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...
It's sort of understandable why the defenders of the genocide have to keep defending it. Stopping doing so today would mean admitting that until yesterday you've been defending utter inhumanity.
A review:
> Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a challenging documentary. It is not only difficult to watch, but it also probes into one of the most grotesque aspects of human nature: the capacity for self-delusion in the face of horrific atrocities. This isn’t a film about history, facts, or statistics; it’s about the memories of the men who killed, the stories they tell themselves, and how they continue to live with the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. The film’s power lies in its ability to take the viewer beyond a surface-level understanding of evil and into the psychological abyss of those who have committed atrocities—and seemingly moved on with their lives.
From: https://docthisway.com/2024/09/23/the-act-of-killing-review/
For whatever reason YouTube has put age limits on some of the uploads of it, here's the start of one without it:
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/...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/30/israel-forces-...
Hmm.
> It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy… The following acts are examples of perfidy… The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status...
(Assassinating a paralyzed patient in a hospital is also not typically - ahem - kosher. Even if you're in uniform!)
Could you clarify where in the Geneva Conventions this very important exemption is stated?
> Why was it decided that feigning of civilian, non-combatant status is bad?
Because people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators, and even enemy civilians are protected persons.
They should also pay reparations, and send their leaders to the Hague.
Who accepted those? And did they have a right to do so on behalf of _all_ of humanity?
The conventions are a guideline. To use them as a blanket moral justification for your actions after the fact is extremely disingenuous.
You know who reminds me of that? Fucking Serbia and they got bombed for it.
- Hamas is a terrorist organization that planned and executed a mass terror campaign, fully knowing and hoping for the reaction. And boasting about it continuously and repeatedly.
- Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not the IDF's fault.
And if it was, they didn't mean it.
And if they did, Gaza deserved it.
- Likud is an evil political party
- Natanyahu is a wanted war criminal
- IDF committed many atrocities
- Hamas was insane to think that Bibi would NOT BOMB the Gaza in retaliation.
- Hamas was the first to cast the stone.
- Israel ALWAYS gonna retaliate with non proportional force when it comes to security of its citizens.
>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.
Their reconstruction of the Beirut Port explosion was incredible though: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/beirut-port-...
Not sure if they're still fêted as artists or have moved away from that label. I still find their approach completely mesmerizing nevertheless.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfD1y7WZLpM
alternative FE: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=bfD1y7WZLpM
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:
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.
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?
"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)Read that and tell me that Israel is acting proportionally...
Damn…
It’s literally happening in Ukraine and, to a lesser scale but precisely the same in type, Minneapolis. On the other hand, there are conflicts across Africa and Asia which are not receiving half the attention.
Because the West doesn't fund and shield the perpetrators unlike Israel.
Seems like interesting tech.
"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.
On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket, with video from multiple angles of the failure, that it hit an empty parking lot in front of the hospital and only blew out the windows and burnt a few cars, and that no more than a handful of people had been killed.
And also the repeated claims that Israel were lying about the tunnels under Gaza Hospitals, and make videos of one such strike (a bunker buster penetrating the parking lot just outside the entrance) go viral, only for Hamas to later announce that one of the replacement leaders for Sinwar had been killed in that strike, and for excavation to find the bunkers / tunnel network underneath that very hospital.
As well as, earlier in the war, a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza.
None of that justifies genuine instances of war crimes and atrocities that Israel may have committed, but there's a reason why people tune out some of the extreme claims that fly around.
I already said I don't condone any instances of legitimate war crimes. I don't think enumerating everything that has ever happened by either side is very useful. But it's a fact that both sides lie flagrantly about atrocities. Lots of the footage in the early days of the war that was claimed to be from Gaza was actually recycled from the Syrian civil war.
If you want me to start listing some BS that Israel has done, fine - the calendar stunt was ridiculous (if you have followed the conflict, you probably have heard of it). What goes on in the west bank is disgraceful. There are plenty of statements by Israeli politicians that are basically genocidal language (though you can play that game with most countries, random US politicians say psychotic shit all the time).
And yet one side is committing genocide.
