story about the ambush several times, following the discovery of the bodies in a mass grave, along with their flattened vehicles, and the emergence of video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers. An internal military inquiry ultimately did not recommend any criminal action against the army units responsible for the incident."
I would describe that as a walk-back.
thrance•Feb 24, 2026
I don't know why you're using the past tense here, I was still trying to talk some sense into these people barely two days ago. It's hopeless at this point.
netsharc•Feb 24, 2026
If you have 3 hours, there's a documentary you can watch, about a man who was sanctioned by the government to kill a lot of "communists" in 1960's Indonesia: The Act of Killing (available at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q ).
It's sort of understandable why the defenders of the genocide have to keep defending it. Stopping doing so today would mean admitting that until yesterday you've been defending utter inhumanity.
A review:
> Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a challenging documentary. It is not only difficult to watch, but it also probes into one of the most grotesque aspects of human nature: the capacity for self-delusion in the face of horrific atrocities. This isn’t a film about history, facts, or statistics; it’s about the memories of the men who killed, the stories they tell themselves, and how they continue to live with the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. The film’s power lies in its ability to take the viewer beyond a surface-level understanding of evil and into the psychological abyss of those who have committed atrocities—and seemingly moved on with their lives.
The Act of Killing is near the top of my list of underappreciated films. Permanently haunting.
expedition32•Feb 24, 2026
It's pretty clear that Israel is ethnically cleansing so that they can live in a pure Jewish state.
You know who reminds me of that? Fucking Serbia and they got bombed for it.
Muromec•Feb 24, 2026
Serbia wasn’t on a good terms with Big Genocide lobby
baq•Feb 24, 2026
I can’t believe I’m actually writing this: parent is an underrated comment.
pjc50•Feb 24, 2026
Even so, there have been all sorts of contrarians trying to defend them. Usually for weird anti NATO reasons.
baq•Feb 24, 2026
It should be reminding you of something which happened a few decades earlier and was much, much worse than Serbia.
scarecrowbob•Feb 24, 2026
As a person living on the border between New Mexico and Colorado on land that borders reservations and who drives past the site of a residential school pretty regularly, I completely agree.
- Hamas is a terrorist organization that planned and executed a mass terror campaign, fully knowing and hoping for the reaction. And boasting about it continuously and repeatedly.
- Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.
ceejayoz•Feb 24, 2026
I am entirely behind this take.
guerrilla•Feb 24, 2026
You didn't actually address the actual point. Israel and it's defenders have been lying about the death toll this entire time and Hamas was not.
> - Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.
This is also an extreme understatement. It's literally a genocide.
troupo•Feb 24, 2026
> Israel and it's defenders have been lying about the death toll this entire time and Hamas was not.
Lol if you believe that Hamas has not been lying about the death toll. Including immediate precise counts split by women and children within minutes of each Israeli strike.
guerrilla•Feb 24, 2026
The evidence that their numbers were accurate was just presented to you in this very thread.
cholantesh•Feb 24, 2026
I take it that literally every NGO in this space and genocide scholars are all in on the lie?
yosamino•Feb 24, 2026
here you go:
> The Israel Defense Forces believes that the Hamas-run health ministry’s death toll from the war in the Gaza Strip has been largely accurate, a senior Israeli military official acknowledged on Thursday.
IDF claims 2/3 to 3/4 of killed are civilians. Now add in that around half of the population of Gaza is under 18 and also that half the population is female.
I know that I will not convince you, you are a person who thinks "lol" is adequate terminology when discussing the killing of humans, but you also don't get to lie about things on the internet that even the party you support does not lie about.
Because of literally years of terrorist acts from Hamas? Because the action initially had overwhelming public support? Because, as any military action without proper planning, they promised a quick victory and had no plans beyond "bomb, bomb, bomb"? And had no plans for "what do we do if we don't succeed"?
For an exactly same "military action with no planning but a lot of bravado" scenario see Russia's invasion into Ukraine.
baq•Feb 24, 2026
Consider the possibility that “bomb bomb bomb” was the entire and only point of the exercise.
sophacles•Feb 24, 2026
Because there were children to starve. Brown children.
baq•Feb 24, 2026
> - Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning,
You’re being generous. There’s zero chance Israel didn’t know it’d happen and it let it happen anyway. The one country which all but brags about tying off loose ends.
slg•Feb 24, 2026
Israel's response was very similar to the US's response to 9/11. 3,000 Americans were killed by terrorists (a smaller percentage of the population than Israelis killed on 10/7) and as a response the US started two wars killing at least 100 times as many Afghans and Iraqis (there are lots of debates about the total casualties there too just like Gaza). This is not a defense of Israel, just a fact that seemingly is never part of the conversation that I think can help people better understand why this is happening.
abdelhousni•Feb 24, 2026
You forgot eighty years of occupation, cultural , economical and ethnical cleansing of the local indigenous people called Palestinians with help of US and Western countries mainly.
slg•Feb 24, 2026
>the local indigenous people called Palestinians
While you have a valid point overall, I always hate this specific phrasing because it's either ignorant of history or implies there is a statute of limitations on being indigenous. And if it is the latter, you're actively being counterproductive to the cause because that is telling the Israelis that the land will be morally theirs if they can hold it for enough generations.
TheOtherHobbes•Feb 24, 2026
Hamas is a terror organisation funded, and quite possibly created, by far-right nationalist elements in the Israeli government to weaken the Palestinian authority and create a pretext for the occupation of Gaza.
Netanyahu is on the record funnelling money through Qatar. He said it was for "humanitarian aid" - which would be more credible if it wasn't such an extraordinary and unusual outbreak of concern for Palestinian wellbeing.
The occupation is straight out genocide, labelled as such by many Israeli scholars, as well as most of Rest of World.
This level of barbarism and entitlement has no place on a civilised planet.
general_reveal•Feb 24, 2026
There is an alternate World Peace Force that just got started recently because I believe, as regimes change, the UN will audit what happened. The issue is there will now be another international body that will argue the other way. It’s not exactly 3d chess, but, it is chess. Purchase of US TikTok (chess moves).
LorenPechtel•Feb 24, 2026
All the hospitals are rubble? Why did I see images of a basically untouched hospital after the fighting stopped? And it's irrelevant anyway as hospitals lose their protected status when used for military purposes. All the Geneva protections apply only to truly civilian things, not to things pretending to be civilian.
And Haaretz is not credible.
Your video is paywalled but also irrelevant as it shows emergency symbols, not proof they truly were medical. The Red Crescent specifically has refused to object to their symbol being used as a cover for military operations and as such it grants no special status on the battlefield.
"Even then, humanitarian considerations relating to the welfare of the wounded and sick being cared for in the facility may not be disregarded. They must be spared and, as far as possible, active measures for their safety taken."
"Notably, an attacking party remains bound by the principle of proportionality. The military advantage likely to be gained from attacking medical establishments or units that have lost their protected status should be carefully weighed against the humanitarian consequences likely to result from the damage or destruction caused to those facilities: such an attack may have significant incidental second- and third-order effects on the delivery of health care in the short, middle and long-term."
> All the Geneva protections apply only to truly civilian things, not to things pretending to be civilian.
"The First Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded field soldiers, the Second Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded sailors, the Third Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of prisoners of war, and the Fourth Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of civilians during armed conflict"
> Your video is paywalled but also irrelevant as it shows emergency symbols
That is precisely why it is relevant. Israel's initial claim was that they didn't have any.
From the article we're discussing:
"After footage from Radwan’s phone was first published by the New York Times a few days later, the Israeli military backtracked on its claims that the vehicles did not have emergency signals on when Israeli troops opened fire, saying the statement was inaccurate."
"The Israeli military then announced on April 20 that an internal inquiry into the incident had found the killings were caused by “several professional failures, breaches of orders, and a failure to fully report the incident.”"
nailer•Feb 24, 2026
You cannot quote Wikipedia on any topic (Wikipedia policy - cite the source, not Wikipedia) but especially matters to do with Hamas/Israel war. Even Jimmy Wales has noted severe issues with bias.
