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.
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.)
I don't see anything shocking just extremely sad, this is war 101, every day. Anybody who cares to follow whats happening will find these stories from each conflict. Ie same stories could be found on Ukraine (especially first months, sometimes with video), I personally recall few heartbreaking ones. Its civilians who suffer the worst fate in every war, innocent, small, defenseless.
Given the uncritical support israel is getting from the political elites, plan will go on and the plan is nothing else than destruction of whole gaza, razing it down and building... whatever, I presume more settlers or maybe even a golf course with hotels on the beach. IDF will launch 'an investigation', that will drag for 2 years and nothing will be done at the end, like always.
And the worst thing - people will forget about all this rather quickly, and much more. Maybe its coping mechanism to stay sane, but stellar behavior it isn't.
The west bank isn't at war with Israel. There wasn't some conflict or event that has justified these actions.
I wish people understood this better. Even if you could manage to justify what's happening in gaza as "this is war", Gaza and the west bank are separate entities with separate governments. The west bank, in particular, is more like an Indian reservation in the US, with the Israeli government effectively exercising supremacy over all aspects of the government.
Theoretically, the IDF is supposed to be the police force for the west bank. That's why they occupy it.
People insist that Gaza is not a country, but Palestine is. You can't then say that the West Bank is not responsible for what the rest of Palestine did.
Gaza and the West Bank aren't countries, they have no autonomy. Palestine isn't a country, it was once where Israel now sits, but hasn't been since the 40s.
Palestinians are people, must like Jews are people. Palestinians are the indigenous inhabitants of Israel, the west bank, and gaza.
Much like all Jews aren't responsible for the actions of Israel, All Palestinians aren't responsible for the actions of Hamas. Even the residence of Gaza.
Except this situation has been going on like this for 60 years - with Israel, or the other western states having absolutely no plans to change anything about it (except making it even worse).
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 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 don't like the comparison with the holocaust, because this feels like opening another door to antisemitism.
What is happening in Gaza is different from the holocaust. This sort of argument is called holocaust inversion.
I am also bothered how the death of palestinian civilians somehow shadows the tactics used by Hamas and Hezbollah and how Iran helps them. So many died in Iraq, so many died in Iran by the hands of their government, so many are dying in Sudan, yet Israel is held to a higher standard, but why? Because of the holocaust, so Israel should know better? Because Israel is an US ally? Because Israel is the most democratic country in the middle east?
Maybe I am doing some whataboutism, but so is the comparison with auschwitz survivors.
I rarely allow myself to engage in arguing about this war anymore because it's just a totem now, even local politicians use it, it's ridiculous. I am just a leftist and I dislike Netanyahu as much as everybody, by the way.
And none of my arguments are meant to downplay how the Israelis engaged in war crimes. I just don't like how the holocaust is brought into that, it tries to install the narrative "jews went through a genocide, but they are taking a revenge" or something.
The problem is that its not a simple conflict where one can take a moral side.
Its absolutely true that Israel is definitely targeting civilians, whether due to negligence or just not giving a fuck, because of a combination of anger and fear of being eliminated.
Its also absolutely true that Hamas and by extension Iran wants Israeli to target civilians because it makes them appear as the bad guys, which furthers their agenda to weaken Israel to eventually retake the land. And not only that, but the terrorist cells also are interested in carrying out attacks in countries that support or have supported Israel even in defense only.
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 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
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 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?
If this was a story from Sudan or Yemen it wouldn't get a single upvote because there's no way to blame the Jews for it.
Posts about Israel get posted constantly because they're a vehicle for highbrow antisemitism.
I'm not saying this story is not legit, but I am saying that if this happened anywhere else, nobody would give damn about it.
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.
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"
There's no mention of any particular company, tech or otherwise, here. Yes, you can probably connect your work in some way to something that affects the military if you live in the US or Israel (and even many places outside of it - we're not restricting to direct connections), but, after all, "there is no ethical consumerism under capitalism".
If I worked at [supposedly evil company], I doubt this largely unverifiable story would cause much turmoil. I'm sure at work I'd be hearing about much worse and more concrete stuff already.
Seen this on repeat lately - there will be some war crime that the IDF commits, soldiers or Israeli citizens celebrate it themselves in a TikTok or in Israeli media, then the US media will argue that it didn’t happen or “there’s some information missing”. It’s actually kind of nuts.
Verification _of what_ though? The OP article makes a lot of claims. Your own link says the car was a legit target for 'speeding at' troops, which completely opposes much of the BBC article.
Just because the IDF issued its "justification" doesn't mean it is. As we know from Gaza, there is always a justification.
Here is a good description from the New York Times:
"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."
DIfferent people have different levels of empathy. If you can live with these things happening in the world, let along being involved even in an extremely minor way then fine, but don't try and downplay it.
I think it's naive to think that things aren't overplayed or dramatized whenever I read such an article, from whatever PoV. So it can only ever be _at most_ as bad as the article claims. Then it's only natural to downplay.
What's naive is to think that this is overplayed when the same events are happening day and day out after Israeli settles continue campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. This is just _one_ representative story of dozens that happen every day as reported by many NGOs. This one was merely made viral.