That’s really the problem, innit? Palestine can’t stop poking, Israel overreact. 20 GOTO 10.
Also, to be perfectly honest, we've seen 4x as many people killed in Sudan as in Gaza in the same timeframe, including entire cities being wiped out by gunmen filming themselves literally going door to door and shooting people begging for their lives, lying on the ground or in hospital beds. 6,000 people were killed over a single weekend in el-Fasher and barely a peep from the media.
What Israel is doing in Gaza is more similar to what Russia did to Grozny during the 2nd Chechen war than it is to most of the events historically termed "genocides". Which, to be extremely clear, is not at all a sympathetic comparison. The conduct of the Russians was incredibly brutal and disgusting and unjustified (then and now). I would not want to be compared to them.
But, like, you do have to have standards for what words mean. If the low-tech butchers of the RSF have killed hundreds of thousands in the same timeframe, it's not crazy to be more cautious with the "genocide" label.
One side is governed by a death cult for sure, if you look at how many children they indiscriminately kill.
Are you referring to the jewish israelis by "death cult"?
If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
Collective punishment, or a long term ethnic cleansing would be much more accurate, but you’re just repeating what you read unthinkingly if you say genocide.
You can't infer intent that way. Nuking Gaza isn't free, it would introduce an existential threat to Israel. They are toeing a dangerous line already, and using WMDs would align other countries against them really quickly.
Putin isn't avoiding using nukes on Ukraine because he's a nice guy.
Cue the citizens that protested to stop the aid trucks from going into Gaza. The citizens that protested because the Israeli military arrested (after a lot of international pressure) soldiers that were caught raping Palestinian prisoners. They were protesting for the right of soldiers to continue to rape.
The people you're talking about are Israel's far-right. I don't think you can index from them onto the median Israeli's political views anymore than you could reasonably index from a member of Hamas's armed wing onto the median Palestinian.
(A recurring theme in both I/P and MENA conflicts more generally is that political minorities - WB settlers in Israel, for example, manage to wield disproportionate power and induce chaos and strife across the region.)
https://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.
What if they only act once it reaches the front page?
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.
Turn on showdead and you'll find much, much weirder wastes of time here.
I also don't think your read of it as an organic outcome of a post that obviously violates guidelines is the natural conclusion here, I actually think that interpretation strains credulity more. Where I agree is that I don't think moderators are being heavy-handed on issues like this, but I do think high level political events do merit attention at least once in a while and I don't think the HN pattern has been toward oversaturation.
And in terms of things that make this story unique, I think it's the highest standard of specificity I've ever seen in reporting of this kind, it's using impressive technological reconstruction of the scene, it's actually quite unlike typical news reporting on the topic and it's hosted on a platform that was YC-incubated, and I think DropSite News is in an ascendant moment as a major news breaker. There's lots to talk about here imo.
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.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Schrodingers...
Did he qualify it by indicating his claim is based on centuries old religious documents that are not agreed to by any majority of the Earth's population?
I'm sure he sees the death and displacement of millions as a small price to pay to bring about the Rapture in his lifetime.
https://religiondispatches.org/2025/12/04/mike-huckabee-trie...
A good chunk of them are insanely pro-semitic as well, as they adopt the dual covenant belief that Jews will actually also go to heaven as well as Christians. I've actually never met anyone that adhered to the pro-zionist dispensationalist view that fully thought out the implied consequences, then proceeded to harbor a personal hatred of Jews. The vast majority of them love all things Jewish and hold them in high regard.
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
I also think issues of censorship are very high on the list of topics of interest on HN and few topics are subject to more extensive censorship than reporting on events in Israel and Palestine.
Furthermore, there are handful of accounts who sole purpose seems to be to pump the HN feed full of Israel and Palestine. People who want so badly to talk about a single political topic should probably go to Bluesky.
Framing it as "obsessive" is an attempt to shift away from subject matter toward an attitude of journalists or consumers, like it's borne of the same attitude as paparazzi. But I think it merits significant coverage not for that reason, but because it so frequently meets criteria for meriting journalistic attention.
