The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
The New York Times describes it as such:
"Ali Bani Odeh’s wife and four young boys hadn’t seen him in a month and a half when he came home to Tammun, in the West Bank, from his construction job in Israel late on Friday to spend the last few days of Ramadan with his family.
On Saturday night, the boys persuaded him to take them out for a drive. Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, was coming, so there were new clothes to buy. The day’s fast had been broken, so there were sweets to be had, too.
They picked up fried doughnut holes in Tubas, saving them for later, but the clothing shop they went to in Nablus was closed. It was already past midnight, so they headed back to Tammun: Khaled, 11, the oldest, in the back with Mustafa, 8, and Muhammad, 5. Othman, 6, blind and incapable of walking or feeding himself, was in his mother’s lap in front.
As they rounded a corner slowly, a few minutes from home, young Khaled and Mustafa recounted on Sunday, their mother, Waad, 35, asked her husband to pull over and take Othman from her so she could get something from her bag on the floor. Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire."
The situation in the West Bank (and similar forces are at play in Gaza, too) remind me of what's wrong with American policing, at a far more extreme scale.
The people charged with enforcing the peace deploy lethal force with near impunity at the slightest "provocation" (a child throwing a stone, a car driving too fast); I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are, to operate in constant fear and perceive absolutely everything and everyone as a deadly threat to be neutralized. The soldiers themselves are raised in a culture with deeply racist undertones, making them all too ready to view any random Palestinian as a terrorist. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy that should be overseeing them works only to protect them. It's no surprise that things like this happen as often as they do.
Reform in the US is imaginable, I can and do believe, but it's much harder for me to imagine it in Israel - even much of the so-called left in Israel is too radicalized against Palestinians after 100 years of conflict, the Second Intifada, and October 7.
That's a huge problem (immediate, unjustified escalation to violence becoming the norm) and:
> The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
"I feel unsafe" has become the catch-all excuse for everything in the recent decade. It's used to justify everything from Karen complaining about someone's behavior in public to people calling the cops on someone for looking at them wrong, to making a scene on a public bus, to police officers jumping the gun and escalating to violence, all the way to war crimes. When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card? Like a magic spell that you can cast before doing something crazy. It's like that old "He's coming right for us" South Park joke, but instead of being a joke it has real life and death consequences.
That checks out. Although the history of "Warrior Policing" in the US predates this (going back to the 60s) and extends far beyond IDF training programs:
David Simon and others have written extensively for decades about the problems with the Baltimore Police Department, and other departments around the country. They trace these problems back to the war on drugs and other purely American factors.
The Amnesty article that you're citing is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The Baltimore Police Department did not need to learn about constitutional violations from the Israelis.
A certain amount of politics should/must be tolerated on HN, because you cannot compartmentalize technology, politics and morality.
No-one, not even people who say they like technology but do not care about politics, should be able to live their life wihtout knowing that we live in a world where six-year old blind children are murdered with automatic assault rifles.
(For the same reason that no-one should be able to live not knowing that jewish once were murdered in the millions in gas chambers.)
Technology is a form of control. And in the capitalist system, this control is mostly exerted by private companies, on which the rules of democracy do not apply.
i've been on hn a long time, and if there's a prohibition against anything vaguely political if it can't be connected to technology, i've never known it.
I was shadowbanned for mentioning Iryna Zarutska. Most political topics can be connected to technology: technology after all is often how we hear of and discuss these things.
I have followed this conflict since Operation Cast Lead and the beginnings of the siege on Gaza.
Israel has been using enormous amounts of force against the Palestinian people since then, with death tolls of _at least_ 100 dead Palestinians for every dead Israeli.
For a very good account of life in Israel around the time of Cast Lead I recommend Guy Delisle, brilliant diary in comic form.
His partner was working for Doctors Without Borders, the Israeli Army refused to let them enter Gaza to help the people suffering under their bombardments.
I think the middle eastern conflicts are a tragedy. That said, this story does not belong on HN. As others called out this is a tech community and while there is sometimes an overlap with politics, it should at least be somewhat related like mass surveillance or AI being used for war.
HN is one of the most informative and least toxic communities and I’d appreciate if it would stay this way.
As an Israeli, this is an inexcusable crime by IDF soldiers. Appallingly, I expect them to receive no punishment. My country's government is criminally racist.
> Israel's most senior military lawyer has said all charges against five soldiers accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee from Gaza have been dropped.
Don't worry, they punished someone.
> It later emerged the CCTV video had been leaked by the then-Israeli Military Advocate General, Maj Gen Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, leading to her resignation and arrest.
Not a Jew, use to travel to Israel and am usually the sole person left still defending Israel. My gut reaction to 10-7 was to nuke Gaza for good. A lot has happened since then and now, even I consider it irresponsible to give Israel the benefit of the doubt anymore, as this enables such atrocities which I am sure are just the tip of the iceberg.
It’s not that Palestinians haven’t been caught lying repeatedly. It’s that the overall setup is just obviously allowing for such things to happen.
I wonder if 80 years of quasi-state-of-war let some circles in the Israeli power structure realize, that more conflict means more power for them.