This must be the definition of pedantry. The point is *Israel deliberately destroyed an unconscionable number of hospitals, killing enormous amounts of real-life civilian people, actual humans like you and I. People with daughters, husbands, friends, people who were just as valuable as anyone else.
nailer•Feb 24, 2026
> I remember when folks here were shilling the "Israel promises they'd never bomb a hospital"
The pro-Hamas people, including the BBC, did lie about bombing a hospital. A PIJ rocket fell into the carpark.
There was a seperate hospital that the IDF did bomb - with the usual evacuation warning - that MSF recently admitted was filled with Hamas fighters.
Like the genetics disorder kids (touted as 'starving children' by pro-Hamas accounts), and the 'genocide' where the population increased, I suspect this will also be proven wrong.
ceejayoz•Feb 24, 2026
> There was a seperate hospital that the IDF did bomb…
The IDF has also widely accepted the total death toll as an approximation. They have widely disputed the breakdown of those deaths, both number of militants and women and children killed.
This particular incident, however, was clearly an egregious error or war crime and the IDF clearly attempted to cover it up. There were absolutely some such incidents in this conflict.
It should be telling, however, that the majority of the attention of groups such as "Forensic Architecture" is on Israel, rather than say, reasonably distributed among state level participants in war at present or in recent history. There are something like 20x as many deaths in each of Ukraine and Sudan - yet even HN has more stories about Israel.
joyeuse6701•Feb 24, 2026
I’m not sure why the Palestinians and allies are complaining. Their stated aim is the genocide of Jews and the destruction of Israel. That’s Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, Yemen. And they’ve tried but are too incompetent to succeed.
So when Israel meets them with the same energy, it’s all double standards and whining. That is beneath contempt, as some famous scorched earth general once said.
_zachs•Feb 24, 2026
Not sure how much I'm going to trust this source or report. Seems like there's always a motive behind them, and when counter reports come out actually showing it was Hamas murdering their own citizens again there's no redactions or updates.
ceejayoz•Feb 24, 2026
Oh, come on.
> The Israeli military was forced to change its story about the ambush several times, following the discovery of the bodies in a mass grave, along with their flattened vehicles, and the emergence of video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers. An internal military inquiry ultimately did not recommend any criminal action against the army units responsible for the incident.
Unfortunately, the takeaway here will be "be better at destroying the evidence". The video is quite damning against their initial claims; it includes an uninterrupted view of their arrival, in marked emergency vehicles with lights on and uniformed personnel, and the gunfire beginning: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
tovej•Feb 24, 2026
That's literally the opposite of how the media game around this genocide has played out. And Forensic Architecture has proven to be a reliable source thoughout the conflict.
estearum•Feb 24, 2026
[flagged]
dang•Feb 24, 2026
Please don't cross into personal attack, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
Disgusted by this, I hope that the good people of Israel realize what their hideous regime is doing and stop it.
I know for sure that
RIMR•Feb 24, 2026
Damn, the IDF got this guy mid-sentence...
jihadjihad•Feb 24, 2026
WHAT DOES HE KNOW FOR SURE???
ebbi•Feb 24, 2026
The problem is majority of Israeli citizens think the government isn't doing enough.
Cue the citizens that protested to stop the aid trucks from going into Gaza. The citizens that protested because the Israeli military arrested (after a lot of international pressure) soldiers that were caught raping Palestinian prisoners. They were protesting for the right of soldiers to continue to rape.
woodruffw•Feb 24, 2026
> The citizens that protested because the Israeli military arrested (after a lot of international pressure) soldiers that were caught raping Palestinian prisoners.
The people you're talking about are Israel's far-right. I don't think you can index from them onto the median Israeli's political views anymore than you could reasonably index from a member of Hamas's armed wing onto the median Palestinian.
(A recurring theme in both I/P and MENA conflicts more generally is that political minorities - WB settlers in Israel, for example, manage to wield disproportionate power and induce chaos and strife across the region.)
incahoots•Feb 24, 2026
Might behoove you to know how schooling in that "country" is handled..especially when it comes to Palestinians. Below is an excellent insight as to how this is a "country" wide homegrown effort to raise unhinged cilivians that celebrate the murder of children & women.
Exactly. I replied to the comment above, but a lot of people don't appreciate the right-left divide in Israel is very different to that in other western nations. A leftist in Israel would probably be considered extreme right in some other nations.
woodruffw•Feb 24, 2026
I know a fair number of leftists of both Israeli and Palestinian extraction, and I don't really think this is true. The more nuanced and IMO correct appreciation of left-right politics in Israel (and MENA more generally) is that they're flavored but not inherently dominated by ethnonationalist movements that reached their fever pitch in the 20th century, and have slowly been replaced by ethoreligious movements that have substituted declining follower numbers for more extreme activity.
woodruffw•Feb 24, 2026
I don't know what to tell you. If you think I don't believe that Israel structurally dehumanizes Palestinians, you'd be wrong. But you'd also be wrong in thinking that this is somehow a deviation from the norm; both sides are actively governed by their political extremes, like I said.
incahoots•Feb 24, 2026
You're painting with broad-strokes here which comes off as disingenuous, I presume that's not your intention but it calls into question your understanding of the history between these states being laid bare.
I suggest reading Hamas' 2017 charter in full for proper context.
ebbi•Feb 24, 2026
A stat I came across recently is that over 60% of Israeli's don't support a two state solution - i.e. they don't support the idea of Palestinians having a state.
This also tracks with my travels to Palestine, friends who have travelled more recently, and various videos and article: the right-left in Israel is quite different to the right-left in other Western nations: namely, if you talk to a leftist Israeli, they will also hold strong view against Palestinians.
woodruffw•Feb 24, 2026
> A stat I came across recently is that over 60% of Israeli's don't support a two state solution - i.e. they don't support the idea of Palestinians having a state.
This is, critically, a pretty different political position from defending people accused of wartime rape. That doesn't make it a good position, but we shouldn't conflate the two.
As for why: Israelis don't appear to disapprove of a two-state solution any more or less than Palestinians[1]. Both are absolutely committed to the idea that their one-state solution will be supreme.
Only 5% of Israelis believe that IDF used too much violence in Gaza..
heyitsmedotjayb•Feb 24, 2026
Mike Huckabee said yesterday that all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates should be taken by Israel. That would involve a cleansing of hundreds of millions of people.
georgemcbay•Feb 24, 2026
Huckabee is a Christian Zionist.
I'm sure he sees the death and displacement of millions as a small price to pay to bring about the Rapture in his lifetime.
whatshisface•Feb 24, 2026
This is commonly misconstrued as christianity, but in christian tradition it would bring about the coming of the antichrist, massive persecutions globally, and armageddon.
thrance•Feb 24, 2026
Keep in mind that these powerful men believe that Jewish people coming back to Israel is the first step of the Apocalypse, and the return of Christ. It is a death cult quite literally trying to bring about the end of the world, and they're ruling the world. Also, they are insanely antisemitic and believe most Jews will go to hell.
> Also, they are insanely antisemitic and believe most Jews will go to hell.
A good chunk of them are insanely pro-semitic as well, as they adopt the dual covenant belief that Jews will actually also go to heaven as well as Christians. I've actually never met anyone that adhered to the pro-zionist dispensationalist view that fully thought out the implied consequences, then proceeded to harbor a personal hatred of Jews. The vast majority of them love all things Jewish and hold them in high regard.
woodruffw•Feb 24, 2026
Mike Huckabee is a clown who was more or less strategically plonked into Israel to feed soothing quotes to the settler minority. I think it'd be an error to assume that his particularly evil flavor of Christian eschatology reflects the political or military policies of Israel (which is saying a lot, since Israel's military policy is very clearly good at producing war crimes).
upmind•Feb 24, 2026
If this was happening against the west, people would care a lot more. Unfortunately, nothing seems to be happening to Israel.
JumpCrisscross•Feb 24, 2026
> If this was happening against the west, people would care a lot more
It’s literally happening in Ukraine and, to a lesser scale but precisely the same in type, Minneapolis. On the other hand, there are conflicts across Africa and Asia which are not receiving half the attention.
kombine•Feb 24, 2026
> On the other hand, there are conflicts across Africa and Asia which are not receiving half the attention.
