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.
ignoramous 22 minutes ago [-]
> All the hospitals are now rubble
Hospitals may have been used for retaliation [0], but it is unclear how many & in what capacity (according to accepted conventions, using a hospital to treat wounded combatants wouldn't make it a valid military target, for example; but hiding weapons or personnel would).
Not sure I understand the mass downvotes on this one. I didn't take it as endorsing the action but summarizing the rationale.
weird_tentacles 16 minutes ago [-]
^ A disgusting attempt at the justification of murdering hospital employees - doctors, nurses - and their patients. About as low as a human being can go.
Only in Israel could such thinking ever be accepted.
ceejayoz 14 minutes ago [-]
It's not at all an uncommon scenario to have to deal with in war, especially asymmetrical conflicts.
IMO, Israel stepped very clearly over the line, repeatedly, in how they handled it, but the parent post is a pretty reasonable summary of the considerations.
weird_tentacles 3 minutes ago [-]
Well, you are lying of course. If you are not, then you would have listed some "not at all an uncommon scenario"s of:
- Hospitals ... used for retaliation ... using a hospital to treat wounded combatants wouldn't make it a valid military target
- hiding weapons or personnel
- subsequent massacres [that were] policy of finding and destroying all the phones.
Lie: "It's not at all an uncommon scenario to have to deal with in war"
Truth: Mass-destroying a country's hospitals, murdering the doctors, nurses, workers & patients, mass-executing aid workers ... is Israeli. And only Israeli.
ebbi 7 minutes ago [-]
Steven Sinofsky (ex Microsoft, and was also in the Epstein leaks), has been running cover for the IDF for the last few years. One tweet that comes to mind where he alluded that just because a building may have a few first aid kits, it's not a hospital.
upmind 12 minutes ago [-]
If this was happening against the west, people would care a lot more. Unfortunately, nothing seems to be happening to Israel.
heyitsmedotjayb 13 minutes ago [-]
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.
glenstein 8 hours ago [-]
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 1 hours ago [-]
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 20 minutes ago [-]
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.
This is very thorough. Thanks for the direct link.
The case seems pretty clear, especially since the soldiers tried to hide all evidence.
ignoramous 45 minutes ago [-]
> 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 32 minutes ago [-]
> 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 25 minutes ago [-]
The tank commanders of another, bygone war also had the reputation for attention to detail. Funny how history rhymes.
tt_dev 9 hours ago [-]
> The Israeli soldiers remained on the sandbank while firing continuously at the aid workers for four minutes.
Damn…
coolca 28 minutes ago [-]
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 17 minutes ago [-]
Damn, the IDF got this guy mid-sentence...
weird_tentacles 12 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
epolanski 8 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
throwawaysleep 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
conartist6 7 hours ago [-]
From where I sit nobody is questioning that the Israelis are supposed to be the good guys in this story. But the stories coming from the region are horrific! Is it true that it is the official policy of the IDF to shoot to kill children who throw stones at them?
Plus because Israel is making serious efforts to choke off all information from the region, I understand that it takes some time before a sober accounting of an incident like this reaches the outside world. To avoid the charged rhetoric I have waited. Yet the point blank executions of humanitarian workers is still shocking to me. Such reckless hate, it must destroy a person.
tovej 41 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
8 hours ago [-]
idop 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
aa-jv 8 hours ago [-]
The slaughter of journalists is documented throughout modern history - by the very people those journalists worked for.
idop 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
throwawaysleep 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
urikaduri 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
urikaduri 7 hours ago [-]
Here are 512 vietnamese journalists killed in the Vietnam war.
> 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 7 hours ago [-]
Any posts linked to the IDF committing crimes are automatically flagged on this site (and others). Many bots are at play here.
austin-cheney 52 minutes ago [-]
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 41 minutes ago [-]
Indeed, and try suggesting there should be minimal accountability for flagging[0] and you'll likewise be flagged. Sure maybe the data says there's not some cartel flagging conspiracy but it starts to seem awful suspicious that even reasonable discussion of this misfeature gets flagged.
