How are those "acceptable" collateral deaths not war crimes?
You can think that what they are doing is bad, but thats unrelated to the highly specific claim of genocide, which requires specific intent.
If Israel wasn't able to use tools like this, then it probably wouldn't be viable for them to identify much of Hamas (that's kind of the point of guerilla warfare). Since that would make it difficult to fight a war efficiently, they would be more likely to engage in diplomacy.
To put it bluntly, useing AI to decide on targets for lethal operations in unconsiounable given the current and forseable state of technology.
Come back to me when it can be trusted to make mortgage eligability questions without engaging in what would be blatantly illegal discrimination if not laundered by a computer algorithm.
We have no idea whether this story itself is relaying anything of value. For all we know, stories like this could be a part of the war effort.
> Underlining everything +972 does is a dedication to promoting a progressive worldview of Israeli politics, advocating an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and protecting human and civil rights in Israel and Palestine.
> And while the magazine’s reported pieces—roughly half of its content—adhere to sound journalistic practices of news gathering and unbiased reporting, its op-eds and critical essays support specific causes and are aimed at social and political change.
1: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articl...
Are ad-hominems generally acceptable here?
Netanyahu, who has been PM of Israel on 3 occasions, for 16 years, and was one of the people responsible for a policy of funding and arming Hamas (so Israel didn't have to answer awkward questions like "Arafat and the PLO are willing to come to the peace table and make a two state solution work, why aren't you?"), figuring it better to have an extremist opponent than a moderating one is categorized as being from very right wing to extreme right wing.
So I would say that the very vast majority of reporting is probably left to far left of Netanyahu and his party position. That doesn't obviously discount their remarks, let alone your implication that by default, we should assume their words might not be accurate.
972 isn't just left of Netanyahu or his current government, which you correctly categorize as extreme right IMO. They are far left of almost all Israelis, many of whom are centrists (with not a few more left-wing citizens). As far as I can tell, they are far to the left of Haaretz, which is the more standard olg-guard left-leaning newspaper in Israel.
> That doesn't obviously discount their remarks, let alone your implication that by default, we should assume their words might not be accurate.
I was implying they are inaccurate not because they lean left, specifically, but because they are very biased. I don't particularly trust their reporting, because in the few times I've read any of it, it's been fairly clear that they are interpreting almost everything in a way that is maximally "anti-Israel". That doesn't mean they automatically shouldn't be trusted, but they shouldn't automatically be trusted either.
2. I think that kind of dehumanizing language is both awful and counterproductive. All it does is radicalize Israelis further, Israelis who already believe the world is against them and they have to fight for themselves.
3. When people use similar language about Gazans, e.g. saying e.g. "there are no innocent Gazans" or "most Gazans are terrorists", people correctly criticize them.
4. In any case, even if you truly believe that most Israelis are fascists, my main point still stands - that 972 is far to the left of most Israeli's beliefs.
If we can’t trust AI to drive a car, how the hell can we trust it to pick who lives and who dies?
It is obvious that Israel has loosened their targeting requirements, this story points to their internal justifications. The first step in ending this conflict must be to reimpose these standards of self restraint.
At that point I had to scroll back up to check whether this was just a really twisted April's Fools joke.
There's often a criticism of the US military doctrine that our weapons are great but are often way more expensive than the thing we shoot them at (as exemplified in our engagement with the Houthis in the Red Sea.)
If anything, the quote you pulled sounds like its talking about highly precise weaponry, and it seems to me that the way to minimize the overall death in a war is to use your precise weapons to take out the most impactful enemy.
Which part of this is different than how you see the world so that reading this quote threw you?
expensive relative to what? a single rifle bullet? jdam kits are not expensive, easy to manufacturer, and there's plenty of 500lb dumb bombs lying around. If a country has access to precision guided bomb tech then I'd say the should be obligated to use it for bombing exclusively.
Hamas combatants like fried chicken, beer, and women. I also like these things. I can't possibly see anything wrong with this system...
Our premiere AI geniuses were all sqawking to congress about the dangers of AI and here we see that "they essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human decision.”
Sounds like you want to censor information that could hurt your bottomline.
I am pro Palestine and not simping for Israel. I think visibility on Israel's actions matter, but HN is also very clearly not the appropriate website for a lot of politically involved news.
Just as an example, the EU is setting a lot of law and policy surrounding technology right now, affecting how companies like Apple operate or putting policy into place to regulate emerging technologies like AI. The people who make the technology should be aware of those policies, how it affects what they build, and society's view on the products of their development more broadly.
I realize Israel and Palestine is a charged topic, but in my view, the high stakes of that conflict and the threat to human life on both sides means it's more important to have conversations about technology in that context, not less. Those conversations are probably going to hurt somebody's feelings, but we ought to talk about issues like how freedom of speech online and terrorism are connected and how AI systems and the military are mixing because it's important to maintaining the ethical fabric of our profession.
There could hardly be a more pertinent issue for tech right now. Just sweepingly wild shit that we should be grappling with.
This should be advertised. The true price of AI is people using computers to make decisions no decent person would. It's not a feature, it's a war crime.
We are privy to the whims of whatever political views of those that aligned/run/manage/stake in YC and their policies and values.
I think it takes a tiny number of flags to nuke a post, independent of its upvotes, so strong negative community opinions are always quick to kill things.
To restore it, mods have to step in, get involved, pick a "side".
I think the flagging criteria needs overhauling so popular, flagged posts only get taken down at the behest of a moderator. But that does mean divisive topics stay up longer.
For the nothing it's worth, I don't see this post as divisive. It's uncovering something ugly and partisan in nature, but a debate about whether or not an AI should be allowed to make these decisions needn't be partisan at all.
Only allowing 20 seconds to verify that you are male (nothing else). Intentional night bombings to increase the chance of hitting your target, but ignoring that you're hitting a residential, killing a target's family and neighbours by association. Programming in a allowable "10% error rate", which looks more like a success rate when you factor in collateral. These aren't acceptable in war. If this is news, you need to read the article.
There are, of course, many other concerns with Israeli conduct in and around Gaza.
I agree that war is a dirty process, but trying to differentiate this from genocide is increasingly tough.
But hamas fighters wear civilian clothes, so I'm not sure the rules even apply to them.
For at least 15 years we've had personalized newsfeeds in social media. For even longer we've had search engine ranking, which is also personalized. Whenever criticism is levelled against Meta or Twitter or Google or whoever for the results on that ranking, it's simply blamed on "the algorithm". That serves the same purpose: to provide moral cover for human actions.
We've seen the effects of direct human intervention in cases like Google Panda [1]. We also know that search engines and newsfeeds filter out and/or downrank objectionable content. That includes obvious categories (eg CSAM, anything else illegal) but it also includes value-based judgements on perfectly legitimate content (eg [2]).
Lavender is Israel saying "the algorithm" decided what to strike.
I want to put this in context. In ~20 years of the Vietnam War, 63 journalists were killed or lost )presumed dead) [3]. In the 6 months since October 7, at least 95 journalists have been killed in Gaza [4]. In the years prior there were still a large number killed [5], famously including an American citizen Shireen abu-Akleh [6].
None of this is an accident.
My point here is that anyone who blames "the algorithm" or deflects to some ML system is purposely deflecting responsibility from the human actions that led to that and for that to continue to exist.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda
[2]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_and...
[4]: https://cpj.org/2024/04/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-...
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_dur...
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Shireen_Abu_Akleh
Oh, very noble of you to take on that risk, from that side of the bomb sight.
> Second, we reveal the “Where’s Daddy?” system, which tracked these targets and signaled to the army when they entered their family homes.
This sounds immoral at first, but if proportionality is taken into consideration, the long term effects of this might be positive, ie fewer deaths long term due to the elimination of Hamas staff. The devil is in the details however, as there is clearly a point beyond which this becomes unacceptable. Sadly collective punishment is unavoidable in war, and one could argue that between future Israeli victims and current Palestinian ones, the IDF has a moral obligation to choose the latter.
> Fourth, we explain how the army loosened the permitted number of civilians who could be killed during the bombing of a target.
This article below states the civilian to militant death ratio in Gaza is 1:1, and for comparison the usual figure in modern war is 9:1, such as during the Battle of Mosul against ISIS. They may still be within the realm of moral action here, but the fog of war makes it very difficult to assess.
https://www.newsweek.com/israel-has-created-new-standard-urb...
I’m unsure why the UN + Arab Nations don’t take control of the situation, get rid of Hamas, provide peacekeeping, integrate Palestine into Israel, and enforce property rights. All this bloodshed is revolting.
Why? They don't care. They are mostly dictatorships, and it seems to me that it's good for the dictators if the conflict continues, so they can use Israel as something external to try to keep the people angry at (lower risk for revolution).