Anyways, if Israel looses support from people like me, the overall image is probably in the absolute gutter.
That's literally the strategy of the Likud, who undermined the more moderate Fattah to allow the extremist Hamas to reign on the Gaza strip, hoping that one day the 7th of october would happen, and would let them unleash a genocide...
I have no doubt isreali forces are responsible for a lot of war crimes. At the same time i see how one they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination. All sides just need to stop with that hatred. It leads to so much pain.
> i see how one they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination. All sides just need to stop with that hatred. It leads to so much pain.
I think by now we all know this is a straw man, considering the disproportionate amount of power both parties have. There is absolutely no excuse left for what Israel has been doing in Gaza.
"Neighbors" is not the right term. Zionists invaded Palestine and ethnically cleansed the land. Literally anyone would fight to get their homes back and against the people who murdered their families.
I am German. My government does not acknowledge the tragedy that has been unfolding in Gaza since the Hamas attack in October 2023. It’s absurd. Since then, Jewish people in Berlin who were demonstrating alongside Palestinians against the war in Gaza have been beaten down by the German police. In 2021, Esther Bejarano, the last survivor of the Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra, passed away in Hamburg. Whenever she commented on the culture of remembrance, the media was eager to report on it. Whenever she commented on the situation of the Palestinians, it was not reported in the media. People sometimes ask how it was possible that the vast majority of so-called ordinary people in this country back then could simply tolerate these crimes against Jews and look the other way. Now that should be clear to everyone. The Max Planck Institute in Rostock estimates that well over 100,000 people have been killed in Gaza. But nobody here gives a damn (at least not publicly). We’re even supplying weapons there. Everyone acts as if they’ve forgotten what was written in German newspapers about the current Israeli government when it took office, and as if there were no connection to what’s happening in Gaza right now. I am deeply and profoundly disappointed in the elected officials and public servants of my country. They have learned nothing from the atrocities committed by their grandfathers.
I find this bewildering. Im not German. Im not Israeli.
Yet I have known that Israel sails German subs (the best in the world) since.... the Greek financial crisis (the subs were part of the scandal) ? Certainly since the mid 2010s.
The last time I was in Berlin (2018), I was actually somewhat shocked by the amount of antisemitic graffiti that I saw just about everywhere (especially on lamp posts). Especially given the strictness of the laws against such speech.
It's even more insidious, I know activists in your country and they not only abhor the current support for Israel's genocide but they are terrified of their activism being criminalized under anti-nazi laws. How ironic.
(The eyewitness) told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account.
I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired.
"No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
If you listen to the news, Israel kills innocent people on a daily basis in Palestine and Lebanon. It is a surprise that people choose to live in the West Bank despite such killings.
I think that's the point - to discourage (certain) people from living there at all. Except it turns out people are capable of never-ending suffering and persevering through it.
You would think Israelis would already know this very well.
What's surprising is how nonchalantly people like you suggest victims should just surrender and leave. Exactly the same thing was told to Ukrainians after the invasion. The fucking audacity you people have is staggering.
I see people saying this story doesn't belong on HN. genuine question, if this story were about a german national would it be considered as political? is palestinian existence inherently more political than other peoples' existence?
I'm saying this as someone who doesn't really care about this certain topic:
Either we allow _all_ political content or nothing.
The HN guidelines are incredibly grey and handwave-y
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
To me HN became to big for its own good since the Covid days. It's like the reddit front page except there are no subs with mods but one big flood (basically /r/all).
If I got to /r/linux, /r/selfhosted/, /r/networking/ or other tech subs I'll probably find what I saw on HN 15 years ago. But less and less here.
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
If the story was about a German national then yes, I would still say this is political and doesn't gratify my intellectual curiosity.
I'll bite: If for any reason, probably because it's neither technically interesting nor entrepreneurial in nature.
US Politics seems to get more of a pass, probably due to Silicon Valley being there (and nearly all the major tech outlets), similarly some China news gets a pass, also largely when it relates to supply chain and Taiwan.
This goes beyond US politics. The US and Israel do not exist in a bubble. This conflict can and will have big repercussions which will impact our technical and entrepreneurial institutions.
All events in the universe are connected to all others. If the rule is that anything that could affect anyone is fair game, then there simply are no rules, to subject guidelines, no filter whatsoever. It's hackernews.com without the "hacker"
Every time these sorts of articles get posted people that express a differing opinion from the standard get flagged (making it so you can't read their post at all) pretty quickly making it seem more like the intention isn't to start discussion. It seems like it's gotten to the point that the people that just get flagged into oblivion stopped trying to post.
These are not even a isolated or a new pattern that Palestinian people are enduring such atrocities by the rogue israeli regime with full impunity from the western super powers. In fact, the Palestinian people have been suffering such oppression and injustice everyday at the hand of zionist society on a regular basis since 1948.
In fact, here are some more such equally horrible actions of the israelis just in the recent days that you may not find on the western media ever.