You always have plenty of excuses when you get called out. Looking the other way while bot armies mass downvote pro Palestine / anti ICE / anti PayPal mafia content is complicity. I’m sure you have the data to suss out what is obvious to anyone watching these threads in real time.
johnfn 41 minutes ago [-]
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 13 minutes ago [-]
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.
lyingliarsg 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
modsareliars12 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
lyingfireb 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
therobots927 58 minutes ago [-]
11 minutes and you’re almost totally grayed out. Wild that they think this type of suppression isn’t blatantly obvious to anyone with a brain.
ebbi 43 minutes ago [-]
It's desperation at this point. With each passing day, the truth comes out in clear, non-negotiable detail, and therefore the desperation to hide and/or deflect increases.
I recommend any hackernews users to check that site frequently, plenty of interesting posts on hackernews that get flagged and hidden daily.
smartbit 5 hours ago [-]
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.
forvelin 8 hours ago [-]
why is this flagged ?
myrmidon 4 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
computerex 1 hours ago [-]
I literally can’t say anything pro humanity without it being flagged even if it hints negativity towards Israel.
EvgeniyZh 2 hours ago [-]
Can you remember any pro-Israeli posts you turned flags off for since the October 7 attack?
underdeserver 1 hours ago [-]
Can you point to any pro-Israeli posts on HN since October 7, flagged or not?
computerex 1 hours ago [-]
They don’t get flagged though.
EvgeniyZh 56 minutes ago [-]
Yes they are, just like the comment you answered to will.
a456463 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
a456463 1 hours ago [-]
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.
RobotToaster 1 hours ago [-]
> 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_ 12 minutes ago [-]
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).
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
The forensic reconstruction to this level of detail is novel and interesting, both for the methods deployed and for the likelihood that the half-life of unsolved war crimes appears to be decreasing.
ycombinatrix 8 hours ago [-]
This is most certainly not something that is covered on TV news. Seems on topic to me.
glenstein 8 hours ago [-]
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 7 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
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.
ycombinatrix 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mhb 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ycombinatrix 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
simonjanssen 7 hours ago [-]
I think the solution which will lead to the best quality of life for people in and around the levant is a single, secular state. Two states that are both ethnonationalist is unsustainable, and any single state which isn't secular can only be achieved through genocide. Freedom to practice whatever religion, seperation of church and state, and no apartheid for a certain group of people.
If you post like this again we will ban you. There's no place for slurs on this site.
Yes, we apply that equally - I've banned the account that was slurring the opposite group elsewhere in this thread (btw, their comments won't appear to anyone who hasn't turned 'showdead' on in their account). In that case, I didn't post a reply because the account was new and already had a pattern of breaking the site guidelines. In your case, the account is well-established so we wouldn't just go ahead and ban it without replying or warning first.
Dang, I'm writing this reply as a target of antisemitic hate. I am not strictly a Jew (though I am often mistaken for one due to both name and appearance). My relatives were hunted and gassed in WW2.
The poster you are responding to is making ha joke:ish observation (probably badly communicated) that the modus operandi in the Israeli Government is to label all evidence of their crimes "antisemitic" no matter how truthful they are, no matter how many facts, no matter how vile their actions look.
Netanyahu et al have nurtured a context where there is no difference between real antisemitic hate and valid criticism. He and the people like him equate truth to antisemitism. Something which hurts many of us.
We have to be proactive about moderating anti-semitism on HN—which does appear, unfortunately, though of course not in every comment that someone happens to read that way. There is huge variance in how people interpret these things and we do our best to be charitable. (Also, I had better add that we do our best moderate other types of slur in just the same way.)
Let's assume you're correct. Such a point needs to be expressed thoughtfully and substantively, not snarkily in a way that pattern-matches to a slur. This ought to be clear from the site guidelines: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - "Eschew flamebait." - "Don't be snarky." - [etc.]