Killing 30 000 * 15 = half a million civilians?
That's choosing to do war crimes or a genocide, plus increasing the risk for more terror attacks in the future
Ugh.
if ( contact.image.ocr().find( 'relief' ) ) contact.bomb()Wouldn't be surprised if this hasn't already been the case in Israel-Palestine already. AI targeting of Palestinians long before October 7th in other words.
ETA:
I wonder if this is going to ruin their SEO...it might be worth a rebrand.
> Fourth, we explain how the army loosened the permitted number of civilians who could be killed during the bombing of a target. Fifth, we note how automated software inaccurately calculated the amount of non-combatants in each household. And sixth, we show how on several occasions, when a home was struck, usually at night, the individual target was sometimes not inside at all, because military officers did not verify the information in real time.
Tbh this feels like making a machine that points at a random point on the map by rolling two sets of dice, and then yelling "more blood for the blood god" before throwing a cluster bomb
be ready to be targeted by AI, from another state, within another war
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai...
Ultimately, it's a calculus of "us vs them" and which lives are valued or devalued.
Relatedly, are police justified when they shoot at a house with 500 rounds, killing the suspect and their entire family that happened to be in the general vicinity? Is the math "one law enforcement > n lives as long as one was a (potential) badguy"?
If you wanted to do this with minimal civilian casualties, then you bring the ground forces in, block by block, and you clear things the old-fashioned way. You take casualties, but those are casualties who signed up to be "warfighters".
Now this IS inflamatory: I think we have a lot of warfighters and cops who are just plain cowards, that's the mentality. Why have a class of trained and armed people who are so afraid of dying that they'd rather kill anything and everything in their path than potentially be injured or killed?
I thought the ethos of the warfighter and law enforcement was "act as a shield, act as a bulwark, save lives, give my life so that others may be free, etc etc". Nowadays its "nah I'm not going in that school, there's badguys with guns and I might die, just stay outside".
That leads to a failure of imagination where somehow "blow up a building with innocent people as long as you got your target" seems somehow justified because you didn't risk a 'good guy' life. Cowardice.
No. It's just a tool. People still configure the parameters and ultimately make decisions. Likewise modern missile do not make conflicts more or less ethical just because they require advanced physics.
I doubt an artillery system using machine learning to correct its trajectory and get better accuracy would be controversial, since the AI in that case is just controlling the path of a shell that an operator has determined needs to hit a target decided upon by humans.
The AI did something, but the IDF used it to justify effectively committing a genocide.
Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets
In the past there was all this talk of nonlethal weaponry, but nowadays it seems to be used at best "in the small", by police and not the military
Killing will only ever get easier and faster and remote from human action, oversight and consequence for the perpetrator. Too fast for humans to understand, to remote too feel
https://twitter.com/Aryan_warlord/status/1774859594747273711
Perfect match for a targeting AI, the AI could even customize each missile as it's being built according to the target it selected.
Let's face it, in any war, civilians are really screwed. It's true here, it was true in Afghanistan or Vietnam or WWII. They get shot at, they get bombed, by accident or not, they get displaced. Milosevic in Serbia didn't need an AI to commit genocide.
The real issue to me is what the belligerents are OK with. If they are ok killing people on flimsy intelligence, I don't see much difference between perfunctory human analysis and a crappy AI. Are we saying that somehow Hamas gets some brownie points for not using an AI?
Instead of the Milosevic example I'd say it's analagous to Dehomag machines during the Holocaust. The Nazis didn't need advanced database systems to attempt a genocide, but having access to them made it far far easier to turn the whole process into a factory line: something predictable and constant that allowed it to achieve a pace and scope far beyond what they would have been able to do otherwise. Similar here, or in other cases where advanced technology is brought to bear in war. Anything that makes human death more automated is, IMO, abhorrent and worth of criticism in it's own right.
I see two cases here. One is that the AI has some non-negligible accuracy, and one where it doesn't. If it's somewhat accurate, then actually, using it is saving civilian lives, attacking only the active enemy.
And if it's inaccurate... Then presumably whoever made it knows it, and whoever uses it knows it's merely a fig leaf for shooting random people, and is ok with that. Is it then worse to kill random people as found by an AI than to drop a bomb somewhere, because you have a hunch there might be a worthwhile target there? This is the bit I'm not sure of.
In this war, it's so easy to find the other side. If you want to recklessly shoot civilians, they are just on the other side of the wall. I'm not sure that AI makes it any easier.
It seems like the whole cell phone infrastructure need to be torn down.
The social media input is terrifying: show any Palestinian sympathies (sentiment analysis) in your posts and you're on the list.
I guess you can do some sort of common principal component analysis (CPCA) from known Hamas persons to create some sort of cluster based on cell phone location data or call data, somewhat like Spotify does with recommendation from "common songs".
I wonder if this might explain why so many journalists are killed, since they probably call Hamas leaders and meet them a lot more than most people in the data set.
That's my understanding. That the whole of the Gaza strip is essentially watched under the equivalent of stingrays and all traffic out is monitored with room 641a style taps.
IMSI seems like a thing that need to be mitigated. We need a FOSS mobile yesterday. Especially when Elon Musk puts cell towers everywhere and most likely give our locations to Washington and by extension Netanyahu.
Minimizing deaths is the humane approach to war. So we move away from broad killing mechanisms (shelling, crude explosives, carpet bombing), in favor of precise killing machines. Drones, targeted missiles and now AI allow you to be ruthlessly efficient in killing an enemy.
The question is - How cold and not-human-like can these methods be, if they are in fact reducing overall deaths ?
I won't pretend an answre is obvious.
The west hasn't seen a real war in a long time. Their impression of war is either ww1 style mass deaths on both sides or overnight annihilation like America's attempts in the middle east. So our vocabulary limits us to words like Genocide, Overthrow, Insurgency, etc. This is war. It might not map onto our intuitions from recent memory, but this is exactly what it looks like.
When you're in a long drawn out war with a technological upper hand...you leverage all technology to help you win. At the same time, once pandoras box is open, it tends to stay open for your adversaries as well. We did well to maintain global consensus on chemical and nuclear warfare. I don't see any such concensus coming out of the AI era just yet.
All I'll say is that I won't be quick to make judgements on the morality of such tech in war. What do you think happened to the spies that were caught due to decoding of the enigma ?
So overfitting or hallucinations as a feature. Scary.
It maybe worth noting that there is at least one notification service out there to draw attention to such posts. Joel spolsky even mentioned such a service that existed back when stackoverflow was first being built.
Human coordination is arguably the most powerful force in existence, especially when coordinating to do certain things.
Also interesting: it would seem(!) that once an article is flagged, it isn't taken down but simply disappears from the articles list. This is quite interesting in a wide variety of ways if you think about it from a global cause and effect perspective, and other perspectives[1]!
Luckily, we can rest assured that all is probably well.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dub8fBuXK_w&pp=ygUZaXRzIGxhdmVuZ...
This system has zero applicability in Ukraine.
This statement means little without knowing the accuracy of a human doing the same job.
Without that information this is an indictment of military operational procedures, not of AI.
So they were having daily quotas for killings. Literally a killing machine with a input capacity of 1200 targets per day that has to be fed. Just like the Nazis during WW2
1. Hebrew University’s Faculty of Repressive Science 2. The spiraling absurdity of Germany’s pro-Israel fanaticism 3. The first step toward disintegrating Israel’s settler machine
As such, their view is not at all balanced or even-handed. Objective truth obviously matters very little to them since they exhibit such open bias and loathing towards Israel and the Jewish people.
Is this any different?
I can’t believe that this would be the very first instance of a statistics based method for finding potential targets.
if the markers, a la features, discussed in the article are anything to go with, it is a very disturbing method of classifying a target. if human evaluators use the same approach to target bombings, then there is no supporting how this war is being fought.
I understand what you are getting at, but if you read the article this is not how this technology is being used, rather the opposite. The AI seems to use very broad criteria / flimsy evidence to decide who is a target, and then it is chosen to strike them specifically when they get home and would typically be surrounded by civilians (mostly women and children).
Their own testing showed 1 in 10 selected targets were not actually militants, but because it is statistically 'correct' (despite loose definitions of correct) 90% of the time all targets will be bombed. Add the fact that collateral damage of 15-20 civilians is accepted even for the lowest ranking militants (and much higher for commanders) who are then targeted with unguided munitions, which makes this quite a lot less 'targeted' and 'efficient' than e.g. US drone strikes in Afghanistan.
I haven't been putting much faith in numbers coming out of the region since Oct. Anyone capable of giving an accurate number is invested enough to be deeply biased in some direction. Well researched sources such as this one are directionally correct. But, you can't blame me for being suspicious of a magazine I just heard of.