I agree that comment sections can be bad, but they aren't always, and to some degree I would rather trust moderation than suppress reporting on a topic of legitimate interest. You're exactly right that a lot of reaction is toxic and politicized, and sometimes the way that manifests is by trying to cook up rationales to suppress stories by flagging them. Out of respect for the concern you've identified, it would be a huge mistake to let politicization win by allowing politically motivated abuse of flagging.
Am I still allowed to ask why the moderators don't want people to read and discuss this particular technology story?
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.
The rise and fall of peer review - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47123133 - Feb 2026 (0 comments)
Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120899 - Feb 2026 (692 comments)
Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119210 - Feb 2026 (440 comments)
Music Discovery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114672 - Feb 2026 (56 comments)
The 7-Year Bug That Took 3 Minutes to Fix - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47090261 - Feb 2026 (1 comment)
AI made coding more enjoyable - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47075400 - Feb 2026 (97 comments)
RFC 3092 – Etymology of “Foo” (2001) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46934499 - Feb 2026 (52 comments)
Launching My Side Project as a Solo Dev: The Walkthrough - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46845567 - Feb 2026 (9 comments)
There is an AI code review bubble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766961 - Jan 2026 (249 comments)
Proof of Corn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46735511 - Jan 2026 (307 comments)
XLibre XServer 25.1 Changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46474846 - Jan 2026 (4 comments)
Python Data Science Handbook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46120611 - Dec 2025 (61 comments)
NTSB Preliminary Report – UPS Boeing MD-11F Crash [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45995834 - Nov 2025 (228 comments)
Best shipping logistic aggregator in India - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45924139 - Nov 2025 (0 comments)
WebDAV isn't dead yet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698070 - Oct 2025 (128 comments)
Unicode Footguns in Python - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45689443 - Oct 2025 (20 comments)
AGI is not imminent, and LLMs are not the royal road to getting there - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45627171 - Oct 2025 (124 comments)
Super Ace: Your PH Home for Jili Slots and a 300% Welcome Bonus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45624939 - Oct 2025 (0 comments)
Pkgbase Removes FreeBSD Base System Feature - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44730021 - July 2025 (42 comments)
It seems that people, even "established HN users" will flag literally anything. Do you feel that there is any remaining article quality signal that can be obtained from the current flagging mechanism?
If you squint and look closely, though, I think you can detect this in the above list. The weirdest "wtf?" cases of flagging are ones where the threads had a lot of comments and were on the frontpage. That means upvotes won the tug-of-war with flags, as they should have in most of those cases.
Conversely, it you look at the submissions in the list which had 0 comments or very few, it looks to me like most were either spam, low-quality articles, or dupes.
Remember, also, that some flags are just mistakes - the link is easy to fat-finger or misclick, and the UI doesn't provide feedback about that. That's likely to change soon as part of work that tomhow and I are planning.
Even just technologically it's more interesting than 90% of the stuff posted here.
There is a name for people who build coalitions through compromise and diplomacy, and work towards pragmatic solutions to actual problems — they're called "centrists".
Redirects set to: talk.politics.misc.
So you don’t think anyone should discuss topics that touch on politics, including this war, on HN?
It's a societal-level policy: 47% of Israeli Jews want all Palestinians killed; 82% want all Palestinians forcefully expelled (i.e., ethnically cleansed) [0] which would constitute genocide. 56% want the same for all Israeli Arabs.
So, it's pathetic when Westerners act surprised at Israel's antics: you can't support a genocidal state and then be shocked when it does genocidal stuff. This is just Tuesday for them.
Once you understand this, Israel's actions are not an anomaly. It's the natural expression of people who consider their neighbors beneath them, and barely even human.
[0]: https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/poll-show-most-jew...
Gaza exposed it even more:
* No one accepts high western "morality" anymore
* Most US politicians are blackmailed via Epstein who worked for Israel, with high probability, including Trump
* ICE is just the beginning, they're trained by IDF, send more people and 1940 is not too far away from us
??? Most? His network was certainly extensive but "most politicians" seems like a significantly overextended extrapolation.
Is that an accurate trend on an individual basis?
> 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...