Historically, the western news media have always downplayed or completely ignored the persecution of Palestinians at every cost. Now due to rise of social media and citizen journalism, the israeli and zionist atrocities are coming out every single day hundreds of times, causing the abysmal distrust in these media outlets across the globe. To salvage their credibility, the western media now picking up some stories here and there, yet use the very artistic and convoluted language not to damage the image of the rogue zionist regime as much as possible. Journalists with conscience, who could not take anymore such order from their bosses, kept resigning from these news outlets:
* The New York Times
- Anne Boyer: The Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry editor for The New York Times Magazine resigned in November 2023. In her resignation letter, she wrote that she could no longer work for the publication amidst the "reasonable tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering" and "verbally sanitized hellscapes."
- Jazmine Hughes: An award-winning staff writer for The New York Times Magazine resigned in November 2023 after signing an open letter by "Writers Against the War on Gaza." The outlet stated the signing violated its policies on public protest.
- Jamie Lauren Keiles: A frequent contributor and writer for the magazine also resigned in solidarity with Hughes after signing the same open letter.
* BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation)
- Karishma Patel: A presenter and journalist who walked out of the BBC in October 2024. She later published an essay in The Guardian criticizing the broadcaster's "obstructive editorial policy" and its decision to shelf the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack.
- Bassam Bounenni: A veteran North Africa correspondent for BBC Arabic resigned in October 2023. He announced his departure on social media, stating it was for the sake of his "professional integrity" regarding the coverage of the escalation in Gaza.
- Noah Abrahams: A freelance sports reporter for the BBC resigned in October 2023 in protest of the broadcaster's refusal to use the word "terrorist" to describe Hamas, highlighting the internal friction over language and terminology.
* Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)
- Nour Haydar: A political reporter in the Canberra bureau resigned in early 2024. She cited concerns over the broadcaster's coverage of the Gaza conflict and its treatment of culturally diverse staff as primary reasons for her departure.
* Reuters
- Valerie Zink: A Canadian photojournalist who resigned from Reuters in August 2025. She publicly denounced the agency's coverage as a "betrayal of journalists," specifically citing an instance where the outlet allegedly published unsubstantiated claims from the Israeli military to justify the killing of a Palestinian colleague.
Mainstream world news has a place on HN if it contains "significant new information", and as much as this site is primarily for curious conversation and gratifying intellectual curiosity, we don't want to pretend that horrific events like this aren't happening.
Horrific events happen almost every hour of every day. This is political, and the events that are upvoted are always from the same political perspective. If you don't see this, you're blind. But from my perspective, mods do see it, are ok with it, and that is unfortunate. There are few places left online without explicit political bias. HN used to be one of them.
Reminder that whatever you think, war, terrorism, questions of "the right/wrong target," etc are all insperable from AI and technology these days. These soldiers were where they were for concrete reasons dictated across vast automated networks; their choices of engagement are insperable from the tools either side (army and occupied population to be clear) here has or is perceived to have. War is simply many different "user stories," to put it coldly, and there is ethical and/or practical reasons, as technologists/scientists/academics, to see it that way (even if the goal is to just know thy enemy).
This is all why Anthropic is now a "supply-chain risk", why Thiel and Musk are particularly powerful persons-qua-tech-CEOs, why embedded microcontrollers getting so cheap (or whatever) enables drones instead of suicide bombs.
I honestly think the gaza war was largely continued as a distraction from the true atrocities Israel has been committing in the west bank. By getting all the news to focus on Gaza Israel could trot out reasoning that many people accept, but the state sponsored terrorism they are undertaking in the west bank is the kind of stuff that is truly hard for even ardent Israel supporters to overlook.
Unfortunately, even in this comment section, you see people conflating the two. People don't realize that Palestinians live in both the west bank and gaza or that there are 2 different government for the west bank and gaza.
I agree, but I'd say it's important when pointing out how horrible this is you don't let the "they deserved it" narrative fly.
How Israel acts in the west bank is a testament to how poor their behavior in gaza is. They have no real justification for their evictions and murders of west bank citizens. They have no justification for turning a blind eye to settler violence. They have no justification for not punishing IDF soldiers who break theirs and international law.
Israel's plan to confuse people about what is happening in the west bank vs gaza is so effective that even their detractors are falling for it. Truly a genius strategy
Well, right now the "better technology" is Israel's use of the "Lavender" AI to designate people to kill because they are "likely" to be hamas supporters.
And yes, probably they could have used better technology to realize that people in the car are not a danger to them. But that would immply they actually want to avoid killing civilians instead of looking for any excuse to shoot them.
Given that the IDF involved were undercover agents (according to the reports), it seems unlikely that this family knew that driving fast would get them killed.
> He told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account.
I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired.
"No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
Tragic, but what am I supposed to take away from this story? Palestine is an impoverished community with a terrorist government that isn't afraid to commit atrocities against humanity to get what they want whether it be slaughtering civilians or using human sheilds (setting up bases in hospitals, schools, etc). Israel is portrayed as the baddies in articles like this but I genuinely think in the aggregate Israel has shown incredible restraint compared to their muslim peers. If this was flipped and it was a larger muslim nation punching down on a minority Jewish nation, would the larger muslim nation be showing the restraint that Israel is showing towards Palestine? Doubtful. Hamas, Iran, and ilk have openly expressed their desire to completely destroy Israel, civilians and all.