> collateral damage of XYZ civilians is accepted
This is an operational decision. Even if the militants were identified by hand, the acceptable collateral was a decision made by some commander. I'm not sure how 'Lavender' (The central topic of this thread) affects this.
One argument is that 'the risk of technology' and 'the risk of how technology makes humans behave' are one and the same.
The article directionally points towards a Hanlon's Razor-esque disregard towards the shortcomings of Lavender. Any time people's lives are at stake, the bar needs to be sky-high. An intelligence operative will be trained to sniff out a fake-informant or a fake-asset from experience. They do not have the same intuitions for a statistical machine, and are likelier to ignore egde-cases, with disastrous outcomes. Some might think this is because 'Lavender coaxes them into doing it'. I believe 'humans are smart enough to know what they're getting into'.
______________________
All this being said, I repeat my earlier statement. We in the west have not seen real-war. We're applying civilian sensibilities to a situation where century long struggles have now morphed into full blown existential hatred among neighbors. US 'missions' in the middle east don't count, because they are fake wars. The US had nothing at stake. One fine day it randomly pulled out of Afghanistan and it affected the life of exactly 'zero' Americans. That's not war, that's military adventurism. The US has only ever sniffed risk 3 times in its existence. Pearl Harbor, WTC & Cuban missle crisis. Look at how it reacted in the immediate after-math of all 3, and you'll know the real face of 'American military'. Every thing else is PR and civilians happily drink the koolaid. (Here on out America = Pax Americana)
Coming back to 'real war'. What are the sensibilities of war when war is real? The price of human life is clearly not the same as peace-time. What collateral damage are Ukraine & Russia accepting as parts of their war? Look at the sheer number of deaths in recent wars/insurgencies [1]. These are mostly civilian deaths. The obvious question is - "If war is always bloody, why is everyone so caught up with this war in particular"?
That's because, Israel is unique in that it is a "western nation" engaging in war post-WW2. Western nations don't fight wars. They settled all neighborhood debates through the bloodiest wars of the 20th century. And foreign risks are crushed through NATO/American military superiority, before they ever gain momentum.
Lavendar and the Israeli military appears to place a low-value on human place. But, is this value lower than other peer-wars, or are we imposing civilian sensibilities onto war time ? I don't know. But, I dislike the hand-wavy confidence with which people choose an answer for this question.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll#Mod...
I mean, is anyone who paid attention surprised by this Lavender system? It's doing exactly what they said they were doing: kill everyone suspected of Hamas affiliation, no matter the cost.
We can have interesting ethical discussions about the AI aspect, but I feel that's not really what this is about.
There is no allegation that the main criteria for the algorithm is "being male."
The allegation is that the human double-checking of the algorithm confirms the target is male (as opposed to woman/child.)
> Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities;
It's clear the the wholesale bombing of communities is occurring. Whole families are being extinguished because they've been seen with a military target.
The first five all seem to apply. It's hard to say exactly where the IDF the blame lies but a decision is being made at some level to wilfully ignore the suffering brought to millions of Gaza's inhabitants. It seems an AI has been left to make some of those decisions. It's not good enough.
Edit: I'm not trying to be facetious or sardonic. I understand urban warfare makes adhering to international law incredibly hard for Israel, but stories like this show that they are not taking even the most reasonable steps to avoid civilian deaths, indeed a lot of their choices seem to rely on civilian suffering to ensure the clearing of Gaza.
We barely trust an AI to take an exit without crashing into a divider, AI hallucinations paired with a poor remit in Gaza mean three generations get wiped out overnight.
How is phoning/texting occupants, roof knocking, leaflets, etc. not reasonable lengths to avoid civilian deaths? If you were the commander what would you do differently while still accomplishing the mission of eliminating Hamas?
> whoever uses it knows it's merely a fig leaf for shooting random people
I think this is the problem, but needs a little more unpacking, because IMO it goes beyond a pure 'fig leaf'. From what I understand it's not just a way to ID who is a combatant: it actively plans bomb targets. The difference is that a fig leaf provides purely pretense, and as you point out that's nothing new: we've had automated ways of ID'ing someone as a criminal or terrorist forever. But this not only provides the pretense of ID'ing someone as a combatant, it also loads the gun and aims it for you. So to me it's more than just someone saying "oh these people were all flagged, so let's plan an attack on them", it's actually the machine drawing up the full plan and just asking you "I found combatants should I kill then [Y]/N?". Both are bad (IMO), but the second one seems like a new evolution in the automation of warfare that I find uniquely concerning.
[0] Expanding on this point a little: combatant status seems ambiguous to me because it's not really a physically measurable variable. A car crashing or an image containing a tumor are all things that can be objectively verified, but the legal worthiness of killing someone for participation in a war is a far more ambiguous concept I think. Is someone who quarters enemy troops a worthy combatant? Someone who provides logistical support? I see lots of room for ambiguity that would be ugly to encode in data.
972mag is a left-wing media and what they say should be viewed with skepticism because they follow a pro-Palestine narrative.
On silver lining for those who lost their lives to his particular holocaust: These technologies in particular have a tendency of ending up used against the very people who created them or authorized their use.
AI
Yeah, yeah guidelines and all.
Just watched someone get their post deleted for criticizing Israel's online PR/astroturfing.
Israel's ability to shape online discussion has left a bad taste in my mouth. Trust is insanely low, I think the US should get a real military base in Israel in exchange for our effort. If the US gets nothing for their support, I'd be disgusted.
Posts do get flagged and/or killed, whether by user flags, software, or mods, but you can always see all of those if you turn 'showdead' on in your profile. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
If you notice a post getting flagged and/or killed that shouldn't have been, you can let us know and we'll take a look. You can also use the 'vouch' feature, also described in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Sporktacular&next=39...
Can you explain why would the USA support one country instead of appeasing 300 million in the area?
What are the benefits out of being so pro israel?
The second is this: Why is a western ally allowed to have Apartheid, allowed to kill thousands of women and children with or without AI, besiege (medieval style) 2.3mil civilians, starve and dehydrate them to death, all the while comparing a tiny area without war planes, without a standing military, without statehood to Nazi Germany and Gaza to Dresden to completely level Gaza? To Nazi Germany that had the most advanced technology of their time, threatening the whole world? Dehumanising Palestinians by declaring them all „terrorists“, mocking their dead, mutilated bodies in Telegram groups with 125k Israelis (imagine 4mil US citizens in a group mocking other nations dead children). Why do we allow this to happen? Why is a western ally allowed to do this while almost all our western governments fund and support this and silence protest against it?
How is this even possible to do without having the system make a lot of mistakes? As much AI talk there is on HN these days, I would have recalled an article that talks about this kind of military-grade capability.
Are there any resources I can look at, and maybe someone here can talk about it from experience.
I'm not sure what is wrong with this technology. They barely say at the achievements this technology has gained, and only speaking about the bad side.
This article tries to make you think behind the scenes that Israel is a technology advanced, strong country, and Gaza are poor people whom did nothing.
It didn't even speak about the big 7 October massacre, where tens or even a hundreds innocent women were raped, because they were Israelis. I'm not sure when this kind of behavior is accepted in any way, and it makes you think that Hamas is not a legit organization, but just barbaric monsters.
Be sure that Gaza civilians support the massacre, and a survey reports that 72% of the Palestinians support the massacre[1], spoiler: it's much higher.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/21/middleeast/palestinians-b...
10% still seems too high, but 90% would be absolutely nuts.
It seems like Israel is already bombing indiscriminately, with 35 000 killed (the majority of whom are women and children). Was AI used for these targets?
History is going show a similar story to when IBM helped facilitate the Holocaust, this genocide also has people working on tools that enable it; people "just doing their job."
Did AI target World Central Kitchen or the 200+ humanitarians, journalists, hostages and medics? This is just one aspect of Apartheid Israel's war crimes.
Apartheid Israel seems to be a pariah state, if it's not with their hacking or bombing consulates, it's with the military industrial complex relationship with the US. Do they think their actions are conducive to their well-being?
US supporting Israel makes very little sense.
That being said, Trump signed bill to removed reporting of drone strikes by US military and he approved more strikes than Obama.
So US likely has amplified systems compared to Lavender and Gospel. We'd have no idea.
This season of Daily Show about AI comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20TAkcy3aBY
Everyone claiming AI is going to do great good, solve climate change yada yada is deeply in an illusion.
AI will only amplify what corporations and state powers already do.
Every. Single. Time.
(...) at some point we relied on the automatic system, and we only checked that [the target] was a man — that was enough. It doesn’t take a long time to tell if someone has a male or a female voice (...)