Because the West doesn't fund and shield the perpetrators unlike Israel.
throwaway3060•Feb 24, 2026
I hear this sentiment a lot when it comes to people trying to justify why Ukrainians or Iranians are somehow less deserving of their attentions, and it infuriates me every time. If the goal is to try to prevent unjustified killings, then it makes no sense.
kombine•Feb 24, 2026
I personally raise awareness about Ukraine and Palestine in equal measure. But there is fundamental difference: Israelis will stop their violence on Palestinians the minute they lose support of the US and Europ, whereas the West doesn't hold the same leverage over Russia.
throwaway3060•Feb 24, 2026
I disagree with many parts of this narrative, but even this fundamental hypothesis that Israel will just give up without Western support, that there is absolute leverage, I have no idea where it comes from or what evidence suggests this. If Israel feels they need to do this, they will just source supplies from somewhere else. And everyone will be worse off for it.
peterashford•Feb 24, 2026
It makes perfect sense. In a democracy your government (supposedly) represents you, thus the actions of your government are those you are partly morally responsible for and partly have some control over. If Russia or China is selling AK47s to warlords in Sudan, there's not much that westerners can do about it
troupo•Feb 24, 2026
> Because the West doesn't fund and shield the perpetrators unlike Israel.
Who do you think supplies the weapons to most of the world's conflicts? They just appear out of thin air?
woodruffw•Feb 24, 2026
> Because the West doesn't fund and shield the perpetrators unlike Israel.
You could make an at least passable argument that the US offers a favorable media environment to our MENA allies (i.e., those other than Israel) during what is by all accounts an extremely brutal and mostly ignored conflict in Sudan.
jajuuka•Feb 24, 2026
I just wanna say it's nice to see more people finally waking up and smelling the ashes. I can only hope in the future this genocide will be studied to better understand the main points of failure to not repeat such a widely event covered event.
dralley•Feb 24, 2026
The problem is that both sides lie flagrantly with such frequency that very few claims about the war can be taken at face value.
On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket, with video from multiple angles of the failure, that it hit an empty parking lot in front of the hospital and only blew out the windows and burnt a few cars, and that no more than a handful of people had been killed.
And also the repeated claims that Israel were lying about the tunnels under Gaza Hospitals, and make videos of one such strike (a bunker buster penetrating the parking lot just outside the entrance) go viral, only for Hamas to later announce that one of the replacement leaders for Sinwar had been killed in that strike, and for excavation to find the bunkers / tunnel network underneath that very hospital.
As well as, earlier in the war, a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza.
None of that justifies genuine instances of war crimes and atrocities that Israel may have committed, but there's a reason why people tune out some of the extreme claims that fly around.
Vasbarlog•Feb 24, 2026
> problem is that both sides lie flagrantly
And yet one side is committing genocide.
suzzer99•Feb 24, 2026
And one side started it by killing 1,200 civilians and kidnapping 250. Which doesn't justify genocide. But it does factor into the response when one side is governed by a death cult that has no problem letting scores of their own civilians die if it furthers their cause.
Vasbarlog•Feb 24, 2026
Oh, I didn’t know that the whole conflict started on October 6th.
One side is governed by a death cult for sure, if you look at how many children they indiscriminately kill.
mhb•Feb 24, 2026
When do you suppose the conflict started?
Vasbarlog•Feb 24, 2026
When the first Israeli settler stole the home of a Palestinian.
thenaturalist•Feb 24, 2026
Yeah nah.
Best get some history reading on.
Hint: Palestinians were Jews living under Roman rule after the Romans renamed Judea and Samaria.
Islam entered Judea & Samaria through its violent colonization from the Arabian peninsula through the world.
cess11•Feb 24, 2026
About 700 israeli civilians were killed, out of which an unknown number was killed by the IDF. Quite a few, if the large amount of hellfired cars are anything to go by, and the kibbutzim inhabitants weren't very happy about being shelled by tanks.
Are you referring to the jewish israelis by "death cult"?
dralley•Feb 24, 2026
October 7th was genocide, though. You cannot possibly in good faith argue that what Israel is doing is genocide but what Hamas did wasn't.
Also, to be perfectly honest, we've seen 4x as many people killed in Sudan as in Gaza in the same timeframe, including entire cities being wiped out by gunmen filming themselves literally going door to door and shooting people begging for their lives, lying on the ground or in hospital beds. 6,000 people were killed over a single weekend in el-Fasher and barely a peep from the media.
What Israel is doing in Gaza is more similar to what Russia did to Grozny during the 2nd Chechen war than it is to most of the events historically termed "genocides". Which, to be extremely clear, is not at all a sympathetic comparison. The conduct of the Russians was incredibly brutal and disgusting and unjustified (then and now). I would not want to be compared to them.
But, like, you do have to have standards for what words mean. If the low-tech butchers of the RSF have killed hundreds of thousands in the same timeframe, it's not crazy to be more cautious with the "genocide" label.
incahoots•Feb 24, 2026
Here I thought leaving reddit would provide a break of low quality bait, yet here we are.
Vasbarlog•Feb 24, 2026
Exactly! Wtf
Vasbarlog•Feb 24, 2026
What Israel is doing is genocide. The International Association of Genocide Scholars say so https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS... . Is there anyone who is arguing, in ”good faith” as you say, that the atrocities of October 7th were a genocide?
thenaturalist•Feb 24, 2026
Ah, the association where anyone paying a 30 USD annual fee can become a member...
7952•Feb 24, 2026
The difference between Hamas and Israel is the magnitude of effect. And that for most of the war one party had much more capacity to change its course than the other. But either way criticism of the semantics and focus of media just seems irrelevant and overly abstract. It focuses too much on the group and not enough on the individual. Which drags the argument into the realm that ethno-nationalists of either side occupy. Death is always a tragedy and unnecessary killing is immoral. Anything deeper than that stinks of ignorance and is grotesque.
throwaway3060•Feb 24, 2026
Even then, Gaza is far more dense than Grozny; almost certainly the Grozny campaign was conducted with far more deliberate indifference to any concept of morality.
khazhoux•Feb 24, 2026
And the other side just. won’t. stop. attacking.
That’s really the problem, innit? Palestine can’t stop poking, Israel overreact. 20 GOTO 10.
Vasbarlog•Feb 24, 2026
You could say that about Israel too you know. The other side just. Won’t. Stop. Attacking. Israelis can’t stop sniping children.
cholantesh•Feb 24, 2026
But not the video in the OP which demonstrates that the IDF were, in fact firing on aid workers and refugees as they had been accused of, and certainly not the hours of footage of the IDF brazenly taking human shields over the years while insisting they didn't, or the reports of the IDF arming settlers. Curious that you can't enumerate any of these, and you're happy to take at face value a claim the IDF makes but doesn't allow independent third parties to verify (a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza) while abjuring such behaviour.
dralley•Feb 24, 2026
Independent 3rd parties were brought in to verify, though.
I already said I don't condone any instances of legitimate war crimes. I don't think enumerating everything that has ever happened by either side is very useful. But it's a fact that both sides lie flagrantly about atrocities. Lots of the footage in the early days of the war that was claimed to be from Gaza was actually recycled from the Syrian civil war.
If you want me to start listing some BS that Israel has done, fine - the calendar stunt was ridiculous (if you have followed the conflict, you probably have heard of it). What goes on in the west bank is disgraceful. There are plenty of statements by Israeli politicians that are basically genocidal language (though you can play that game with most countries, random US politicians say psychotic shit all the time).
cess11•Feb 24, 2026
Can you link to those reports?
cholantesh•Feb 24, 2026
>Independent 3rd parties were brought in to verify, though.
Reuters was given an IDF escort as they were walked through the tunnel system, during which a room with some servers was called a Hamas data centre, and they nodded along. That's not quite the same thing.
>Lots of the footage in the early days of the war that was claimed to be from Gaza was actually recycled from the Syrian civil war.