No. Your message is. A lot of people commit mortal sin of logical fallacy by extending the responsibility for actions of certain group of people to everyone sharing with them ethnicity or religion. It‘s the stupidity worth of the strongest condemnation given the context.
It‘s not jews committing war crimes in Gaza, it‘s zionists. It‘s not muslims or Palestinians planning and executing terrorist attacks, it‘s religious extremists and far right nationalists. When there will be common understanding of this simple truth, fighting the root causes will be much easier.
ycombinatrix 8 hours ago [-]
I think GP was making a joke - since zionists claim any anti-zionist behavior is anti-semitic.
ivan_gammel 8 hours ago [-]
Then I apologize without retraction.
SauciestGNU 5 hours ago [-]
Good instinct to fight against antisemitism, because there is a lot of it. Unfortunately the Israeli government lobs accusations of antisemitism at its (legitimate) critics frequently, enough so to muddy the waters between actual antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli state.
ivan_gammel 3 hours ago [-]
Nah, let’s not let them to set the narrative. It is not antisemitism to criticize Israel and I do not care what Israeli or my (German) government says about it.
jquery 8 hours ago [-]
Yep. It's used as a shield for the worst humanity has to offer.
glenstein 8 hours ago [-]
Their message didn't make any of the extrapolations that you're suggesting and I don't think that the post itself does that either.
ivan_gammel 7 hours ago [-]
The message is ambiguous. It can be interpreted the way I read it.
glenstein 6 hours ago [-]
I disagree that it's ambiguous, and I think how you choose to interpret it comes down to the difference between charitable interpretation and bad faith.
ivan_gammel 3 hours ago [-]
Whether you agree with it or not, does not matter. It is ambiguous due to a simple fact that I did not had the choice of interpretation in my mind. It is how I understood it and it differs from your understanding. The author should have been more clear.
blitzar 7 hours ago [-]
> why is this flagged ?
Because flaggers deem it to be anti-semitic
> committing war crimes in Gaza, it‘s zionists
This is 1) extending responsibility for actions of induviduals to everyone sharing with them ethnicity or religion 2) a display of anti-semitic bigotry
Otherwise it, like most tech heavy investigations, showcase how much useful information there is fly around out there in the air just waiting to be hoovered up - and (althought not the case here) YC funded companies happen to be at the frontlines of such work
SAI_Peregrinus 5 hours ago [-]
Zionism isn't an ethnicity or a religion.
GuinansEyebrows 1 hours ago [-]
whether or not you agree that zionism is intrinsically jewish or not, it would serve you to understand that the poster you're arguing against does not believe that zionism is intrinsically jewish, and thus, you're talking past them.
mothballed 8 hours ago [-]
But it's not all zionists committing war crimes in Gaza, it's the IDF. And it's not all IDF members, only some individuals. And its not all of those some individuals, only some of their brain and trigger finger. And it's not all the time, only some of the time.
We mustn't generalize.
ivan_gammel 7 hours ago [-]
You are surprisingly right. I know people who served in IDF and would prefer to have nothing in common with those criminals. Generalizing to them would be wrong. It is not voluntary service, different people are required to serve. But people aside, is IDF as institution rotten? It is not generalization to say „yes“, when such things happen. An institution is an entity with the agency to prevent such things and not only did it fail, it covered up. Is Israeli government complicit? Hell, yes, same reason.
1718627440 7 hours ago [-]
There were people in the German army (Wehrmacht) who wanted to have nothing in common with those criminals. Some even tried to kill Hitler and get rid of the regime.
orwin 7 hours ago [-]
Not the majority though, else the wehrmacht would have done less war crimes.
1718627440 6 hours ago [-]
I think this depends on whether you draw the boundary at "refuses to do X even when killed for it" or "wouldn't have done X on their own".
throwaw12 6 hours ago [-]
IDF is an army of Israel, not some unknown militant group.