Why would half a dozen, active military offcers brag about careless use of tech and bombing families with children while they sleep risking accusation of treason?
Feels like well done propaganda more than anything else to me.
It's plausible they use AI. It's also plausible they don't that much.
It's plausible it has high false positive rate. It's also plausible it has multiple layers of crosschecks and has very high accuracy - better than human personel.
It's plausible it is used in rush without any doublechecks at all. It's also plausible it's used with or after other intelligence. It's plausible it's used as final verification only.
It's plausible that targets are easier to locate home. It's plausible it's not, ie. it may be easier to locate them around listed, known operation buildings, tracked vehicles, while known, tracked mobile phone is used etc.
It's plausible that half a dozen active officers want to share this information. It's also plausible that narrow group of people have access to this information. It's plausible they would not engage in activity that could be classified as treason. It's also plausible most personel simply doesn't know the origin of orders up the chain, just immediate.
It's plausible it's real information. It's also plausible it's fake or even AI generated, good quality, possibly intelligence produced fake.
Frankly looking at AI advances I'd be surprised if propaganda quality would lag behind operational, on the ground use.
- Weaponized financial trojan horses like crypto
- Weaponized chemical warfare through addictions
- Drone swarm attacks in Ukraine
- AI social-media engineered outrage to change publics perception
- Impartial, jingoistic mainstream war propaganda
- Censorship and manipulation of neutral views as immoral
- Weaponized AI software
Looks like a major escalation towards a total war of sorts.
But what is even sadder is that the supposedly morally superior western world is entirely bribed and blackmailed to stand behind Israel. And then you have countries like Germany where you get thrown in jail for being upset at Israel.
That is appalling.
There has been no mass self-correction to my knowledge that would avert this kind of destructive behavior.
But in saying that, I am fully aware that most of such behavior stems from people who are in charge of the world at a political level.
Is it implausible to think that this is something that will have to change in order for the world to change?
The war doesn’t serve anyone but a few rotten minds who are trying to make decisions on behalf of millions if not billions of people.
And we share a similar nudge. I do think that was is happening in the world today is a mere preparation (of society) for a massive power struggle in various parts of the world that will inevitably lead to a full-blown war. But this is only my personal feeling/interpretation.
I realize this seems almost unrealistically upbeat, and most people don’t want to believe it given what we see in the media every day. Note that I’m not arguing against increasing global instability, which will become worse if Russia triumphs in Ukraine (whatever form that could take) or the US continues to turn its back on its allies.
Disinformation and AI fakery via social media are probably the scariest things to me on your list. Twitter is now a garbage dump for this stuff, but the good news is that it is hemorrhaging both users and money.
Let’s say, for the sake of the thought experiment, that every weekday, a small swarm of killer drones is released in your city. These drones reliably, randomly target and kill 250 commuters per weekday.
That’s only 62,500 people per year. Pretty mild. Certainly nowhere near as bad as Covid, maybe about as bad as a bad flu year, right? Heart disease kills about 700,000 people a year, so it’s not even 10% of that. Barely registers on the dashboard.
War is terrible. War has always been terrible. It was almost certainly worse in the past, but it still sucks now. Most of the things you mention were way worse 100 years ago.
Sure, AI didn't write the propaganda, instead humans did. The affect was the same.
Back in 2002 or so, a friend of mine swore blind that an American had been arrested for wearing a "give whirled peas a chance" T-shirt — which is an anecdotal way of saying: are you sure you've got the full story?
I'm learning German by listening to „Langsam Gesprochene Nachrichten“ by Deutsche Welle, and it definitely looks like a lot of people are less than enthusiastic about how Israel's forces are conducting themselves in war despite the constant note that Hamas is (1) a terror organisation that (2) started this particular round by killing 1000 civilians: https://www.dw.com/en/israel-withdraws-from-gazas-devastated...
Germany is also extremely sensitive to every aspect of this due to the events of 80 years ago.
Reports I've seen from the BBC show that there are significant protests in Israel, by those who consider the war to be justified, against their own government, not only for dropping the ball by failing to prevent the initial attack, but also for driving a wedge between them and their closest allies with the conduct of the war: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68722308
>In Berlin, authorities banned a pro-Palestinian rally from being held.[176] A number of spontaneous demonstrations protesting the bombing of Gaza took place across the country, but were forcefully broken up by police.[177] Germany banned fundraising, the displaying of the Palestinian flag and the wearing of the keffiyeh.[13]
>In Neukölln, a neighborhood of Berlin, pro-Palestinian protesters described police crackdowns on protest that were "shocking and violent".[180]
Add religious indoctrination to that. A huge number of Americans are evangelical Christians who unconditionally support Israel because they are utterly convinced that the continued existence of Israel is a necessary prerequisite for the reincarnation of their god.
That said, there's also something noticeably different about this conflict. For the first time, the reporting I've seen in the mainstream press has generally been trending negative towards Israel. For example, the Washington Post has had a recent article on a press tour the IDF led of the burned-out remains of the hospital it attacked, clearly part of a campaign to justify why it was necessary, and the entire article was dripping with subtext of "we don't buy what the IDF is saying". And even the political headlines are generally framed in a way to keep you asking "should the US even be supporting Israel?"
Israel has already squandered all the sympathy it got from the terrorist attacks last October, and it's well on the way to squandering all residual sympathy from the Holocaust. And the Israeli political and military establishment seems to have zero clue that this is going on.
At times, Israel allowed for a two-state solution but Hamas wanted every Jew there dead or gone. They’d push them into the ocean itself if allowed. People called for Israel reducing their presence in Gaza for peace. Doing that led to more attacks instead of more peace.
Recently, Hamas killed and kidnapped civilians on purpose. Whereas, Israel warned people to leave before the invasion where they then focused on military targets. If people stayed and were connected to those, they’ll likely die during the invasion. The OP is about people who stayed that are mostly connected to militants. OP writer pities their families but not all the non-militant families Hamas killed.
While both sides are plenty guilty, one is actually aiming for peace, focusing on military targets, and reducing civilian casualties. The other broke peace, attacked civilians, and called for more genocide. The difference between these two strategies shows that anyone wanting long-term stability with less murder in the area should support Israel.
Also, Israel is allied more with us while their opponents keep funding terrorist groups, including our own enemies. They’re also strong, economic partners. Why on earth would we ditch our friends to back people who do little for us and support our enemies?
1. “How the Israel lobby moved to quash rising dissent in Congress against Israel’s apartheid regime”
2. “Top Pro-Israel Group Offered Ocasio-Cortez $100,000 Campaign Cash”
3. “Senate Candidate in Michigan Says He Was Offered $20 Million to Challenge Tlaib”
[1]: https://theintercept.com/2023/11/27/israel-democrats-aipac-b...
[2]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ocasio-cortez-aipac-offer-con...
[3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/us/politics/hill-harper-r...
Also, The Guardian corroborated +972's reporting on this matter recently: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai...
And, while I have you I had a few questions, if you don't mind:
1. What drove the IDF's intelligence failure on Hamas activity before Oct 7?
2. With or without intelligence, why was the IDF unable to defend such an important security zone? One that I'd argue is world class, in terms of technology, troops, and arms.
> Why would these people have such important jobs within the military if they are so anti-Israel?
Soldiers are not screened for philosophical or nationalistic biases when they join intelligence or elite cyber units. They are only screened for capability, and patriotism is assumed. This has led to many anti-Zionists serving in very senior positions in the army. I've personally heard senior IDF officer rail against the religion and the country.
> 1. What drove the IDF's intelligence failure on Hamas activity before Oct 7?
Multiple factors. The social turmoil from the Judicial Reform fiasco definitely weakened us, as many left-wing intel personnel refused to serve, while others kept serving but stopped doing their jobs. Hamas also played an excellent game, keeping their mission secret amongst top commanders until the morning of Oct 7. I believe that our agencies had all the pieces of the puzzle, but since they weren't talking to each other, they didn't put it together until it had already happened. If Israel wants to survive (speaking as a resident and a soldier), then the entire intel apparatus has to be overhauled. Otherwise, we will be visiting the gas chambers quite soon.
> 2. With or without intelligence, why was the IDF unable to defend such an important security zone? One that I'd argue is world class, in terms of technology, troops, and arms.
Also, there are a few reasons. The soldiers there had been lulled into a sense of false security, and they paid for it with their lives. Most of them (about 350) were wiped out within the first hour or two. Again, Hamas played an excellent game. They brought a fully-automatic grenade launcher with an enormous amount of ammo and annihilated one base within a few minutes. That took out most of the infantry in the area. Meanwhile the pilots were not able to get into the air because of the Judicial Reform fiasco. They had not flown in 6 months out of protest against the reform, and as such their planes had not been refuelled or used in any way, and were not operational. But most of all, the left-wing generals that dominate our army truly believed that we had entered an era where no more wars would be fought, despite there being zero evidence that this was the case. Hamas understood this, and used it against us to mount a flawless surprise attack.