Sorry, I just don't buy the coached words of a 12 year old as categorically truthful. If anything, ethnic cleansing would be a more statistical and thus verifiable claim than the literal anecdote of a child.
Really interesting that out of all the testimonials coming out from Gaza and the West Bank that repeat observable, recorded events over and over again, by people in all sides of the conflict, that you selective choose skepticism about this one as if Hind Rajab didn´t happen.
We (and I) have become desensitized. When I saw one of these for the first time about 25 years ago, I was thinking about it for a week. Maybe longer. Because it was new, internet was new, and the video (not the same but it really does not matter) was the first time I saw it for ... real, felt it for real.
But after seeing a 100 of these, after knowing some of these are AI, after seeing news of a 1000 more ... I mean how is columbine or sandy hook different ... you see these but you eventually scroll up, sometimes immediately sometimes after a few seconds.
I am not making light of it just saying ... a lot of people at evil companies are also tuned out.
Well, it's also compartmentalized isn't it. It's happening remotely, even if you're buliding the targetting systems or something like that. It's still all abstracted.
And as sympathetic as I might be otherwise, everyone is prone to dramatization and histrionics, which has a numbing tendency too. On both sides.
This is a journalistic article that does provide multiple sources of evidence - including multiple sources of eyewitness testimony, the facts of what happened to the car/damage to the bodies, what the IDF says happened, and the non-response by the IDF to the evidence presented here - what other evidence could possibly meet your bar here?
This doesn't seem like a good faith discussion by people that informed themselves on what this piece is saying, so I'm bowing out. Have a good one.
No that actually never happened. The very day Israel declared its independence its army was already outside the territory proposed for it by the UN's partition plan. Israel itself never declared what its borders were.
Effective border control would be much easier to implement than the settlement program. In fact it largely has been working since the second intifada when they reinforced it. The west bank settlements make israel less safe, not more.
As if Israel, a nuclear power under complete protection of the world's sole superpower, could have any trouble defending its border. Though of course, turning your neighbours into your friends through appeasement and cooperation would remove the need for such heightened defense. The only problem is that it would be the end of their dreams of territorial expansion and Greater Israel.
Charitably, this is an astroturf that accumulated 200+ upvotes in about 20 minutes, which I suspect is highly irregular for HN. Along, with a very clear concerted effort to quickly downvote anyone pointing out this is isn’t HN. If this is the case, what is HN admin doing about it?
Less charitably, HN is not where hackers hang out anymore. The hackers have moved on and HN is now this.
You think, charitably, that this is an astroturf, really? What's the distribution of upvotes look like for front-page posts, binned in 20 minute intervals?
Reviewing your post history, it's overwhelmingly in non-tech related threads. This seems like a standard post for your tastes, semantically. Why then the sudden distaste?
Interesting how this highlights a philosophical conundrum here that I'm not sure I have the answer to that goes beyond just forums. Do people make the community, or do rules make the community? I can envision arguments for both sides.
If HN gets invaded by people who want to discuss cooking and start submitting and upvoting cooking articles and HN turns into cooking discussion website? And once they get majority, they'll change the rules to make it exclusively about cooking.
It's still people, just different people. People who like cooking vs. people who like technology and startups.
There's no philosophical conundrum.
Do you want HN to be colonized by cooking people or not? That is the question.
I don't.
We need to stand our ground and repel colonizers who want to change the character of HN. Our unity is our strength.
It absolutely does. Israel uses an AI system("Lavender") to decide which civilians to kill. I remind myself of this fact every single day when deciding where to apply my work. We(software developers) are more than ever exposed to the reality that our products will kill people in the real world.
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.
Zionism is the idea that the Jewish people deserve a national state. Being anti-Zionist is equivalent to wanting Israel to not exist as a national state.
Zionism is currently realized as an apartheid system because there are too many non-Jews within the borders of Israel. The solution should have been two-states, but it seems that current Israeli leadership doesn't want that. So what is left? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/11/israels-netanyahu-s...
Zionism is just another flavour of fascism. Fascism comes in many flavours, and Zionism is one of them. And it's just as ugly as all the other flavours.
> about an incident involving New Zealanders and Maoris
Really?
Aotearoan here. Our racist history is shameful. Many massacres, both sides but mostly one way traffic.
Our history of "othering" indigenous people here in law was shameful too.
But seriously, and with all due respect, fuck you!!
We are facing up to our racist past, present and (Dog help us) future.
Tikanga Māori is joining our legal system.
Being openly racist to Māori is politically suicidal (some right wing politicians are giving it a go, and getting burnt for it)
Māori institutions are integrating themselves into all levels of our culture and society
And on and on. New Zealand is a Māori country, I am Pākehā, I have no problem with that, I belong here too. We (white people) are learning to share, learning there are more ways than our ways. Israel could learn from us, but...
The Isralies are utterly different. The violent homicidal, nay genocidal, racism of Israel is institutional.
Fuck you. For all we have our problems with racism, we are not genocidal racist violent thugs, as are the IDF representing the Israli state
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.
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."
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.
It's not collateral damage in the gaza war. This was a family in the west bank, where there is no hamas and no "war", that was gunned down in cold blood for no reason. Not even presenting a threat. I hope one day you are able to find compassion.