Lots of footage that Hamas or advocates for Palestine released or Twitter randos? Not all of those things are equivalent to Israel making a claim.
wao0uuno•Feb 24, 2026
It's gonna happen again and again and again until the end of humanity.
mattmaroon•Feb 24, 2026
It’s strange to me when otherwise intelligent people call this genocide. Genocide is an attempt to exterminate an entire people. Israel is a nuclear armed nation fighting against the equivalent of Dayton, OH.
If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
Collective punishment, or a long term ethnic cleansing would be much more accurate, but you’re just repeating what you read unthinkingly if you say genocide.
> If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
You can't infer intent that way. Nuking Gaza isn't free, it would introduce an existential threat to Israel. They are toeing a dangerous line already, and using WMDs would align other countries against them really quickly.
Putin isn't avoiding using nukes on Ukraine because he's a nice guy.
neoromantique•Feb 24, 2026
Why does israel use expensive precise munitions wherever possible rather than their stockpiles of much more deadly "dumb" ones?
NickC25•Feb 24, 2026
because it would be admitting to the world that it has said weapons.
Israel has always said it doesn't have nuclear weapons. They would have absolutely zero sympathy going forward from any major nation if they decided to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza, and they want that land so rendering that land uninhabitable might not be a good idea.
superb_dev•Feb 24, 2026
How is long term ethnic cleansing different from genocide?
zorked•Feb 24, 2026
Your are using an argument similar to the repugnant logic of Holocaust deniers. They use claims that Germany could have easily killed Jews /even faster/ as an argument to claim that they didn't commit genocide /at all/.
khazhoux•Feb 24, 2026
“Your honor and members of the jury: my client could have easily committed way worse crimes!”
incahoots•Feb 24, 2026
Reddit-tier low effort arguments should be auto-banned (including this comment).
zaptheimpaler•Feb 24, 2026
The media organizations and people who pushed the pro-Israel narrative already understand all of this - it's not a failure, it was their intended goal.
HappyPanacea•Feb 24, 2026
And this is relevant for HN, because?
ceejayoz•Feb 24, 2026
> Earshot used echolocation to analyze the audio on the recordings in order to arrive at precise estimates of the shooters’ locations. Echolocation is the process of locating the source of a sound based on an analysis of the sound’s echoes and the environment in which the sound travels. The Israeli military destroyed and cleared so many buildings in the Tel Al-Sultan area where the ambush of the aid workers took place that very few structures remained. This destruction actually strengthened Earshot’s ability to determine the positions and movements of Israeli soldiers, based on identifying the surfaces responsible for clearly distinguishable gunshot echoes. Rather than having multiple buildings reflecting the sound waves, there were only a few standing walls and the emergency vehicles themselves.
Seems like interesting tech.
gryzzly•Feb 24, 2026
Much discussion of the tech here, lots of it. Should be definitely flagged.
xinuc•Feb 24, 2026
It's relevant for all humanity.
Not relevant only for those that have lost theirs.
Nice try Zionist drone.
kazinator•Feb 24, 2026
Why have this topic on HN? I mean, search this page for the word "flagged", and while doing that also look at all the grayed-out, downvoted comments that are within an inch of being flagged. Obviously, this is not suitable for HN.
mhb•Feb 24, 2026
That battle's been fought and lost. The moderators' suggestion, which I recommend, is to email the moderators.
axus•Feb 24, 2026
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not the IDF's fault.
And if it was, they didn't mean it.
And if they did, Gaza deserved it.
stackedinserter•Feb 24, 2026
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, it's actually Israel's fault.
And if it was, we didn't mean it.
And if we did, Israelis deserved it.
Apply to every missile attack from Gaza over the last 15 years.
ceejayoz•Feb 24, 2026
> That didn't happen.
Hamas brags even about their failed attacks.
Your comparison fails at the first step.
> And if it was, we didn't mean it.
And this one! How often does Hamas pull the "we didn't mean it!" card for their attacks on Israel? Have they ever? Of course they mean it, they're a bunch of assholes.
nailer•Feb 24, 2026
> Hamas brags even about their failed attacks.
Sure but pro Hamas advocates deny everything.
greekrich92•Feb 24, 2026
So the people who live in an open-air prison are on equal footing with their captors, torturers, starvers? Is that you're position?
That's rhetorical btw, since your comment was not made in good faith.
jeromegv•Feb 24, 2026
I don’t think we can truly compare the missile attacks of Hamas vs the bombing campaigns of Israel
Look at any photo of any neighborhood in Israel, is there anywhere that remotely looks similar to the pile of rocks that Gaza looks like now?
Universities, hospitals, so much infrastructure, all gone. So much of Gaza is now people living in tents. Israel destroyed so much civilian infrastructure that existed.
How’s that similar to you?
ceejayoz•Feb 24, 2026
Look, I don't disagree, but American cities looked pretty fine after WWII, and Germany was rubble. Which side gets pounded more doesn't inherently prove which side was right.
(In this case, I'm of the opinion that both sides committed clear, deliberate war crimes.)
yodsanklai•Feb 24, 2026
and if you don't agree, you're antisemitic
dkersten•Feb 24, 2026
The IDF are terrorists and war criminals.
bamboozled•Feb 24, 2026
Hamas ? All good?
neaden•Feb 24, 2026
People in places like this generally don't feel the need to condemn Hamas because it's understood that they are bad. Hamas is not an ally of the United States, it's troops and police force don't train with the United States military, it does not buy weapons from United States factories, and it does not receive government aid from the United States. If you feel the need to, you can add a condemnation of Hamas to basically every post here and it'll be accurate. Hell if you want to add a condemnation to the Iranian and North Korean governments too while you're there, that'd be fine too.
criddell•Feb 24, 2026
There are a bunch of people here who are university students and Hamas support isn't as low as you might think on western campuses.
bdhe•Feb 24, 2026
Hamas support or Palestinian support?
appreciatorBus•Feb 24, 2026
Hamas support. Though I wouldn't be surprised if most can't tell the difference.
NickC25•Feb 24, 2026
Hamas also doesn't have nuclear weapons.
guerrilla•Feb 24, 2026
Whataboutism.
nitwit005•Feb 24, 2026
If the only defense you can think up is that Hamas is worse, it's a bad sign.
pavel_lishin•Feb 24, 2026
If you're going to put words in someone's mouth, at least make them big words.
Read that and tell me that Israel is acting proportionally...
iberator•Feb 24, 2026
My stance is Mossad reading:
- Likud is an evil political party
- Natanyahu is a wanted war criminal
- IDF committed many atrocities
- Hamas was insane to think that Bibi would NOT BOMB the Gaza in retaliation.
- Hamas was the first to cast the stone.
- Israel ALWAYS gonna retaliate with non proportional force when it comes to security of its citizens.
guerrilla•Feb 24, 2026
> Hamas was insane to think that Bibi would NOT BOMB the Gaza in retaliation.
My theory is that they knew this would happen and they did it because they knew it would garner support (which it did) and they also knew they had nothing to lose because this is what would have happened in the long-term anyway. They chose between a quick death and a slow death. Unfortunately, everyone else who originally chose them to protect them didn't get to choose. I doubt most would have voted for this if they had that choice.
neoromantique•Feb 24, 2026
What in actuality was happening long-term is the increasing integration and cooperation of Gazans with Israel, reduction of tensions and hopes for eventual peace. Which is an existencial threat to Hamas.
guerrilla•Feb 24, 2026
That's not a counterpoint to what I said.
selimthegrim•Feb 24, 2026
Uh, was this happening 1967-87? Because they were sure more integrated before the First Intifada
jeromegv•Feb 24, 2026
Is that the same cooperation seen in the West Bank where Israel keeps sending settlers and make Palestine land smaller and smaller every single year?
I highly recommend to watch the Oscar winning movie “no other land”, for anyone that thinks that Israel would just let them leave in peace
iberator•Feb 24, 2026
I also almost believe that top echelons of Israeli intelligence knew about the upcoming attack, but they didn't expect THAT many fatalities and that Hamas were going to take hostages alive.
guerrilla•Feb 24, 2026
That's interesting. It could be. Maybe some day we'll find out.
prmoustache•Feb 24, 2026
A never ending conflict is what maintain the Likoud in power. This far right party and government has no interest in peace and is insulting the memory of the people who died in the holocaust.