When Israel does something wrong, like kill civilians and/or foreign aid workers, do the Jewish people all over the world collectively bear the guilt of it? Obviously not. You can’t have it both ways.
> what other country in the world can you say that a country is identical to its people?
We are unlike any other nation or state on earth - I mean, we are DEFINITELY judged differently! lol. Indeed, you cannot judge us like you would any other state, because we are unique. E.g. there is no state that is generally considered the national home of the Christians, or the Buddhists, or the Muslims.
Legally, all Jews have a say in Israel's decisions via the Law of Return, whether they use that privilege or not, so at the legal level there is a level of accountability.
> When Israel does something wrong, like kill civilians and/or foreign aid workers, do the Jewish people all over the world collectively bear the guilt of it?
Yes, they absolutely do. You are correct in your assertion that you can't have it both ways, and we aren't asking for that. All Jews worldwide should be judged on the actions of the Israeli State, because Israel is the nation-state of the Jews.
Conversely, when Israel does something good or right or praiseworthy, every Jew around the world is entitled to that praise, and feels proud of their home, even if they are currently not living there.
[177]: "Police broke up the protest by force stating that, according to a police spokesperson, public safety was threatened by “anti-Israel and violence-glorifying chants” and the wearing of masks."
[13]: "“Hamas is already labelled as a terrorist organisation in Germany, but now Berlin will prohibit any activities in support of the group or its agenda,” Scholz said in a speech to parliament. The ban will apply to fundraising, the display of the Palestinian flag, and even the wearing of the Palestinian keffiyeh."
[180]: that one does sound bad even in the source material, I'm not going to attempt to delve deeper into that and instead will take it at face value.
Intentionally attacking a civilian target (a family in their home) without warning.
The what I'd do is a seventy year answer. It's immaterial to the occurrence of war crimes.
The seventy year answers are political cop-outs and not actionable by any commander. These discussions never go anywhere because people are naive about war, the laws of war, urban combat, insurgencies, or their military strategy invokes time-travel.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/24/opinion/gaza-israel-war.h...
https://lite.cnn.com/2023/11/07/opinions/israel-hamas-gaza-n...
> The destruction and suffering, as awful as they are, don’t automatically constitute war crimes – otherwise, nearly any military action in a populated area would violate the laws of armed conflict
> When Hamas uses a hospital, school or mosque for military purpose, it can lose its protected status and become a legal military target.
> Like all similar conflicts in modern times, a battle in Gaza will look like the entire city was purposely razed to the ground or indiscriminately carpet bombed – but it wasn’t. Israel possesses the military capacity to do so, and the fact that it doesn’t employ such means is further evidence that it is respecting the rules of war.
Targeting the sleeping family of a target is intentionally targeting civilians; a war crime.
The opinions of you and John Spencer have not swayed my own.
Not sure these three links show that "supposedly morally superior western world is entirely bribed and blackmailed". Especially on the "entirely" and "blackmail" parts.
Focusing on international interference by one state does not reduce the blame that can be thrown at another. There's no limited reserve of blame that requires to be cleverly distributed. The undemocratic influence over public institutions by lobbies, like Qatar's (see Qatargate in Europe) or Israeli-linked ones alike and many more, are the death of our societies.
“Saw you blowing up the children…”
“It wasn’t me.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/08/middleeast/gaza-israelis-...
If so it's worth noting that we have much better data on that campaign. We know exactly how many Hezbollah members have died because that organization actually releases that information. We have good numbers on civilian casualties. Naturally there are many different factors but I think Israel has done a much better job over there in terms of minimizing civilian casualties. There have been some notable incidents like IIRC journalists getting hit, but the overall numbers I think are significantly weighed towards military targets.
I wouldn't give them credit. It's a very different environment and that alone is enough to explain fewer civilian deaths. Even if they cared exactly as much as they do about Gazan civilians they would be killing fewer civilians as a proportion.
...
Khodr reported: “This is not the first time a health centre has been hit in the ongoing confrontations along the border. We’ve seen numerous attacks against health centres especially in front-line villages and we have seen paramedics killed.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/27/hezbollah-launches-...
EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hezbollah_confl...
484 fighters killed
53–63 civilians killed in Lebanon 15 Syrian civilians killed
This seems like a more than acceptable ratio between civilians and combatants in a war, no?
It's worth mentioning Hezbollah is the entity that started attacking Israel after Oct 7th and is also in violation of security council resolution 1701: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counci...
I'm sorry. This is so terrible that humor is the only recourse left to me. We were once afraid of AI drones with guns murdering the wrong people, but now we have an AI that is being used to plan a systematic bombing campaign. Human pilots and all the associated support personal are its tools and liberal quotas have been set on how many of the wrong people are permissible for each strike to hit. Yet again, reality has surpassed science fiction nightmare.
The future is now.
It's a vanishingly small list. Virtually everyone wearing a (D) or (R) hat is extremely interested in sending our tax money towards this purpose, which fund programs exactly like in this article.
How do you think they process millions of call records, intercepted messages, sim swaps, etc?
People thought this way about the machine gun, the armored tank, the atom bomb. But once the genie is out there's no putting it back in.
As an aside, I think this is a good example of how humans and AI will work together to bring efficiency to whatever tasks need to be accomplished. There's a lot of fear of AI taking jobs, but I think it was Peter Thiel who said years ago that future AI would work side by side humans to accomplish tasks. Here we are.
"A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE
THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION"
Thousands of years ago, gunpowder was invented. This technology enabled humans to finally break through mountains and build tunnels. It enabled the beautiful display of fireworks. But the misuse of this technology ultimately leads to destructions of cultures and civilizations.
This latest development with AI as implemented in Lavender — is one that’s exceptionally dangerous. This latest misuse of technology should concern all.
We must not allow the proliferation of this brilliant technology to be used for the purpose of destruction. It concerns me greatly.
I hope that we could resolve conflicts and differences in ways that are civil.
USA didn't exactly have much stricter conditions or way better accurancy of their intelligence. They did nothing qualitatively different. They just labeled anyone in the blast radious as unknown enemy combatants in the reports. And USA never had to operate at this volume. I guess that's just how modern war looks from the position of superior firepower.
We can kill more. Feed us targets. We can do it cheaply and fast. 10-20 civilians per one speculative target is acceptable for us.
Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
AI system says person X in location Y needs to be taken out due to "terrorist association". Check if location Y is cleared for operations. Command has given general authority for operations in this region.
An autonomous drone is deployed like a Patriot missile shooting out from some array into the night sky, quietly flies to location Y, identifies precise GPS coordinates and sends itself including a sizeable warhead into the target. Later, some office dude sits down at his desk at 8:30am, opens some reporting program.
"Ah, 36 kills last night." Takes a sip of coffee.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness [2]: https://blog.eutopian.io/tags/strategic-software/
This needs to be applied to nation-states & so much more we're engineering.
I'd love to see a design methodology grounded in accounting for all nondual needs of humans. This idea usually comes with complaints of that being an impossible task, without really understanding the issue.
There are also numerous other organisations with such standards.
So sorry.
Let's start with a definition:
sim·u·la·tion /ˌsimyəˈlāSH(ə)n/ noun noun: simulation; plural noun: simulations
1. imitation of a situation or process
2. the action of pretending; deception
3. the production of a computer model of something, especially for the purpose of study.
#1 and #2 are pretty easy to prove, just look at journalism (arguably the main source of authoritative "plot twists and general stimulation", or many other broadly respected/worshipped disciplines, like "science" and their Theory of "Everything"), and the effect it has on people (hint: they typically believe it is an accurate representation of reality, you can tell because they will cite it as proof of their beliefs, and get angry if you do not accept it as proof).
One then runs into another problem: this will be rejected, because that "is not" a simulation, which brings us to yet another level of the simulation: language - the words we use to describe reality are objectively and obscenely incorrect, most of the time. Sometimes people will notice this, other times they will not - whether they do or not can be predicted with astonishing accuracy regardless of the person or their educational level based on whether it supports their pre-existing belief or not.
This basically ends up with a paradox: from most phenomenological perspectives (the main perspective, on a weighted causality basis), it is not possible for us to be living in a simulation, because of the simulation (culture, yet another level). It's basically bulletproof, a lot like like religion but even trickier and stronger.
> or do we care enough to know?