Restraint? The goal of the Zionists has been turning all of Palestine into a Jewish state since before the state of Israel existed and quite openly so and that is still the goal. Israel does what it can to achieve this goal and I would bet they would just kill or displace every last Palestinian if they could get away with it. There is only restraint because of the fear of the backlash from the international community if they push to hard, if Israel existed in a vacuum, there would be no piece of Palestine left for a long time.
Israel isn't "portrayed as the baddies" on this story. They are the baddies on this story. They killed a family going in their car full of children. There's no way to turn that story around. That is unequivocally bad.
> incredible restraint
What's incredible is calling it "restraint". "Genocide" is a more appropriate term. Here's the UN:
Terrorist government? This is the West Bank, which is currently governed by Fatah, which has global recognition as the rightful representative authority of the Palestinian people.
The West Bank is governed by the PLO, not Hamas, so it sounds like your concern is that you just don't wish to hear about it because it's an inconvenience.
I think you're right. Obviously this is awful and the IDF shouldn't be doing this and should be held responsible (of course they won't). But it seems like the implicit message behind the story is Palestine good, Israel bad, which at best is a massive oversimplification.
Please take your propaganda elsewhere. If Hamas or any other group in the region perpetrated any of the war crimes that Israel commits on any given day, every media outlet would be writing about it for weeks. In the meantime, Israel can bomb Gaza literally every day since the so-called ceasefire and nobody bats an eye. Israel just now acquitted its soldiers caught raping Palestinians in custody on camera. No coverage, no outcry. Israel is very objectively a bad guy, armed with nukes.
Israeli Zionists slaughter innocent people including children and immediately pull the victim card when criticized.
It’s on full display here.
You point out a FACT of reality and they go “you just hate Jews” they immediately draw the victim card - fooling NO ONE.
It only makes the divide worse.
I fear for you Zionists, you’re going to make a monster out of the world by becoming a monster yourself. You will lose and there’s no chance you’ll fulfill your wacky ass prophecy.
Give up the insane plans immediately and assimilate with your fellow man, or lose everything your ancestors worked for.
For those wondering, it is verifiable story, it is covered as fact in Israeli newspapers:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-forces-kill-west-bank-...
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/p7mq5k5bs
The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
The New York Times describes it as such:
"Ali Bani Odeh’s wife and four young boys hadn’t seen him in a month and a half when he came home to Tammun, in the West Bank, from his construction job in Israel late on Friday to spend the last few days of Ramadan with his family.
On Saturday night, the boys persuaded him to take them out for a drive. Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, was coming, so there were new clothes to buy. The day’s fast had been broken, so there were sweets to be had, too.
They picked up fried doughnut holes in Tubas, saving them for later, but the clothing shop they went to in Nablus was closed. It was already past midnight, so they headed back to Tammun: Khaled, 11, the oldest, in the back with Mustafa, 8, and Muhammad, 5. Othman, 6, blind and incapable of walking or feeding himself, was in his mother’s lap in front.
As they rounded a corner slowly, a few minutes from home, young Khaled and Mustafa recounted on Sunday, their mother, Waad, 35, asked her husband to pull over and take Othman from her so she could get something from her bag on the floor. Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/world/middleeast/palestin...
The situation in the West Bank (and similar forces are at play in Gaza, too) remind me of what's wrong with American policing, at a far more extreme scale.
The people charged with enforcing the peace deploy lethal force with near impunity at the slightest "provocation" (a child throwing a stone, a car driving too fast); I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are, to operate in constant fear and perceive absolutely everything and everyone as a deadly threat to be neutralized. The soldiers themselves are raised in a culture with deeply racist undertones, making them all too ready to view any random Palestinian as a terrorist. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy that should be overseeing them works only to protect them. It's no surprise that things like this happen as often as they do.
Reform in the US is imaginable, I can and do believe, but it's much harder for me to imagine it in Israel - even much of the so-called left in Israel is too radicalized against Palestinians after 100 years of conflict, the Second Intifada, and October 7.
That's a huge problem (immediate, unjustified escalation to violence becoming the norm) and:
> The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
"I feel unsafe" has become the catch-all excuse for everything in the recent decade. It's used to justify everything from Karen complaining about someone's behavior in public to people calling the cops on someone for looking at them wrong, to making a scene on a public bus, to police officers jumping the gun and escalating to violence, all the way to war crimes. When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card? Like a magic spell that you can cast before doing something crazy. It's like that old "He's coming right for us" South Park joke, but instead of being a joke it has real life and death consequences.
> I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are
IDF trains them.
https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/with-whom-are-many-u-s-polic...
That checks out. Although the history of "Warrior Policing" in the US predates this (going back to the 60s) and extends far beyond IDF training programs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrior_policing
Pretty sure police brutality was invented way before Israel existed.
David Simon and others have written extensively for decades about the problems with the Baltimore Police Department, and other departments around the country. They trace these problems back to the war on drugs and other purely American factors.