You can't just stamp out a guerilla resistance the way Israel have tried to do. I suspect Hamas reckoned that a well-timed short term sacrifice would turn global opinion against Israel.
micromacrofoot•Feb 24, 2026
Most people in Gaza now aren't old enough to have voted for Hamas. Median age is estimated to be under 20.
postsantum•Feb 24, 2026
Reminds me of Tiananmen square in regard to how stubbornly westerners insist that NOTHING happened in Gaza before 7/23
adv0r•Feb 24, 2026
FINALLY HN waking up
simianparrot•Feb 24, 2026
This account literally only spams this kind of stuff. It has zero relevance to HN. We already have Reddit.
thenaturalist•Feb 24, 2026
What is the HN community doing to use tech to combat terrorism and defend civilian security and freedom?
rainmaking•Feb 24, 2026
The attack on Israel was deliberately designed to provoke Israel into committing atrocities, and Israel- partially- took the bait.
That is a very different situation from, say, the Kosovo, when the Serbs just walked in intent on killing everybody.
Was that good? Of course not.
If you go around accusing Israel of genocide, deliberately omitting the little detail of facing an enemy who does everything they can to get their own people killed to make you look bad- are you being fair and just in your assessment? Obviously not. Are you incentivizing Hamas to do it all again? Absolutely.
NickC25•Feb 24, 2026
>If you go around accusing Israel of genocide, deliberately omitting the little detail of facing an enemy who does everything they can to get their own people killed to make you look bad
Easy to make that enemy look bad when you are an impoverished country that has no food, no old people (they were all killed) or modern weapons, that enemy is starving you, killing your women and children, bombing schools and hospitals.....and oh yeah that nation has nuclear weapons.
throwawayheui57•Feb 24, 2026
Iranian here! I wish freedom for the people of Gaza and an end to their suffering and oppression. Down with all the dictators and oppressors. Be it IRGC or IDF.
Dig1t•Feb 24, 2026
>Israeli soldiers fired over 900 bullets at the aid workers
That is a LOT of shooting.
A normal mag holds 30 rounds, that's 30 full magazines worth of bullets they dumped into these people.
They were really trying to make sure there were no survivors.
manyaoman•Feb 24, 2026
I hear about IDF war crimes all the time, but this level of lying and cover-up is something new and causing me some serious cognitive dissonance right now.
On the tech side I’m wondering if any LLMs were used, they don't seem to mention any by name at least.
proxysna•Feb 24, 2026
Exceptional report. Surprised to see that much of a confusion on HN about why it is there. MH17 posts with forensics did not seem to be offtopic when they were posted. This fits.
rekrsiv•Feb 24, 2026
You're telling me a fascist government that is actively doing every war crime it falsely accuses its neighbor of committing is above doing it to the rest of the international community? That's clearly anti-Semitic rhetoric.
lingrush4•Feb 24, 2026
Turns out that if you try to provide aid to terrorists, you could get killed by the people whose job is to kill terrorists. No way to see that coming.
33 Comments
The case seems pretty clear, especially since the soldiers tried to hide all evidence.
Even if the 'soldiers' didn't, it wouldn't have mattered as the governing apparatus usually goes out of its way to protect their own militants.
Ex A:
https://www.counterfire.org/article/cold-blooded-murder-and-...However, you are also correct, the IDF has little or no accountability for criminal behavior.
May be the brazenness is why they make the best Tech CXOs?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfD1y7WZLpM
alternative FE: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=bfD1y7WZLpM
Damn…
"fun" fact: more journalists died in the Gaza than in every conflict since ww2 combined.
Being a journalist typically provides you some protection in times of war, but for journalists who are part of a group suffering genocide, it's a liability.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I also think issues of censorship are very high on the list of topics of interest on HN and few topics are subject to more extensive censorship than reporting on events in Israel and Palestine.
Furthermore, there are handful of accounts who sole purpose seems to be to pump the HN feed full of Israel and Palestine. People who want so badly to talk about a single political topic should probably go to Bluesky.
Framing it as "obsessive" is an attempt to shift away from subject matter toward an attitude of journalists or consumers, like it's borne of the same attitude as paparazzi. But I think it merits significant coverage not for that reason, but because it so frequently meets criteria for meriting journalistic attention.
I agree that comment sections can be bad, but they aren't always, and to some degree I would rather trust moderation than suppress reporting on a topic of legitimate interest. You're exactly right that a lot of reaction is toxic and politicized, and sometimes the way that manifests is by trying to cook up rationales to suppress stories by flagging them. Out of respect for the concern you've identified, it would be a huge mistake to let politicization win by allowing politically motivated abuse of flagging.
Am I still allowed to ask why the moderators don't want people to read and discuss this particular technology story?
In case you didn't see them yet, here are some of my other comments in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141678
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141517
Re the concern about flagging, the situation is much as I've described in these past threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Specifically, when I looked through who had flagged the current post, I saw the usual coalition between users who appear to be consistently flagging for political reasons, and other users who have quite different flagging patterns than that. In any case, virtually all of the accounts that flagged the thread were established HN users.
Sometimes when people bring this concern up, I go through and make a list of other stories that the same accounts had flagged, to illustrate the point that their flags are not exclusively targeting one specific topic or vector. I've done that here in a collapsed reply, if anyone wants to take a look.
I hope this explanation helps - your posts in this thread seemed to me to be in good faith so I wanted to respond in kind. If you still have a question that my comments and links to past explanations haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
The rise and fall of peer review - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47123133 - Feb 2026 (0 comments)
Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120899 - Feb 2026 (692 comments)
Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119210 - Feb 2026 (440 comments)
Music Discovery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114672 - Feb 2026 (56 comments)
The 7-Year Bug That Took 3 Minutes to Fix - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47090261 - Feb 2026 (1 comment)
AI made coding more enjoyable - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47075400 - Feb 2026 (97 comments)
RFC 3092 – Etymology of “Foo” (2001) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46934499 - Feb 2026 (52 comments)
Launching My Side Project as a Solo Dev: The Walkthrough - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46845567 - Feb 2026 (9 comments)
There is an AI code review bubble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766961 - Jan 2026 (249 comments)
Proof of Corn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46735511 - Jan 2026 (307 comments)
XLibre XServer 25.1 Changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46474846 - Jan 2026 (4 comments)
Python Data Science Handbook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46120611 - Dec 2025 (61 comments)
NTSB Preliminary Report – UPS Boeing MD-11F Crash [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45995834 - Nov 2025 (228 comments)
Best shipping logistic aggregator in India - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45924139 - Nov 2025 (0 comments)
WebDAV isn't dead yet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698070 - Oct 2025 (128 comments)
Unicode Footguns in Python - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45689443 - Oct 2025 (20 comments)
AGI is not imminent, and LLMs are not the royal road to getting there - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45627171 - Oct 2025 (124 comments)
Super Ace: Your PH Home for Jili Slots and a 300% Welcome Bonus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45624939 - Oct 2025 (0 comments)
Pkgbase Removes FreeBSD Base System Feature - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44730021 - July 2025 (42 comments)
It seems that people, even "established HN users" will flag literally anything. Do you feel that there is any remaining article quality signal that can be obtained from the current flagging mechanism?
If you squint and look closely, though, I think you can detect this in the above list. The weirdest "wtf?" cases of flagging are ones where the threads had a lot of comments and were on the frontpage. That means upvotes won the tug-of-war with flags, as they should have in most of those cases.
Conversely, it you look at the submissions in the list which had 0 comments or very few, it looks to me like most were either spam, low-quality articles, or dupes.
Remember, also, that some flags are just mistakes - the link is easy to fat-finger or misclick, and the UI doesn't provide feedback about that. That's likely to change soon as part of work that tomhow and I are planning.
Your question is answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443, but the short version is that your assumption that we see everything is incorrect.