Consider the time and dedication it took to solve the many thousands of things that used to be a mystery - indeed, we do not care enough to take on solving this relatively simple problem. If you try to do it during a conversation, most people will object, usually passionately, based on memes like "We don't have time for that", "That's not what this place is for", etc. I'd even say that certain people in certain positions may like things just as they are, this state of affairs has high utility.
“The latest death toll from the attack is now 767 civilians, 20 hostages and 376 members of the security forces, giving a total of 1,163. One person remains missing.” https://www.barrons.com/news/new-tally-puts-october-7-attack...
The question I’m implicitly raising is why would one be worse than the other?
In fact, Israel is counting every adult male as Hamas in their death counts. If we were to use “IDF rules” and count every adult male victim of the Oct 7th attack as a “soldier” (a claim made by Hamas, bolstered by the fact that almost military service is required of most Jews in Israel), then the ratio would be less than 2:1.
IHL actually prohibits the killing of persons who are not combatants or "fighters" of an armed group. Only those who have the "continuous function" to "directly participate in hostilities"[1] may be targeted for attack at any time. Everyone else is a civilian that can only be directly targeted when and for as long as they directly participate in hostilities, such as by taking up arms, planning military operations, laying down mines, etc.
That is, only members of the armed wing of Hamas (not recruiters, weapon manufacturers, propagandists, financiers, …) can be targeted for attack - all the others must be arrested and/or tried. Otherwise, the allowed list of targets of civilians gets so wide than in any regular war, pretty much any civilian could get targeted, such as the bank employee whose company has provided loans to the armed forces.
Lavender is so scary because it enables Israel's mass targeting of people who are protected against attack by international law, providing a flimsy (political but not legal) justification for their association with terrorists.
[1]: https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/assets/files/other/icrc-002-0990...
Its success was so marked that it was immediately decided in 1893 to move a Tabulator to Ellis Island, to count the ethnics from the source with Hollerith's new technology. Herman Hollerith had great success in his own lifetime, the technology eventually becoming the core of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, otherwise known, a decade later, as International Business Machines.
The establishment of this clear process surrounding race - actual race law - was, believe it or not, pretty novel in Western history. A lot of old-timey race policy - like the relationship between a monarch and the Jews, or what exactly a visiting Muslim could or couldn't do (like sell and buy slaves cough Venice cough) - this race stuff was almost always very, ah, what we'd call "tribal knowledge". A Jew in the Middle Ages could have far greater rights and lifestyle than in later periods, but those rights were completely unpredictable; this was true to greater or lesser extent for many "outsiders" in the early European era. Even in 1900 American innovation in race law - based on "Science!" - was a new thing, and extremely exciting to the enthusiasts of folk movements[2] crisscrossing our entire civilization[3] at the time. One of those was Willy Heidinger, who established Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft to produce license-built Hollerith machines. World events interceded, however, and the German civil service infrastructure to run a census would not be present until much later . . 1933, in fact, when things would get very spicy indeed in the world of race "science".
And then, of course, cataclysm: the end of the European Order.
On the European continent, a debt to truth was paid. A hundred million dead or maimed, nations wrecked, a whole world - a weltanschauung - burnt down to the foundations - below the foundations. But elsewhere - like in the New World - the lesson was not as stark. And in yet other places the inverse lesson was learned: once you determine a person is not a person, you must brutalize yourself and your population immediately, before the soon-to-be-unpeople realizes that the struggle is existential.
Let's wrap this up.
What 20th century Race Science/Race Law were trying to do was make sense of something as complicated as human culture but using the sciences they understood: 19th century statistics, the physics of iron and steam. Those were the sciences with the capital backing, so - of course! - those were the only science that mattered. Today, we're looking at another complex element of the human experience - human language, human consciousness - and again, we're looking at it through the science that's got the most capital backing it: computation. That's how "text" somehow, incredibly, came to contain "language". Or how "scarcity" was represented by "money" - as if there were any N-dimensional descriptions that could adequately vectorize either of those concepts.
Ultimately, when you really dig yourself into these sorts of artificial - if not downright dishonest - "science-y" establishments, when you start imposing them on the world, you don't break out of them easily. Or without damage. The people making use of your LLM widget do not understand the math - all they know, like the race science of previous centuries - is that it's Science-y. It might as well be wearing a Mitre and Crosier.
[1] What those actions were, is a subject for another post. Probably inside a soon-to-be-flagged topic.
[2] The American example in race law was also very exciting to a certain Mr. Adolf Hitler, as well. You can read all about it in Mein Kampf. Hitler's attitude towards America is really fascinating stuff, but an entirely other subject.
[3] And beyond! Ethnonationalism spread like fire, as colonized peoples realized this could be their big ticket towards peerage in the European age.
There is some incredible magic that often happens: as soon as anyone is targeted and killed, they immediately transform from civilians to "collaborators", "terrorists", "militants" etc. Of course everything is classified and restricted to avoid anyone snooping around and asking questions.
We all know (if we stop and think) that a person can be both a teacher and a terrorist.
But according to media here almost every victim except top Hamas brass seems to be referred to by their whatever else they were besides terrorists and the terrorists (or even just soldier) part get hushed down.
So if some guy in a track suit and flip-flops uses an anti tank grenade launcher, discards the empty tube, walks away, and gets lit up, then the next day the Internet is awash with videos of the “IDF murdering a civilian!”
For reference, I think both sides are in the wrong in this conflict, and Israel more than Gaza.
However, the Internet is full of armchair international law experts that are being played like a fiddle by Hamas’ propaganda arm.
Speaking of international laws of combat: no protections apply to non-uniformed combatants pretending to be civilians. None. They can be tortured, executed on the spot, whatever.
If you want protections to apply to you, then wear a uniform or never go anywhere near a gun.
In the Guardian article, an IDF spokesperson says it exists and is only used as the former, and I'm sure that's what was intended and maybe even what the higher-ups think, but I suspect it's become the latter.
The Guardian article makes it clear prior to those denials that those higher-up appear to not to care how accurate it is and appear to be making a conscious choice to accept the fact it is highly flawed on the basis that it might kill some of whom they would legitimately claim as valid targets.
It's clear from the operational details discussed in the article the critical target number is largely number of kills, regardless of whether they are any actual material threat, or not.
Cull predominantly the male population and their family members, not assassinate active threats is the overall impression I got of the Israeli strategy.
I must add that anyone claiming the use of AI and inference models in this way is in anyway justifiable needs to seek help. The claim of 90% accuracy is almost certainly over claiming by over 100%.
Intended by who? You don't kill 13,000 children by accident.
I think the loop-hole here is that a weapon manufacturing facility is almost certainly a military strategic target, and international law allows you to target the infrastructure provided the military advantage gained is porportional to the civilian death.
So you can't target the individuals but according to international law its fine to target the building they are in while the individuals are still inside provided its militarily worth it.
It seems wrong that you can't target weapon manufacturers, can you cite a source? Weapon manufacturers contribute to the military action, and destroying weapon manufacturers contributes to military advantage.
For a source, you can check out the Red Cross document I linked. Specifically, Ctrl+F for "continuous combat function" and read the commentary on recommendation V. The Guidance is considered authoritative in legal circles.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/hamas-is-using-unexplo...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-03/world-central-kitchen...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-02/israeli-strike-that-k...
Pretty disgraceful (which itself feels a disgracefully unimpactful thing to say regarding people losing their lives whilst doing charity work).
The problem with Hamas is that they don't shy away from hiding combattants in civilian clothings or use women and children as suicide bombers. There is more than enough evidence of this tactic, dating back many many years [1].
By not just not preventing, but actively ordering such war crimes, Hamas leadership has stripped its civilian population of the protections of international law.
> Otherwise, the allowed list of targets of civilians gets so wide than in any regular war, pretty much any civilian could get targeted, such as the bank employee whose company has provided loans to the armed forces.
In regular wars, it's uniformed soldiers against uniformed soldiers, away from civilian infrastructure (hospitals, schools, residential areas). The rules of war make deviating from that a war crime on its own, simply because it places the other party in the conflict of either having no chance to wage the war or to commit war crimes on their own.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_child_suicide_bombers_b...
You completely lose any credibility with this statement. Civilians can't be "stripped" of protections of international law.
In theory, yes. In practice--in which make believe world is this true?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismail_Haniyeh
Always interesting to me how western diplomats do not just right out reject bombing of diplomatic buildings, but search for stupid justifications, if it's "others" being bombed and not their team.
Or politicians who don't reject targeting of other politicians' families for killing, when it's the politicians they "don't like" or whatever, and even tacitly support it. Or who don't say a word when a hospital is attacked and hundreds of people murdered in it over several weeks, and ultimately destroyed, but blab something about right to self-defence constantly, or IHL which according to legal experts is used mostly to enable mass murder, not to stop it. Kinda paradoxical for a law that was meant to prevent needless suffering.