The Amnesty article that you're citing is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The Baltimore Police Department did not need to learn about constitutional violations from the Israelis.
Everybody thinks the War on Drugs is about "keeping people safe". It never was, it was always about manufacturing a tool to oppress "others".
> I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are'
American police officers ARE trained much like IDF forces. By the IDF! https://jinsa.org/jinsa_program/homeland-security-program/
A certain amount of politics should/must be tolerated on HN, because you cannot compartmentalize technology, politics and morality.
No-one, not even people who say they like technology but do not care about politics, should be able to live their life wihtout knowing that we live in a world where six-year old blind children are murdered with automatic assault rifles.
(For the same reason that no-one should be able to live not knowing that jewish once were murdered in the millions in gas chambers.)
Technology IS politics.
Technology is a form of control. And in the capitalist system, this control is mostly exerted by private companies, on which the rules of democracy do not apply.
There must be guardrails
Considering this news article has absolutely nothing to do with technology, yes I think this doesn't belong here.
i've been on hn a long time, and if there's a prohibition against anything vaguely political if it can't be connected to technology, i've never known it.
I was shadowbanned for mentioning Iryna Zarutska. Most political topics can be connected to technology: technology after all is often how we hear of and discuss these things.
I have followed this conflict since Operation Cast Lead and the beginnings of the siege on Gaza.
Israel has been using enormous amounts of force against the Palestinian people since then, with death tolls of _at least_ 100 dead Palestinians for every dead Israeli.
For a very good account of life in Israel around the time of Cast Lead I recommend Guy Delisle, brilliant diary in comic form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem:_Chronicles_from_the...
His partner was working for Doctors Without Borders, the Israeli Army refused to let them enter Gaza to help the people suffering under their bombardments.
I think the middle eastern conflicts are a tragedy. That said, this story does not belong on HN. As others called out this is a tech community and while there is sometimes an overlap with politics, it should at least be somewhat related like mass surveillance or AI being used for war.
HN is one of the most informative and least toxic communities and I’d appreciate if it would stay this way.
At the same time, there must be a point where general humanity overrides community guidelines.
Exactly! Don't bring politics into HN. Everyone and their dog have grievances. There's a time and place for them.
HN routinely talks about politics. Thinking that technology and politics can be understood in isolation is a pipe dream
> and least toxic communities
Your comment sounds toxic to me. It endorses silence in face of a genocide.
As an Israeli, this is an inexcusable crime by IDF soldiers. Appallingly, I expect them to receive no punishment. My country's government is criminally racist.
See also: raping a detainee with a knife.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2xrz71zm3o
> Israel's most senior military lawyer has said all charges against five soldiers accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee from Gaza have been dropped.
Don't worry, they punished someone.
> It later emerged the CCTV video had been leaked by the then-Israeli Military Advocate General, Maj Gen Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, leading to her resignation and arrest.
> IDF soldiers
Hopefully, such trigger-happy soldiers are in the minority.
They are not. And they are incited by their hierarchy to commit more crimes, because they are not held accountable
Not a Jew, use to travel to Israel and am usually the sole person left still defending Israel. My gut reaction to 10-7 was to nuke Gaza for good. A lot has happened since then and now, even I consider it irresponsible to give Israel the benefit of the doubt anymore, as this enables such atrocities which I am sure are just the tip of the iceberg.
It’s not that Palestinians haven’t been caught lying repeatedly. It’s that the overall setup is just obviously allowing for such things to happen.
I wonder if 80 years of quasi-state-of-war let some circles in the Israeli power structure realize, that more conflict means more power for them.
Anyways, if Israel looses support from people like me, the overall image is probably in the absolute gutter.
> more conflict means more power for them
That's literally the strategy of the Likud, who undermined the more moderate Fattah to allow the extremist Hamas to reign on the Gaza strip, hoping that one day the 7th of october would happen, and would let them unleash a genocide...
https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/netanyahu-money-...
I have no doubt isreali forces are responsible for a lot of war crimes. At the same time i see how one they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination. All sides just need to stop with that hatred. It leads to so much pain.
> i see how one they cannot think and feel clearly anymore if your neighbours dream constantly about your elimination. All sides just need to stop with that hatred. It leads to so much pain.
I think by now we all know this is a straw man, considering the disproportionate amount of power both parties have. There is absolutely no excuse left for what Israel has been doing in Gaza.
"Neighbors" is not the right term. Zionists invaded Palestine and ethnically cleansed the land. Literally anyone would fight to get their homes back and against the people who murdered their families.
There's another 1000+ "invaders took my shit" issues in the world. Your logic only leads to non-stop fights between everyone
One side is dreaming, the other has systematically been carrying it out for 80 years.
https://www.haaretz.com/west-bank/2026-03-16/ty-article/.pre...
