Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is unfounded. I'm still waiting on a single shred of evidence to drop about the AP building from 2-3 years ago https://apnews.com/article/israel-middle-east-business-israe... > Which unfortunately means prohibitions on bombing hospitals, schools and places of worship are now obsolete. Even if Hamas was fighting from hospitals and schools that is not how this works. Israel would be required to give those schools…
> why are they hitting the refuge camps with 2000lb dumb bombs? Why not guided bombs? In my eyes, this is cast-iron proof that there is little concern on IDF side for civilian deaths. I do not see a plausible counter-argument
Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza war
381–390 of 968 posts
Re: Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza war
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
“Refugee camp” is just a legal designation for certain areas in the Gaza Strip. It refers to “refugees” from events that took place decades before almost anyone in the Gaza Strip was even born.
It's a dense urban area, it has civilians and children. That bomb is large enough to level an apartment block, so ~100 casualties and they don't know where it will land. Who are they targeting with that type of bomb, 1 Hamas fighter hiding among population? It's error margin is in hundreds of meters. You are not allowed to kill 100 innocent people in the hopes (not certainty!) of getting 1 enemy soldier. That's exact…
Re: Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza war
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regardless of any second-order effects, the truth on the ground is that many thousands of innocents are suffering, and I have a hard time seeing any societal configuration where civilians can be legally blown up or starved en masse as anything but immoral. If a terrorist government is embedded in your population centers, it should not be legal to raze those population centers in retribution.
How do you distinguish "retribution" from eliminating the threat posed by (in your words) a terrorist government? What do you propose as an alternative? Simply allow the terrorist government to continue to operate unimpeded, which enables attacks on your own citizens? There's no population on the planet that would accept that.
Re: Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza war
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN's standard about this question has been stable for many years: some stories with political overlap are both inevitable and in keeping with the mandate of the site. The question, when it comes to the biggest political topics, is which stories clear that bar. I've posted about this many times, including quite a few explanations specific to the current topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435324 (Feb 2024) h…
Hey Dang, huge fan of HN. How do you reconcile HN's political neutrality and the fact that almost every overtly political story that hits the front page about certain subjects[1] are blatantly biased on one side? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435324
For starters the situation is evolving more on that front. Every new action is a potential headline for palestine. On the other hand Israel's position is much more static: They want to prevent the slaughter on oct 7 from happening again, and are using force to do so. That hasn't changed. You can't make new headlines out of it.
Its probably also inherent to the fact that Israel is currently on the offensive, outside of its territory in an asymetrical urban conflict. The optics on that are always going to be bad for the state in Israel's position regardless of how justified it is. Urban conflict is always a bloody mess, same with asymetric conflicts.
When israel bombs a hospital that makes a great headline. Its easy to understand and verify - hospital used to be there, now it is not. Its emotional - everyone knows in normal circumstances hospitals are supposed to be off limits. The Israeli side is hard to fit into a headline - hospital bombed after it became a military target due to use by militants, in accordance with international law and the principles of porportionality and distinction. For starters that is a mouthful to be a headline. It lacks emotional punch because now we are talking about legalese not deaths of innocets. Its hard to understand - most non experts do not know what the doctrine of porportionality& distinction is. Even if they do, we do not know in the fog of war what israel knew when targeting it and if it was reasonable at the time. Even if we did, where precisely the line is can be controversially grey. Its not like there is a huge amount of case law on this. Determing if it was legal would probably require hundreds of pages of legal argumentation. Even then, there is a whole other question of if the line international law draws is the correct one morally, which you could write a book on. Its just very hard to put all that in a news article.
So i don't think it is HN's fault that most of these articles lean more anti-israel. Its just much easier to write about things from that perspective. It is much more black and white and requires much less nuance and context.
Re: Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza war
#385I appreciate that this is on here and I hope we can collectively handle it. Tech isn't isolated from this situation, as difficult as it is to admit and talk about with civility and care. A US military software engineer even self immolated recently in protest of what's happening. I don't see what's happening in Gaza as being culturally particular to the specific identity groups involved here. It's a very human situati…
Re: Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza war
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Israelis are the ones setting those parameters and creating the conditions, though. It's not a "gotcha" to point out that journalists are also affected along with the other noncombatants.
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No, they are being killed at much faster rate, to the point of depletion in relation to other civilians. Look at this plot: https://imgur.com/a/SWNSYOn
In my first post in this thread I did a detailed estimate that for the curve to bend this way, the journalists must be decimated with odds between 51:1 - 96:1 higher when compared to other civilians. This post got heavily downvoted and now sits at the bottom of the thread, but you can read the full explanation there.
Re: Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza war
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe another method is needed then? If you can't tell innocent people from legit targets... rethink the approach? Here is my reasoning: they hide in civilian clothes, okay let's not shoot civilians. They hide in hospitals, okay let's not bomb hospitals. They use civilian buildings, okay let's not bomb civilian buildings. They use civilians as shields... let's not shoot the shields. How is that unreasonable?
> Maybe another method is needed then? What would be useful is a historic example where another approach has worked. I don't approve of Israel's methods. I'd prefer an egalitarian solution. But, I'm all out of ideas. Find me an instance of 2 co-habiting or neighboring groups that hate each other, have huge disputes and ended up in relative peace. I can give you my recent examples of previous instances that are now mo…
Sticking to quite recent examples: South Africa, Basque Country, Ireland.
Re: Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza war
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
War is nasty, it brings out the worst in people. Look at this, listen to their laughter while conducting their "work": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfvFpT-iypw (2007) "The video shows Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, driver Saeed Chmagh, and several others as the Apache shoots and kills them in a public square in Eastern Baghdad after they are apparently assumed to be insurgents. After the initial shooting, a…
It can have a very wide range of nastiness
Re: Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza war
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with the premise that Hamas wouldn't be able to fight open battles. But it doesn't make using human shields (directly by putting military infrastructure in civilian ones or indirectly by not distinguishing themselves) not their fault. The death of human shields is their responsibility, and their alone (without getting into details of which part of dead civilians is actually due to being human shields). Of cou…
> why would you justify it? Let's not start accusing each other. Drop the BS. > using human shields (directly by putting military infrastructure in civilian ones or indirectly by not distinguishing themselves) That doesn't mean they are using human shields (and it doesn't mean they are not): Asymetric forces need to blend into the environment - the mountains, the city, etc. In the city, that means blending into the c…
Being indistinguishable from civilians (blending in) is exactly using civilian as a shield -- the opponent can't identify you and can't kill everyone who looks like you
> They can still minimize civilian death
Arguably Israel does it with fairly low civilian: combatant death ratio