It's like all these people have a death wish, because they're setting standards for future wars. And there will be future wars, even in Europe. Anyway, I lost all respect for all the idiot politicians I sadly voted for, who justify day and night the murder of medics, whole families, children, starvation, etc., when it's "the other", and are all up in arms when it's "us". I certainly won't be fighting for any of them, when the war comes here. They have 0 standards. I'll let them die according to their wishes and standards.
It makes sense. Blowing up a military HQ with a clerk in it makes sense. Blowing up a clerk walking on the sidewalk seems like a wasted effort.
You can come up with all sorts of justifications for anything. At the end of the day, time and time again, over the top escalation usually hurts the stronger party. Asymmetrical warfare doesn’t garner sympathy or military advantages to the stronger party.
> Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark by all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets.
Obviously any judgement is probabilistic.
My understanding is that AI in it's current form is not an applicable technology to be anywhere near this type of use.
Again my understanding: Inference models by their very nature are largely non-deterministic, in terms of being able to evaluate accurately against specific desired outcomes. They need large scale training data available to provide even low levels of accuracy. That type of training data just isn't available, its all likely to be based on one big hallucination, is my take. I'd be surprised if this AI model was even 10% accurate. It wouldn't surprise me if it was less than 1% accurate. Not that accuracy appears to be critical from what I've read.
The Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai..., makes me wonder whether AI development should be allowed at all. Didn't even have that thought before today.
This specific application and the claimed rationale is as close as I have come to seeing what I consider true and deliberate "Evil application" of technology out in the open.
Is this a naive take?
I wonder what the alternative is in a case like this. I know very little about military strategy-- without the AI would Israel have been picking targets less, or more haphazardly? I think there may be some mis-reading of this article where people imagine that if Israel weren't using an AI they wouldn't drop any bombs at all, that's clearly unlikely given that there's a war on. Obviously people, including innocents, are killed in war, which is why we all loathe war and pray for the current one to end as quickly as possible.
This is the second paragraph:
"In addition to talking about their use of the AI system, called Lavender, the intelligence sources claim that Israeli military officials permitted large numbers of Palestinian civilians to be killed, particularly during the early weeks and months of the conflict."
If this is about the hostages, why hasn't Israel agreed to more ceasefires to save them?
>processing masses of data to rapidly identify potential “junior” operatives to target. Four of the sources said that, at one stage early in the war, Lavender listed as many as 37,000 Palestinian men who had been linked by the AI system to Hamas or PIJ.
This is really no different than how the world was working in 2001 and choosing who to send to Gitmo and other more secretive prisons, or bombing their location
More than anything else it feels like just like in the corporate world, the engineers in the army are overselling the AI buzzword to do exactly what they were doing before it existed
If you use your paypal account to send money to an account identified as ISIS, you're going to get a visit from a 3 letter organization really quick. This sounds exactly like that from what the users are testifying to. Any decision to bomb or not bomb a location wasn't up to the AI, but to humans
By the world you mean the US, but yes you are correct.
"NSA targets SIM cards for drone strikes, ‘Death by unreliable metadata’"
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2475921/whistleblower-...
"Gitmo" didn't open until 2002
I was working in Urs's Google Technical Infrastructure division. I read about the project in the news. Urs had a meeting about it where he lied to us, saying the contract was only $9M. It had already been expanded to $18M and was on track for $270M. He and Jeff Dean tried to downplay the impact of their work. Jeff Dean blinked constantly (lying?) while downplaying the impact. He suddenly stopped blinking when he began to talk about the technical aspects. I instantly lost all respect for him and the company's leadership.
Strong abilities in engineering and business often do not come with well-developed morals. Sadly, our society is not structured to ensure that leaders have necessary moral education, or remove them when they fail so completely at moral decisions.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai...
And, personally, I think that stories like this are of public interest - while I won’t ask for it directly, I hope the flag is removed and the discussion can happen.
I would hope they can be unflagged and merged, this appears to be an important story about a novel use of technology.
> "The Lavender machine joins another AI system, “The Gospel,” about which information was revealed in a previous investigation by +972 and Local Call in November 2023, as well as in the Israeli military’s own publications. A fundamental difference between the two systems is in the definition of the target: whereas The Gospel marks buildings and structures that the army claims militants operate from, Lavender marks people — and puts them on a kill list."
It's one thing to use these systems to mine data on human populations for who might be in the market for a new laptop, so they can be targeted with advertisements - it's quite different to target people with bombs and drones based on this technology.
Both use personal metadata, and both can horribly get it wrong.
I would argue that it's likely the only outcome it has had that directly relates to IDF objectives has probably been negative (i.e. the unintended killing of hostages).
Sadly, I think that the continued use of this AI is supported because it is helping to provide cover for individuals involved in war crimes. I wouldn't be surprised if the AI really weren't very sophisticated at all and that to serve the purpose of cover that doesn't matter.
The world should not forget this.
The World Central Kitchen attack appears to have used smart munitions (missiles from a drone) on a mobile truck.
How far does the AI system go… is it behind the AI decision to starve the population of Gaza?
And if it is behind the strategy of starvation as a tool of war, is it also behind the decision to kill the aid workers who are trying to feed the starving?
How far does the AI system go?
Also, can an AI commit a war crime? Is it any defence to say, “The computer did it!” Or “I was just following AI’s orders!”
There’s so much about this death machine AI I would like to know.
Turning off comments makes as much sense as just posting the heading and no link or attribution.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/what-we-know-so-fa...
> It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
> Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.
[0] https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20240403-gaza-aid-wo...
Brings the Ironies of Automation paper to mind: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation
Specifically: If _most_ of a task is automated, human oversight becomes near useless. People get bored, are under time pressure, don't find enough mistakes etc and just don't do the review job they're supposed to do anymore.
A dystopian travesty.
What is the alleged war crime in using a machine for target filtration?
But blaming AI is just easier than acknoledging at every step of this theres a human being Oking it, the war is Ok'd by a human, the target list is ok'd by a human, the missle launch/bomb drop is ok'd by a human, the fucking trigger is pulled by a human.
But sure because the target list was vetted by an AI its the AI's fault.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-10/palantir-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/13/palantir-ceo-says-outspoken-...
The computer basically appeared to randomise a high number of people to kill based on a very shallow dataset, weak data linking and a high desire to kill people who are Palestinian.
It's hard to read the details from the Guardian article and think of it as anything other than a randomised Israeli state murder machine. I can't envisage it being accurate to a point any reasonable person would accept it be used against someone they know, in any circumstances.
That it targeted 10's of thousands is utterly horrifying. That it was involved in any actual battleground scenario makes me think those involved in it's creation and sale are culpable.
The “AI” exists to retcon the justification for any particular genocidal act, but this is really just an old school mindless slaughter driven by anger and racism.
I know roughly ~1000 people. Maybe 10 of them have the physical capability of killing someone, in case you don't know, it's not actually that easy to do it yourself.
Of those not all could mentally do it under anything but the most extreme of circumstances. 2, maybe 3 might be actually capable of ending a life under extreme circumstances.
With a gun probably, at a guess, ~400 - 700 could kill someone if they got anxious/scared enough is my bet. Even if I'm way off it's a lot more than without a gun. Couple of hundred at least. Not 2, or 3!
So yes, I'm sorry, guns definitely, 100% kill people.
And more people will absolutely kill someone if they possess a gun, than if the didn't. And by extension same is true if AI.
I'm interested how you even come up with that response? It's obviously factually and logically wrong. What makes you think it makes a reasonable argument to anyone?
Also, worth pointing out, thar AI in this case is insanely unfit for it's purpose (unlike a gun) and will have randomly killed lots of innocent people, even if the AI algorithm says otherwise.
I give you a gun and say "shoot whoever you choose with this gun, the choice is yours".
I give you an AI powered gun and say "use this however you choose, I have programmed it to automatically shoot in certain circumstances".
In the latter case, I have some responsibility, because I shared in the decision making by programming the gun. Through my code I have put my proverbial finger on the trigger, right next to your finger.
Someone will double down and include AI into the execution phase via AI controlled drones, tanks, etc. Then they will claim no responsibility and blame the ghost-in-the-shell.
I really doubt that's the case, seems more like a "fire first if any suspicion at all and ask questions later" policy. If there was an intentional policy to kills journalists, aid workers and medical staff you'd see a lot more dead.
And you have to be extremely naive or one sided to not realize that Hamas does use those type of roles as cover for their operations.
Not trying to justify Israel's actions because they are fucked up, but based on all the evidence we have you are clearly wrong.
It is. The IDF shot once, then when a vehicle came to rescue survivors, they shot again. Then the third attempt at rescueing survivors, they shot a third time. Purposefully murdering aid workers that coordinated with the IDF before entering the area.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/idf-strike-on-gaza-aid-...