I am German. My government does not acknowledge the tragedy that has been unfolding in Gaza since the Hamas attack in October 2023. It’s absurd. Since then, Jewish people in Berlin who were demonstrating alongside Palestinians against the war in Gaza have been beaten down by the German police. In 2021, Esther Bejarano, the last survivor of the Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra, passed away in Hamburg. Whenever she commented on the culture of remembrance, the media was eager to report on it. Whenever she commented on the situation of the Palestinians, it was not reported in the media. People sometimes ask how it was possible that the vast majority of so-called ordinary people in this country back then could simply tolerate these crimes against Jews and look the other way. Now that should be clear to everyone. The Max Planck Institute in Rostock estimates that well over 100,000 people have been killed in Gaza. But nobody here gives a damn (at least not publicly). We’re even supplying weapons there. Everyone acts as if they’ve forgotten what was written in German newspapers about the current Israeli government when it took office, and as if there were no connection to what’s happening in Gaza right now. I am deeply and profoundly disappointed in the elected officials and public servants of my country. They have learned nothing from the atrocities committed by their grandfathers.
I live in DE too, it's terrifying. I didn't realize the extent of the armaments shipped to Israel from Germany until recently.
The Israeli navy ships were built in German shipyards and subsidized 30%...
I find this bewildering. Im not German. Im not Israeli.
Yet I have known that Israel sails German subs (the best in the world) since.... the Greek financial crisis (the subs were part of the scandal) ? Certainly since the mid 2010s.
Why is this?
> Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra
Is this something from the post-war or did that really exist?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Orchestra_of_Auschwi...
“The Germans wanted a propaganda tool for [SS] visitors and camp newsreels and a tool to boost camp morale.”
There were also several men’s orchestras.
The last time I was in Berlin (2018), I was actually somewhat shocked by the amount of antisemitic graffiti that I saw just about everywhere (especially on lamp posts). Especially given the strictness of the laws against such speech.
Wait until you hear how Muslims in Europe treat openly gay people.
Wait until you hear Muslims in Europe can be openly gay.
It's even more insidious, I know activists in your country and they not only abhor the current support for Israel's genocide but they are terrified of their activism being criminalized under anti-nazi laws. How ironic.
This is incredibly heart breaking, but unfortunately, in war, there are always casualties. This is the grim reality of war.
Wasn't aware Israel had declared war on the West Bank.
There is no war in the West Bank, this is ethnic cleansing.
An eyewitness account from the article:
(The eyewitness) told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account. I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired. "No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
If you listen to the news, Israel kills innocent people on a daily basis in Palestine and Lebanon. It is a surprise that people choose to live in the West Bank despite such killings.
I think that's the point - to discourage (certain) people from living there at all. Except it turns out people are capable of never-ending suffering and persevering through it.
You would think Israelis would already know this very well.
What you're talking about is called ethnic cleansing.
Choose?!
What's surprising is how nonchalantly people like you suggest victims should just surrender and leave. Exactly the same thing was told to Ukrainians after the invasion. The fucking audacity you people have is staggering.
Make no mistake, this is a deliberate genocide
I see people saying this story doesn't belong on HN. genuine question, if this story were about a german national would it be considered as political? is palestinian existence inherently more political than other peoples' existence?
I'm saying this as someone who doesn't really care about this certain topic:
Either we allow _all_ political content or nothing.
The HN guidelines are incredibly grey and handwave-y
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
To me HN became to big for its own good since the Covid days. It's like the reddit front page except there are no subs with mods but one big flood (basically /r/all).
If I got to /r/linux, /r/selfhosted/, /r/networking/ or other tech subs I'll probably find what I saw on HN 15 years ago. But less and less here.
bingo
From the guidelines:
What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
If the story was about a German national then yes, I would still say this is political and doesn't gratify my intellectual curiosity.
I'll bite: If for any reason, probably because it's neither technically interesting nor entrepreneurial in nature.
US Politics seems to get more of a pass, probably due to Silicon Valley being there (and nearly all the major tech outlets), similarly some China news gets a pass, also largely when it relates to supply chain and Taiwan.
> US Politics seems to get more of a pass,
This goes beyond US politics. The US and Israel do not exist in a bubble. This conflict can and will have big repercussions which will impact our technical and entrepreneurial institutions.
All events in the universe are connected to all others. If the rule is that anything that could affect anyone is fair game, then there simply are no rules, to subject guidelines, no filter whatsoever. It's hackernews.com without the "hacker"
All events are connected, but the only superpower is a little more connected.
Nothing exists in total isolation, you have to draw lines anyway.
Every time these sorts of articles get posted people that express a differing opinion from the standard get flagged (making it so you can't read their post at all) pretty quickly making it seem more like the intention isn't to start discussion. It seems like it's gotten to the point that the people that just get flagged into oblivion stopped trying to post.
FWIW, you can read flagged posts and comments by turning on showdead in your profile.
News not connected to technology or VC doesn't belong on HN.
is that an opinion or a consistently enforced policy?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45202200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47136179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46543457
These are not even a isolated or a new pattern that Palestinian people are enduring such atrocities by the rogue israeli regime with full impunity from the western super powers. In fact, the Palestinian people have been suffering such oppression and injustice everyday at the hand of zionist society on a regular basis since 1948.
In fact, here are some more such equally horrible actions of the israelis just in the recent days that you may not find on the western media ever.