Israel is a state, as they call "democratic", which elected officials who have control to stop these crimes, but not stopping deliberately.
lostmsu 8 hours ago [-]
I believe religion is a reasonable extension. Some of them explicitly call for murdering unbelievers.
ivan_gammel 7 hours ago [-]
it‘s „some“, not „all“. Religious extremism by definition.
lostmsu 7 hours ago [-]
I was talking about religions, not individuals.
asdfss674564 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jLaForest 6 hours ago [-]
@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?
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 1 hours ago [-]
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?
shablulman 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jquery 8 hours ago [-]
Real shame this got flagged so quickly, too. This is prime HN material.
indoordin0saur 60 minutes ago [-]
Isn't this a tech news site?
estearum 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
dudefeliciano 6 hours ago [-]
this is prime material for HN to flag...
datsci_est_2015 2 hours ago [-]
Is there an HN but for anarchists? Or maybe just anti-authoritarians?
glitchc 2 hours ago [-]
The Atlantic? I kid. I really mean Al-Jazeera.
thomassmith65 49 minutes ago [-]
There are no anti-authoritarian news outlets in Qatar, for obvious reasons.
> No, it’s not. And I gladly flagged it.
> Redirects set to: talk.politics.misc.
So you don’t think anyone should discuss topics that touch on politics, including this war, on HN?
thenaturalist 44 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
ebbi 42 minutes ago [-]
Oh no, we shouldn't talk about war crimes because the iPhone I'm tapping my words into has some tech from the nation committing those war crimes. I should be more THANKFUL!
thenaturalist 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jayquery 55 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
thenaturalist 38 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
_DeadFred_ 2 hours ago [-]
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?
churchill 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
churchill 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
throwaw12 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
glenstein 8 hours ago [-]
>Most US politicians are blackmailed via Epstein
??? Most? His network was certainly extensive but "most politicians" seems like a significantly overextended extrapolation.
rbanffy 1 hours ago [-]
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.
kvgr 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
asdfss674564 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
7952 8 hours ago [-]
> * No one accepts high western "morality" anymore
Is that an accurate trend on an individual basis?
ebbi 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
throwaw12 8 hours ago [-]
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.
rbanffy 1 hours ago [-]
South America as well, in particular with regard to the US. Too many coups and sponsorship of military dictatorships will do that.
spwa4 2 hours ago [-]
Travel to anywhere, anywhere at all, ask people if they consider themselves morally superior ...
vcryan 1 hours ago [-]
Well, in this case, they are correct
asdfss674564 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
kazinator 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
throwaw12 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bananamansion 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
metalman 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tokai 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
moogly 8 hours ago [-]
Indeed. Vouched but it won't last for long.
As shablulman's inexplicably dead post says, this is very impressive work analyzing this unquestionable war crime.
Cause their post sounds like some AI wrote it, and I guess everyone else noticed, too.
SSLy 8 hours ago [-]
shablu shouldn't sounds like a LLM (no, i didn't flag or downvote it)
Xmd5a 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
iufybbyy 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
kharak 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mapt 8 hours ago [-]
Echolocation based on audio from a cell phone video, with the reports echoing off flat walls in the area, establishes 3D troop movement during the massacre, and the eventual close-range executions. Including of the person whose cell phone it was.
Eyewitness accounts may be dismissed for any number of biases by the motivated reasoner, but echoes are echoes.
7 hours ago [-]
wtfwhateven 5 hours ago [-]
you cannot be serious. wtf?
aa-jv 7 hours ago [-]
There are plenty of people on HN who are active in protecting human rights, and this particular incident is a clear example of the amount of work still left to do in the world by those of us who care about each other more than we cling to national identities - especially those national identities with a long track record of human rights violations.
jquery 8 hours ago [-]
Hacker News is not solely news about hacking. "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
NurembergDfens 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jayquery 56 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
gopheryourshelf 47 minutes ago [-]
And sun rises in the East
_zachs 42 minutes ago [-]
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 40 minutes ago [-]
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 40 minutes ago [-]
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 36 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 24 minutes ago [-]
Please don't cross into personal attack, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
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/...
Only in Israel could such thinking ever be accepted.