1) The entire discussion is a rehashing of the exact same points every time the topic is posted, and not very insightful
2) The participation rate for experts (or even authors) in the discussed field/topic is very low (compared to programming topics)
3) The discussion rarely stays civil and requires excessive moderation
An observation (have no verbatim quote, but believe from dang) is that there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective and exact topic (presumably for above reasons). You can certainly still blame the flagging on bots or Zionists, but it's almost certainly not only those.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flags%20off%20turn%20by%3Adang...
We can't, however, turn off flags on threads we don't know about. You guys (I don't mean you personally!) unintentionally assume that we're omniscient. We aren't, so we need people to tell us about cases like this.
In this case, no one told us; I ran across it randomly. Randomness is only good for partial results. For reliable message delivery, someone needs to email hn@ycombinator.com, and please remember that it takes time to work through that (er) rather active inbox.
What is this facade of impartialness and too much politics? Tell that to the people massacred.
I'm always sceptical of this given it doesn't happen to similar posts about Iran.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46599742
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46849715
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46553599
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46839106
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754132
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624529
Gaza exposed it even more:
* No one accepts high western "morality" anymore
* Most US politicians are blackmailed via Epstein who worked for Israel, with high probability, including Trump
* ICE is just the beginning, they're trained by IDF, send more people and 1940 is not too far away from us
Is that an accurate trend on an individual basis?
??? Most? His network was certainly extensive but "most politicians" seems like a significantly overextended extrapolation.
>A digital reconstruction of the scene shows that the soldiers would have had an uninterrupted view of the arrival of the convoy.
>The reconstruction was jointly achieved with the two survivors of the incident, with an immersive spatial model they could walk through and amend. Together with spatial and audio analysis we established the position of the soldiers on an elevated ground with an unobstructed line of sight to the emergency vehicles.
Not sure if they're still fêted as artists or have moved away from that label. I still find their approach completely mesmerizing nevertheless.
Their reconstruction of the Beirut Port explosion was incredible though: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/beirut-port-...
And the satellite photos showing the scene, and the cell phone video showing the shooting...
It's a societal-level policy: 47% of Israeli Jews want all Palestinians killed; 82% want all Palestinians forcefully expelled (i.e., ethnically cleansed) [0] which would constitute genocide. 56% want the same for all Israeli Arabs.
So, it's pathetic when Westerners act surprised at Israel's antics: you can't support a genocidal state and then be shocked when it does genocidal stuff. This is just Tuesday for them.
Once you understand this, Israel's actions are not an anomaly. It's the natural expression of people who consider their neighbors beneath them, and barely even human.
[0]: https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/poll-show-most-jew...
https://www.earshot.ngo/what-we-do/audio-ballistics
https://forensic-architecture.org/
https://content.forensic-architecture.org/wp-content/uploads...
> Earshot used echolocation to analyze the audio on the recordings in order to arrive at precise estimates of the shooters’ locations. Echolocation is the process of locating the source of a sound based on an analysis of the sound’s echoes and the environment in which the sound travels. The Israeli military destroyed and cleared so many buildings in the Tel Al-Sultan area where the ambush of the aid workers took place that very few structures remained. This destruction actually strengthened Earshot’s ability to determine the positions and movements of Israeli soldiers, based on identifying the surfaces responsible for clearly distinguishable gunshot echoes. Rather than having multiple buildings reflecting the sound waves, there were only a few standing walls and the emergency vehicles themselves.
> “Earshot forensically analyzed over 900 gunshots fired at aid workers. It took one whole year of careful listening to reconstruct an auditory picture of what happened that dark night,” Lawrence Abu Hamdan, the director of Earshot, told Drop Site.
I'm not sure how much this was actually necessary to the eventual verdict if this is ever adjudicated, though, if "hiding the evidence" is a factor:
> Following the ambush, Israeli forces crushed all eight vehicles using heavy machinery and attempted to bury them under the sand.
> The body of Anwar al-Attar was found near the ambush site on March 27, and the bodies of the other 14 aid workers, all wearing identifying uniforms or volunteer vests of their respective organizations, were found in a mass grave near the site on March 30.
But the understanding that they were advanced upon in a walking wave of fire, and then the survivors were executed one by one at close range, may help.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443
There are a million places to discuss politics online. If I wanted to discuss politics, I would go to any one of them. Claiming any HN moderator is 'complicit' in atrocities is absurd.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Turn on showdead and you'll find much, much weirder wastes of time here.
Why wouldn't influence campaigns, we know every big country to be running, target this site? What reason would they have to leave it out from their list? Why not target a major news forum for the more wealthy and connected (predominantly) Americans in tech? This is not an uwu smol bean site anymore and the cost of (undetectably) botting any given site is rapidly approaching cents.
I also don't think your read of it as an organic outcome of a post that obviously violates guidelines is the natural conclusion here, I actually think that interpretation strains credulity more. Where I agree is that I don't think moderators are being heavy-handed on issues like this, but I do think high level political events do merit attention at least once in a while and I don't think the HN pattern has been toward oversaturation.
And in terms of things that make this story unique, I think it's the highest standard of specificity I've ever seen in reporting of this kind, it's using impressive technological reconstruction of the scene, it's actually quite unlike typical news reporting on the topic and it's hosted on a platform that was YC-incubated, and I think DropSite News is in an ascendant moment as a major news breaker. There's lots to talk about here imo.
This is discernible by watching how long it takes stories like these to reach a flagged state on the new submissions page. It is further evident by watching which comments within those submissions get flagged based upon their upvotes and visibility.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962005
What if they only act once it reaches the front page?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Qatar
There is a name for people who build coalitions through compromise and diplomacy, and work towards pragmatic solutions to actual problems — they're called "centrists".
Even just technologically it's more interesting than 90% of the stuff posted here.
I recommend any hackernews users to check that site frequently, plenty of interesting posts on hackernews that get flagged and hidden daily.
All the hospitals are now rubble, and the IDF quietly let it slip that the death toll is legit recently. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-01-29/ty-article/.p...
There's damning video of this specific incident, recovered from the dead. I suspect subsequent massacres made a policy of finding and destroying all the phones. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
Hospitals may have been used for retaliation [0], but it is unclear how many & in what capacity (according to accepted conventions, using a hospital to treat wounded combatants wouldn't make it a valid military target, for example; but hiding weapons or personnel would).
[0] One such recent report: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
Who accepted those? And did they have a right to do so on behalf of _all_ of humanity?
The conventions are a guideline. To use them as a blanket moral justification for your actions after the fact is extremely disingenuous.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/30/israel-forces-...
Hmm.
> It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy… The following acts are examples of perfidy… The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status...
(Assassinating a paralyzed patient in a hospital is also not typically - ahem - kosher. Even if you're in uniform!)
Could you clarify where in the Geneva Conventions this very important exemption is stated?
> Why was it decided that feigning of civilian, non-combatant status is bad?
Because people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators, and even enemy civilians are protected persons.
The spirit of the law is more important then its letter. Also I think Israel never signed that part of the Geneva Conventions.
> Because people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators, and even enemy civilians are protected persons.
When did that happened in the Israel-Arab conflict? (When did that happened elsewhere? It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?)
You, earlier: "A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Hamas did not have a habit of not putting uniforms in combat."
Now it's suddenly not a problem? I can't imagine Hamas signed the Geneva Conventions.
> It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?
German Jews in the 1930s/1940s would probably disagree.
> When did that happened elsewhere? It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?
I mean, the IDF killed three Israeli hostages in Gaza, while with their hands up and holding a white flag, because they thought they were infiltrators.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67745092
They should also pay reparations, and send their leaders to the Hague.
And how do you even know how many active combatants have been hit? Hamas does not release such numbers, just pretends everyone is a civilian. The closest we have to a list of dead combatants is the Israeli list that leaked--but that's inherently quite an undercount as it's a list of those both identified as dead and identified as members of a terrorist group.
And note that "journalist" and "Hamas" are not exclusive. The majority of the "journalists" have been identified as members of terrorist organizations. They call their propaganda people "journalists". And how about that Al Jazzera reporter discovered holding one of the hostages?