1. Either the illegal settlers or the israeli occupation force themselves set a Palestinian boy on fire in Ramallah: https://x.com/dillyhussain88/status/2033528694833127569
2. An israeli ran over a 6 years old in front of her home in Hebron while she was playing: https://x.com/anadoluagency/status/2033226719986069866
3. Another israeli settler deliberately ran his car over a Palestinian child in the Nablus: https://x.com/angeloinchina/status/2033402402062434589
Historically, the western news media have always downplayed or completely ignored the persecution of Palestinians at every cost. Now due to rise of social media and citizen journalism, the israeli and zionist atrocities are coming out every single day hundreds of times, causing the abysmal distrust in these media outlets across the globe. To salvage their credibility, the western media now picking up some stories here and there, yet use the very artistic and convoluted language not to damage the image of the rogue zionist regime as much as possible. Journalists with conscience, who could not take anymore such order from their bosses, kept resigning from these news outlets:
* The New York Times - Anne Boyer: The Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry editor for The New York Times Magazine resigned in November 2023. In her resignation letter, she wrote that she could no longer work for the publication amidst the "reasonable tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering" and "verbally sanitized hellscapes."
- Jazmine Hughes: An award-winning staff writer for The New York Times Magazine resigned in November 2023 after signing an open letter by "Writers Against the War on Gaza." The outlet stated the signing violated its policies on public protest.
- Jamie Lauren Keiles: A frequent contributor and writer for the magazine also resigned in solidarity with Hughes after signing the same open letter.
* BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) - Karishma Patel: A presenter and journalist who walked out of the BBC in October 2024. She later published an essay in The Guardian criticizing the broadcaster's "obstructive editorial policy" and its decision to shelf the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack.
- Bassam Bounenni: A veteran North Africa correspondent for BBC Arabic resigned in October 2023. He announced his departure on social media, stating it was for the sake of his "professional integrity" regarding the coverage of the escalation in Gaza.
- Noah Abrahams: A freelance sports reporter for the BBC resigned in October 2023 in protest of the broadcaster's refusal to use the word "terrorist" to describe Hamas, highlighting the internal friction over language and terminology.
* Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) - Nour Haydar: A political reporter in the Canberra bureau resigned in early 2024. She cited concerns over the broadcaster's coverage of the Gaza conflict and its treatment of culturally diverse staff as primary reasons for her departure.
* Reuters - Valerie Zink: A Canadian photojournalist who resigned from Reuters in August 2025. She publicly denounced the agency's coverage as a "betrayal of journalists," specifically citing an instance where the outlet allegedly published unsubstantiated claims from the Israeli military to justify the killing of a Palestinian colleague.
[flagged]
and your comment is flagged, as is mine. This article has no relevance to HN, just more political activism
Mainstream world news has a place on HN if it contains "significant new information", and as much as this site is primarily for curious conversation and gratifying intellectual curiosity, we don't want to pretend that horrific events like this aren't happening.
Horrific events happen almost every hour of every day. This is political, and the events that are upvoted are always from the same political perspective. If you don't see this, you're blind. But from my perspective, mods do see it, are ok with it, and that is unfortunate. There are few places left online without explicit political bias. HN used to be one of them.
[flagged]
> The same reason your inane question is on HN.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If anything, it's refreshing to see something that isn't about the latest apple / llm / current techbro trend bullshit
I can go to Reddit for that.
You can go to Reddit for everything. There’s even r/hackernews.
Reminder that whatever you think, war, terrorism, questions of "the right/wrong target," etc are all insperable from AI and technology these days. These soldiers were where they were for concrete reasons dictated across vast automated networks; their choices of engagement are insperable from the tools either side (army and occupied population to be clear) here has or is perceived to have. War is simply many different "user stories," to put it coldly, and there is ethical and/or practical reasons, as technologists/scientists/academics, to see it that way (even if the goal is to just know thy enemy).
This is all why Anthropic is now a "supply-chain risk", why Thiel and Musk are particularly powerful persons-qua-tech-CEOs, why embedded microcontrollers getting so cheap (or whatever) enables drones instead of suicide bombs.
I honestly think the gaza war was largely continued as a distraction from the true atrocities Israel has been committing in the west bank. By getting all the news to focus on Gaza Israel could trot out reasoning that many people accept, but the state sponsored terrorism they are undertaking in the west bank is the kind of stuff that is truly hard for even ardent Israel supporters to overlook.
Unfortunately, even in this comment section, you see people conflating the two. People don't realize that Palestinians live in both the west bank and gaza or that there are 2 different government for the west bank and gaza.
The people being oppressed and exterminated belong to the same group.
It's not even wrong to conflate atrocities in both regions as part of the same genocidaire campaign.
I agree, but I'd say it's important when pointing out how horrible this is you don't let the "they deserved it" narrative fly.
How Israel acts in the west bank is a testament to how poor their behavior in gaza is. They have no real justification for their evictions and murders of west bank citizens. They have no justification for turning a blind eye to settler violence. They have no justification for not punishing IDF soldiers who break theirs and international law.