IMO, Israel stepped very clearly over the line, repeatedly, in how they handled it, but the parent post is a pretty reasonable summary of the considerations.
- Hospitals ... used for retaliation ... using a hospital to treat wounded combatants wouldn't make it a valid military target
- hiding weapons or personnel
- subsequent massacres [that were] policy of finding and destroying all the phones.
Lie: "It's not at all an uncommon scenario to have to deal with in war"
Truth: Mass-destroying a country's hospitals, murdering the doctors, nurses, workers & patients, mass-executing aid workers ... is Israeli. And only Israeli.
>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.
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?
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.
Plus because Israel is making serious efforts to choke off all information from the region, I understand that it takes some time before a sober accounting of an incident like this reaches the outside world. To avoid the charged rhetoric I have waited. Yet the point blank executions of humanitarian workers is still shocking to me. Such reckless hate, it must destroy a person.
https://vietnamnews.vn/society/1719668/one-war-journalist-s-...
At this time, not everybody had a phone and 100 followers so Journalists were rarer.
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.
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
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 recommend any hackernews users to check that site frequently, plenty of interesting posts on hackernews that get flagged and hidden daily.
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
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.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
--- original reply ---
If you post like this again we will ban you. There's no place for slurs on this site.
Yes, we apply that equally - I've banned the account that was slurring the opposite group elsewhere in this thread (btw, their comments won't appear to anyone who hasn't turned 'showdead' on in their account). In that case, I didn't post a reply because the account was new and already had a pattern of breaking the site guidelines. In your case, the account is well-established so we wouldn't just go ahead and ban it without replying or warning first.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The poster you are responding to is making ha joke:ish observation (probably badly communicated) that the modus operandi in the Israeli Government is to label all evidence of their crimes "antisemitic" no matter how truthful they are, no matter how many facts, no matter how vile their actions look.
Netanyahu et al have nurtured a context where there is no difference between real antisemitic hate and valid criticism. He and the people like him equate truth to antisemitism. Something which hurts many of us.
Please understand this.
We have to be proactive about moderating anti-semitism on HN—which does appear, unfortunately, though of course not in every comment that someone happens to read that way. There is huge variance in how people interpret these things and we do our best to be charitable. (Also, I had better add that we do our best moderate other types of slur in just the same way.)
Let's assume you're correct. Such a point needs to be expressed thoughtfully and substantively, not snarkily in a way that pattern-matches to a slur. This ought to be clear from the site guidelines: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - "Eschew flamebait." - "Don't be snarky." - [etc.]
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It‘s not jews committing war crimes in Gaza, it‘s zionists. It‘s not muslims or Palestinians planning and executing terrorist attacks, it‘s religious extremists and far right nationalists. When there will be common understanding of this simple truth, fighting the root causes will be much easier.
Because flaggers deem it to be anti-semitic
> committing war crimes in Gaza, it‘s zionists
This is 1) extending responsibility for actions of induviduals to everyone sharing with them ethnicity or religion 2) a display of anti-semitic bigotry
Otherwise it, like most tech heavy investigations, showcase how much useful information there is fly around out there in the air just waiting to be hoovered up - and (althought not the case here) YC funded companies happen to be at the frontlines of such work
We mustn't generalize.
Israel is a state, as they call "democratic", which elected officials who have control to stop these crimes, but not stopping deliberately.
Am I still allowed to ask why the moderators don't want people to read and discuss this particular technology story?
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.
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.
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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?
Even just technologically it's more interesting than 90% of the stuff posted here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Qatar
Redirects set to: talk.politics.misc.
So you don’t think anyone should discuss topics that touch on politics, including this war, on HN?
??? Most? His network was certainly extensive but "most politicians" seems like a significantly overextended extrapolation.
Is that an accurate trend on an individual basis?
As shablulman's inexplicably dead post says, this is very impressive work analyzing this unquestionable war crime.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443
Eyewitness accounts may be dismissed for any number of biases by the motivated reasoner, but echoes are echoes.
> 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