And reports basically conflate "armed man" and "Hamas" as they are pretty much one in the same. (Other than "Hamas" actually includes allied terror organizations.) Think Hamas tolerates opposition in Gaza??
And "Hamas-run Interior Ministry" is accurate. It's admitting the figures are basically enemy propaganda.
From the article we're discussing:
"The Israeli military was forced to change its story about the ambush several times, following the discovery of the bodies in a mass grave, along with their flattened vehicles, and the emergence of video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers. An internal military inquiry ultimately did not recommend any criminal action against the army units responsible for the incident."
I would describe that as a walk-back.
It's sort of understandable why the defenders of the genocide have to keep defending it. Stopping doing so today would mean admitting that until yesterday you've been defending utter inhumanity.
A review:
> Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a challenging documentary. It is not only difficult to watch, but it also probes into one of the most grotesque aspects of human nature: the capacity for self-delusion in the face of horrific atrocities. This isn’t a film about history, facts, or statistics; it’s about the memories of the men who killed, the stories they tell themselves, and how they continue to live with the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. The film’s power lies in its ability to take the viewer beyond a surface-level understanding of evil and into the psychological abyss of those who have committed atrocities—and seemingly moved on with their lives.
From: https://docthisway.com/2024/09/23/the-act-of-killing-review/
For whatever reason YouTube has put age limits on some of the uploads of it, here's the start of one without it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj9Zw5fN3rE
You know who reminds me of that? Fucking Serbia and they got bombed for it.
- Hamas is a terrorist organization that planned and executed a mass terror campaign, fully knowing and hoping for the reaction. And boasting about it continuously and repeatedly.
- Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.
> - Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.
This is also an extreme understatement. It's literally a genocide.
Lol if you believe that Hamas has not been lying about the death toll. Including immediate precise counts split by women and children within minutes of each Israeli strike.
> The Israel Defense Forces believes that the Hamas-run health ministry’s death toll from the war in the Gaza Strip has been largely accurate, a senior Israeli military official acknowledged on Thursday.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-kill...
IDF claims 2/3 to 3/4 of killed are civilians. Now add in that around half of the population of Gaza is under 18 and also that half the population is female.
I know that I will not convince you, you are a person who thinks "lol" is adequate terminology when discussing the killing of humans, but you also don't get to lie about things on the internet that even the party you support does not lie about.
Please try and adhere to the standard of conversation that all of us on HN are trying have to elevate our discussion. Read it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Why did it quickly grow?
For an exactly same "military action with no planning but a lot of bravado" scenario see Russia's invasion into Ukraine.
You’re being generous. There’s zero chance Israel didn’t know it’d happen and it let it happen anyway. The one country which all but brags about tying off loose ends.
While you have a valid point overall, I always hate this specific phrasing because it's either ignorant of history or implies there is a statute of limitations on being indigenous. And if it is the latter, you're actively being counterproductive to the cause because that is telling the Israelis that the land will be morally theirs if they can hold it for enough generations.
Netanyahu is on the record funnelling money through Qatar. He said it was for "humanitarian aid" - which would be more credible if it wasn't such an extraordinary and unusual outbreak of concern for Palestinian wellbeing.
The occupation is straight out genocide, labelled as such by many Israeli scholars, as well as most of Rest of World.
This level of barbarism and entitlement has no place on a civilised planet.
And Haaretz is not credible.
Your video is paywalled but also irrelevant as it shows emergency symbols, not proof they truly were medical. The Red Crescent specifically has refused to object to their symbol being used as a cover for military operations and as such it grants no special status on the battlefield.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_d...
"By February 2024, it was reported that "every hospital in Gaza is either damaged, destroyed, or out of service due to lack of fuel.""
> And it's irrelevant anyway as hospitals lose their protected status when used for military purposes.
A lie.
https://www.icrc.org/en/document/protection-hospitals-during...
"Even then, humanitarian considerations relating to the welfare of the wounded and sick being cared for in the facility may not be disregarded. They must be spared and, as far as possible, active measures for their safety taken."
"Notably, an attacking party remains bound by the principle of proportionality. The military advantage likely to be gained from attacking medical establishments or units that have lost their protected status should be carefully weighed against the humanitarian consequences likely to result from the damage or destruction caused to those facilities: such an attack may have significant incidental second- and third-order effects on the delivery of health care in the short, middle and long-term."
> All the Geneva protections apply only to truly civilian things, not to things pretending to be civilian.
This is an outright lie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions
"The First Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded field soldiers, the Second Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded sailors, the Third Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of prisoners of war, and the Fourth Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of civilians during armed conflict"
> Your video is paywalled but also irrelevant as it shows emergency symbols
That is precisely why it is relevant. Israel's initial claim was that they didn't have any.
From the article we're discussing:
"After footage from Radwan’s phone was first published by the New York Times a few days later, the Israeli military backtracked on its claims that the vehicles did not have emergency signals on when Israeli troops opened fire, saying the statement was inaccurate."
"The Israeli military then announced on April 20 that an internal inquiry into the incident had found the killings were caused by “several professional failures, breaches of orders, and a failure to fully report the incident.”"
That the Geneva Conventions cover more than civilians is... not tough to back up. https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciii-1949
This must be the definition of pedantry. The point is *Israel deliberately destroyed an unconscionable number of hospitals, killing enormous amounts of real-life civilian people, actual humans like you and I. People with daughters, husbands, friends, people who were just as valuable as anyone else.
The pro-Hamas people, including the BBC, did lie about bombing a hospital. A PIJ rocket fell into the carpark.
There was a seperate hospital that the IDF did bomb - with the usual evacuation warning - that MSF recently admitted was filled with Hamas fighters.
Like the genetics disorder kids (touted as 'starving children' by pro-Hamas accounts), and the 'genocide' where the population increased, I suspect this will also be proven wrong.
There was more than "a" hospital. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_d...
"By February 2024, it was reported that "every hospital in Gaza is either damaged, destroyed, or out of service due to lack of fuel.""
The IDF has always said they will bomb anything used by Hamas. Hospitals have been widely used by Hamas for decades: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/05/gaza-palestin...
If you're referring to the "hospital bombing" which was actually caused by a Hamas rocket on 10/17/23, which set off the widespread genocide accusations, that wasn't the IDF: https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/26/gaza-findings-october-17...
The IDF has also widely accepted the total death toll as an approximation. They have widely disputed the breakdown of those deaths, both number of militants and women and children killed.
This particular incident, however, was clearly an egregious error or war crime and the IDF clearly attempted to cover it up. There were absolutely some such incidents in this conflict.
It should be telling, however, that the majority of the attention of groups such as "Forensic Architecture" is on Israel, rather than say, reasonably distributed among state level participants in war at present or in recent history. There are something like 20x as many deaths in each of Ukraine and Sudan - yet even HN has more stories about Israel.
So when Israel meets them with the same energy, it’s all double standards and whining. That is beneath contempt, as some famous scorched earth general once said.
> The Israeli military was forced to change its story about the ambush several times, following the discovery of the bodies in a mass grave, along with their flattened vehicles, and the emergence of video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers. An internal military inquiry ultimately did not recommend any criminal action against the army units responsible for the incident.
Unfortunately, the takeaway here will be "be better at destroying the evidence". The video is quite damning against their initial claims; it includes an uninterrupted view of their arrival, in marked emergency vehicles with lights on and uniformed personnel, and the gunfire beginning: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Cue the citizens that protested to stop the aid trucks from going into Gaza. The citizens that protested because the Israeli military arrested (after a lot of international pressure) soldiers that were caught raping Palestinian prisoners. They were protesting for the right of soldiers to continue to rape.
The people you're talking about are Israel's far-right. I don't think you can index from them onto the median Israeli's political views anymore than you could reasonably index from a member of Hamas's armed wing onto the median Palestinian.
(A recurring theme in both I/P and MENA conflicts more generally is that political minorities - WB settlers in Israel, for example, manage to wield disproportionate power and induce chaos and strife across the region.)
https://electronicintifada.net/content/book-review-how-israe...