Israel's plan to confuse people about what is happening in the west bank vs gaza is so effective that even their detractors are falling for it. Truly a genius strategy
That's a good point actually.
It’s hard not to wonder whether better technology could someday help stop tragedies like this.
No. Better technology is only making it more efficient. We need better humanity, better morals, better policing of criminals in power.
That's misguided. Technology is a tool. Tools can be used for good or bad. The hammer that builds a hospital can also crack a skull open.
No, we need better people controlling the tools.
The israeli army are famous for their tech?
Well, right now the "better technology" is Israel's use of the "Lavender" AI to designate people to kill because they are "likely" to be hamas supporters.
And yes, probably they could have used better technology to realize that people in the car are not a danger to them. But that would immply they actually want to avoid killing civilians instead of looking for any excuse to shoot them.
The Holocaust was built on IBM, the genocide in Gaza is built on Azure. Technology won't be on the side of stopping these tragedies.
nothing has changed https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
* * *
My understanding if you read the Israeli news articles is that the justification is that the car was going fast:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-forces-kill-west-bank-...
Given that the IDF involved were undercover agents (according to the reports), it seems unlikely that this family knew that driving fast would get them killed.
From the article, an eyewitness account:
> He told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account. I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired. "No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
Indeed. Often one of the key details omitted is that Israel has been illegally occupying the west bank since 1967 as part of an apartheid regime.
The BBC had a literal Israeli officer as the head of their Middle East department. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/high-court-rules-favour-j...
Tragic, but what am I supposed to take away from this story? Palestine is an impoverished community with a terrorist government that isn't afraid to commit atrocities against humanity to get what they want whether it be slaughtering civilians or using human sheilds (setting up bases in hospitals, schools, etc). Israel is portrayed as the baddies in articles like this but I genuinely think in the aggregate Israel has shown incredible restraint compared to their muslim peers. If this was flipped and it was a larger muslim nation punching down on a minority Jewish nation, would the larger muslim nation be showing the restraint that Israel is showing towards Palestine? Doubtful. Hamas, Iran, and ilk have openly expressed their desire to completely destroy Israel, civilians and all.
This is the same Israel that has attacked Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Quatar and Sudan (https://youtu.be/pRxKltphg6c?si=bDSB_jA-KPM4Efzu) and globally trafficked children?
(https://youtu.be/RJhqGDZbqBI?si=MQFuah6er7TvHcaD)
Or is it the Israel that deliberately destroys crops (https://youtu.be/Lyp9Xfess3Q?si=1_4usvB1yjgYhKSb)?
Maybe it’s the Israel that ignores ceasefires (http://youtube.com/post/Ugkxn4SkyNfKESV6nPO_ZzgOhdaH8lb_FAkx...) or fills in wells (http://youtube.com/post/UgkxaPo3ERDtr5fQKPAHnFgxwYkMaEeMgdlo...)
Or it could be the Israel that shoots and kills 234 peaceful protestors (https://www.972mag.com/gaza-return-march-idf/)
Restraint is not really in Israeli vocabulary, and the story being sold is a lie.
Restraint? The goal of the Zionists has been turning all of Palestine into a Jewish state since before the state of Israel existed and quite openly so and that is still the goal. Israel does what it can to achieve this goal and I would bet they would just kill or displace every last Palestinian if they could get away with it. There is only restraint because of the fear of the backlash from the international community if they push to hard, if Israel existed in a vacuum, there would be no piece of Palestine left for a long time.
Israel isn't "portrayed as the baddies" on this story. They are the baddies on this story. They killed a family going in their car full of children. There's no way to turn that story around. That is unequivocally bad.
> incredible restraint
What's incredible is calling it "restraint". "Genocide" is a more appropriate term. Here's the UN:
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-c...
Terrorist government? This is the West Bank, which is currently governed by Fatah, which has global recognition as the rightful representative authority of the Palestinian people.
The West Bank is governed by the PLO, not Hamas, so it sounds like your concern is that you just don't wish to hear about it because it's an inconvenience.
I think you're right. Obviously this is awful and the IDF shouldn't be doing this and should be held responsible (of course they won't). But it seems like the implicit message behind the story is Palestine good, Israel bad, which at best is a massive oversimplification.
Please take your propaganda elsewhere. If Hamas or any other group in the region perpetrated any of the war crimes that Israel commits on any given day, every media outlet would be writing about it for weeks. In the meantime, Israel can bomb Gaza literally every day since the so-called ceasefire and nobody bats an eye. Israel just now acquitted its soldiers caught raping Palestinians in custody on camera. No coverage, no outcry. Israel is very objectively a bad guy, armed with nukes.
Israeli Zionists slaughter innocent people including children and immediately pull the victim card when criticized.
It’s on full display here.
You point out a FACT of reality and they go “you just hate Jews” they immediately draw the victim card - fooling NO ONE.
It only makes the divide worse.
I fear for you Zionists, you’re going to make a monster out of the world by becoming a monster yourself. You will lose and there’s no chance you’ll fulfill your wacky ass prophecy.
Give up the insane plans immediately and assimilate with your fellow man, or lose everything your ancestors worked for.