I suggest reading Hamas' 2017 charter in full for proper context.
This also tracks with my travels to Palestine, friends who have travelled more recently, and various videos and article: the right-left in Israel is quite different to the right-left in other Western nations: namely, if you talk to a leftist Israeli, they will also hold strong view against Palestinians.
This is, critically, a pretty different political position from defending people accused of wartime rape. That doesn't make it a good position, but we shouldn't conflate the two.
As for why: Israelis don't appear to disapprove of a two-state solution any more or less than Palestinians[1]. Both are absolutely committed to the idea that their one-state solution will be supreme.
[1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/695582/peace-distant-prospect-i...
I'm sure he sees the death and displacement of millions as a small price to pay to bring about the Rapture in his lifetime.
https://religiondispatches.org/2025/12/04/mike-huckabee-trie...
A good chunk of them are insanely pro-semitic as well, as they adopt the dual covenant belief that Jews will actually also go to heaven as well as Christians. I've actually never met anyone that adhered to the pro-zionist dispensationalist view that fully thought out the implied consequences, then proceeded to harbor a personal hatred of Jews. The vast majority of them love all things Jewish and hold them in high regard.
It’s literally happening in Ukraine and, to a lesser scale but precisely the same in type, Minneapolis. On the other hand, there are conflicts across Africa and Asia which are not receiving half the attention.
Because the West doesn't fund and shield the perpetrators unlike Israel.
Who do you think supplies the weapons to most of the world's conflicts? They just appear out of thin air?
You could make an at least passable argument that the US offers a favorable media environment to our MENA allies (i.e., those other than Israel) during what is by all accounts an extremely brutal and mostly ignored conflict in Sudan.
On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket, with video from multiple angles of the failure, that it hit an empty parking lot in front of the hospital and only blew out the windows and burnt a few cars, and that no more than a handful of people had been killed.
And also the repeated claims that Israel were lying about the tunnels under Gaza Hospitals, and make videos of one such strike (a bunker buster penetrating the parking lot just outside the entrance) go viral, only for Hamas to later announce that one of the replacement leaders for Sinwar had been killed in that strike, and for excavation to find the bunkers / tunnel network underneath that very hospital.
As well as, earlier in the war, a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza.
None of that justifies genuine instances of war crimes and atrocities that Israel may have committed, but there's a reason why people tune out some of the extreme claims that fly around.
And yet one side is committing genocide.
One side is governed by a death cult for sure, if you look at how many children they indiscriminately kill.
Best get some history reading on.
Hint: Palestinians were Jews living under Roman rule after the Romans renamed Judea and Samaria.
Islam entered Judea & Samaria through its violent colonization from the Arabian peninsula through the world.
Are you referring to the jewish israelis by "death cult"?
Also, to be perfectly honest, we've seen 4x as many people killed in Sudan as in Gaza in the same timeframe, including entire cities being wiped out by gunmen filming themselves literally going door to door and shooting people begging for their lives, lying on the ground or in hospital beds. 6,000 people were killed over a single weekend in el-Fasher and barely a peep from the media.
What Israel is doing in Gaza is more similar to what Russia did to Grozny during the 2nd Chechen war than it is to most of the events historically termed "genocides". Which, to be extremely clear, is not at all a sympathetic comparison. The conduct of the Russians was incredibly brutal and disgusting and unjustified (then and now). I would not want to be compared to them.
But, like, you do have to have standards for what words mean. If the low-tech butchers of the RSF have killed hundreds of thousands in the same timeframe, it's not crazy to be more cautious with the "genocide" label.
That’s really the problem, innit? Palestine can’t stop poking, Israel overreact. 20 GOTO 10.
I already said I don't condone any instances of legitimate war crimes. I don't think enumerating everything that has ever happened by either side is very useful. But it's a fact that both sides lie flagrantly about atrocities. Lots of the footage in the early days of the war that was claimed to be from Gaza was actually recycled from the Syrian civil war.
If you want me to start listing some BS that Israel has done, fine - the calendar stunt was ridiculous (if you have followed the conflict, you probably have heard of it). What goes on in the west bank is disgraceful. There are plenty of statements by Israeli politicians that are basically genocidal language (though you can play that game with most countries, random US politicians say psychotic shit all the time).
Reuters was given an IDF escort as they were walked through the tunnel system, during which a room with some servers was called a Hamas data centre, and they nodded along. That's not quite the same thing.
>Lots of the footage in the early days of the war that was claimed to be from Gaza was actually recycled from the Syrian civil war.
Lots of footage that Hamas or advocates for Palestine released or Twitter randos? Not all of those things are equivalent to Israel making a claim.
If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
Collective punishment, or a long term ethnic cleansing would be much more accurate, but you’re just repeating what you read unthinkingly if you say genocide.
You can't infer intent that way. Nuking Gaza isn't free, it would introduce an existential threat to Israel. They are toeing a dangerous line already, and using WMDs would align other countries against them really quickly.
Putin isn't avoiding using nukes on Ukraine because he's a nice guy.
Israel has always said it doesn't have nuclear weapons. They would have absolutely zero sympathy going forward from any major nation if they decided to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza, and they want that land so rendering that land uninhabitable might not be a good idea.
Seems like interesting tech.
Not relevant only for those that have lost theirs.
Nice try Zionist drone.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not the IDF's fault.
And if it was, they didn't mean it.
And if they did, Gaza deserved it.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, it's actually Israel's fault.
And if it was, we didn't mean it.
And if we did, Israelis deserved it.
Apply to every missile attack from Gaza over the last 15 years.
Hamas brags even about their failed attacks.
Your comparison fails at the first step.
> And if it was, we didn't mean it.
And this one! How often does Hamas pull the "we didn't mean it!" card for their attacks on Israel? Have they ever? Of course they mean it, they're a bunch of assholes.
Sure but pro Hamas advocates deny everything.
That's rhetorical btw, since your comment was not made in good faith.
Look at any photo of any neighborhood in Israel, is there anywhere that remotely looks similar to the pile of rocks that Gaza looks like now?
Universities, hospitals, so much infrastructure, all gone. So much of Gaza is now people living in tents. Israel destroyed so much civilian infrastructure that existed.
How’s that similar to you?
(In this case, I'm of the opinion that both sides committed clear, deliberate war crimes.)
Read that and tell me that Israel is acting proportionally...
- Likud is an evil political party
- Natanyahu is a wanted war criminal
- IDF committed many atrocities
- Hamas was insane to think that Bibi would NOT BOMB the Gaza in retaliation.
- Hamas was the first to cast the stone.
- Israel ALWAYS gonna retaliate with non proportional force when it comes to security of its citizens.
My theory is that they knew this would happen and they did it because they knew it would garner support (which it did) and they also knew they had nothing to lose because this is what would have happened in the long-term anyway. They chose between a quick death and a slow death. Unfortunately, everyone else who originally chose them to protect them didn't get to choose. I doubt most would have voted for this if they had that choice.
I highly recommend to watch the Oscar winning movie “no other land”, for anyone that thinks that Israel would just let them leave in peace
You can't just stamp out a guerilla resistance the way Israel have tried to do. I suspect Hamas reckoned that a well-timed short term sacrifice would turn global opinion against Israel.
That is a very different situation from, say, the Kosovo, when the Serbs just walked in intent on killing everybody.
Was that good? Of course not.
If you go around accusing Israel of genocide, deliberately omitting the little detail of facing an enemy who does everything they can to get their own people killed to make you look bad- are you being fair and just in your assessment? Obviously not. Are you incentivizing Hamas to do it all again? Absolutely.
Easy to make that enemy look bad when you are an impoverished country that has no food, no old people (they were all killed) or modern weapons, that enemy is starving you, killing your women and children, bombing schools and hospitals.....and oh yeah that nation has nuclear weapons.
That is a LOT of shooting.
A normal mag holds 30 rounds, that's 30 full magazines worth of bullets they dumped into these people.
They were really trying to make sure there were no survivors.
On the tech side I’m wondering if any LLMs were used, they don't seem to mention any by name at least.