“…were traveling in a convoy that had been coordinated with the Israel Defense Forces and was following an IDF-approved route. The vehicles had GPS trackers and SOS beacons broadcasting their positions”
I will try to solve your doubt. Gaza is a closed area. You can't just cross freely the frontier unless Israel allows it. Before that, humanitarian organisations are required to inform directly to Israeli army about everything that they want to do, where they want to go, how many, an when. They are clearly identified by a logo at all times. Israel had every single piece of info necessary to avoid bombing aid workers and had it for weeks
Despite that, Israel can't avoid to keep killing this workers; and they were doing the same repeatedly, systematically, for the last six months, in multiple attacks that last tens of minutes (maybe even hours?), while singing "oops!, I did it again".
The theory of the honest mistake is getting really difficult to swallow.
Why would Hamas use anything other than clearly uniformed soldiers, marked military vehicles, and civilian distanced military installations?
Obviously, nobody in an international court will be able to say "... but the AI did it!" - This is just far too easy as a way out. There are rules to AI Usage and one of them is not a usage like that - as already said somewhere else: The AI is only as ethical/moral as the humans behind them.
> “Everything was statistical, everything was neat — it was very dry,” B. said. He noted that this lack of supervision was permitted despite internal checks showing that Lavender’s calculations were considered accurate only 90 percent of the time; in other words, it was known in advance that 10 percent of the human targets slated for assassination were not members of the Hamas military wing at all.```
So, there was no human sign-off. I guess the policy itself was ordered by someone, but all the ongoing targets that were selected for assassination were solely authorized by the AI system's predictions.
This sentence is horrifically dystopian... "in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances"
> One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male.
> According to the sources, the army knew that the minimal human supervision in place would not discover these faults.
I took this to mean that a human did press the "approve" button on the computer's recommendation. Though they make clear they were basically "rubber stamping" the machine recommendation.
But to my point:
> “There was no ‘zero-error’ policy. Mistakes were treated statistically,” said a source who used Lavender.
What is the "zero-error" alternative approach for dropping bombs in a war, or firing rockets for that matter? I don't understand the implicit comparison between this approach to targeting and a hypothetical approach that allows war to be waged without any innocents dying or buildings being destroyed. This system should be compared to whatever the real alternative is when it comes to target selection. Again I know nothing about military strategy, I'm hoping someone with more experience will speak up.
To use an analogy: if we are talking about self-driving cars, the rates of collision or death should be compared the rates of collision or death in cars driven by humans. Comparing against some imaginary scenario where cars have no collisions and cause no deaths doesn't make sense.
"Hamas terrorist" criteria: a male of fighting age, give higher weight to those congregating with others of fighting age. Basically take out a generation of Palestinian men and you're all set. Lovely.
>This sentence is horrifically dystopian... "in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances"
Reminds me of similar industrial thinking of a certain previous fascist government.
That said, any organization might do something if it’s 90% accurate. Assuming it even is (doubt it), I think any fair evaluation of such a technology must ask:
What is the accuracy of inexperienced humans in the same position who are rushing through the review during a blitz invasion? If they have battle experience, what about them, too? (I’m assuming most won’t.)
Is the system better than those humans or worse? How often?
Do the strengths and weaknesses of the system allow confidence scores on predictions to know which need more review? Can we also increase reviews when the number of deaths will be high?
That’s how I’d start a review of this tech. If anyone is building military AI, I also ask that you please include methods to highlight likely corner cases or high-stakes situations. Then, someone’s human instincts might kick in where they spot and resolve a problem even in the heat of war.
They just spout a high number that is not 100% (clearly civilians are being killed publicly undeniably ) claiming 100% would be too obviously ridiculous.
More than half of 32,000+ (more under the rubble) killed are woman and children, Hamas is still quite able to fight, hardly any hostages has been recovered .
Israel labels any sort of civilian organization as hamas including journalists, medical and aid staff. 200 UN staff and 100 journalists are dead so far . Israel’s argument is UNWRA terrorist aiding and journalists were also secretly Hamas and doing non journalistic stuff when killed so they include them in legitimate targets .
If you consider everyone is Hamas unless otherwise proven then 90% is possible .
There is no realistic way an algorithm was designed factoring in the level of destruction of infrastructure never seen in any real world data and also benchmarked accurately.
It seems obvious to me that the alternative would be a slower process for picking targets leading to fewer overall targets picked and the guarantee that a human conscience is involved in the process.
And your probably right that the alternatives maybe worse, the folks behind Lavender could probably even prove it with data.. but there should be a moral impetus to always have a human in the loop regardless. And any such attempt to justify it won't capture the publics attention like a sky-net doomsday happening over the civilians in Gaza.
I don’t understand how to come to this. War is crap, not a dinner party. There’s always a human on both sides who will drop a bomb and laugh on camera, with no responsibility. Go watch it (actually don’t, it’s NSFL). Reading this thread feels like everyone watched and believed in that movie where they tried to select and eliminate a target for 2 hours with futuristic hi-tech. A human hesitates to press the button before the war. When in it, he will only be concerned with things like ammunition saving and tactical nuances. There’s not much more morals in a human who usually sits there at the button than in AI automation.
We know that humans can make mistakes, due to a multitude of reasons. They can be tired, moody, distracted, stressed out, time-pressured, simply not care enough, etc, all contributing to making the wrong call. But a computer does not suffer from such issues. Secondly, a computer (program) is able to perform billions and billions of computations within some time period in order to ENSURE that doing this thing with grave consequences is absolutely warranted.
Maybe for some domains we can tolerate errors from AI, but when deciding whether a person (and everyone around them) lives or dies, surely simply being on average even more accurate than a human is not enough. "Killbots" MUST be extremely heavily regulated.
Don't Create The Torment Nexus
I think that once you start from the viewpoint that you're not going to create the Torment Nexus, it becomes a lot easier to avoid creating the Torment Nexus.
The IDF only read the first half of the classic IBM slide!
A lot of news around the bombing called out the uniquely large scale and rapidity of the campaign.
This was a preview of future conflicts.
We're entering the WWI phase of new technology being brought without rules to conflicts where the abuses will be horrific until rules are finally put in place.
Another system would signal that target is at home and it's time to bomb. This system was using phone to geo-locate and due to nature of living in Gaza phones transfer hands often.
Without Lavender they would have dropped less bombs IMO.
At least AI pretends to look at some data instead of just defaulting to tribal bloodlust... who's to say it can't be more ethical? It doesn't take much to beat our track record.
Reminds me of that story from probably 5-7y ago. Someone wanted to use AI to classify photos of tanks as soviet vs US. So he went to a US tank museum and took lots of pictures of the tanks under every angle. Did the same in a soviet tank museum. The resulting model worked great on that training dataset. Then he tried on photos outside of the training dataset. Turned out that it was cloudy the day he visited the US museum and sunny for the soviet museum, and the model used the color of the sky to classify.
Having a human to make those decisions is better because this human can be judged if commits war crimes or genocide or violates international war laws.
A computer can't be jailed and this is the real power of designing this system. To hide the criminals on a black box so nobody can be made responsible
Okay, how is this not a war crime?
There are ~2M civilians who live in Gaza, and many of them don't have access to food, water, medicine, or safe shelter. Some of those unfortunates live above, or below, Hamas operatives and their families.
"Oh, sorry, lol." "It was unintentional, lmao, seriously." "Our doctrine states that we can kill X civilians for every hostile operative, so don't worry about it."
The war in Gaza is unlike Ukraine -- where Ukrainian and Russian villagers can move away from the front, either towards Russia or westwards into Galicia -- and where nobody's flattening major population centers. In Gaza, anybody can evidently be killed at any time, for any reason or for no reason at all. The Israeli "strategy" makes the Ukrainians and Russians look like paragons of restraint and civility.
When the US was in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda learned that the US (generally) won't shoot ambulances. So what became the most valuable vehicle to Al Qaeda? Hamas took notes, but Israel doesn't seem to care as much as the US.
Also, besides all that, once something is used for military operations, it is fair game as a military target. Regardless of civilians. When the law was written it was assumed that governments wouldn't intentionally use their civilians as protection.
The only thing that made this time a bit different is the crazy, almost hard to believe, switch from the Ukrainian conflict and how it was seen and portrayed... To western countries staying completely silent when again, it's our side doing it. Well it wasn't hard to believe but it just made it a lot more blatant.
Israel doesn't really care though since israeli officers routinely go on public tirades that amount to mask-off allusions to genocide ("wipe Gaza" "level the city to the ground" "make it unliveable"), with again 0 consequences at all. Even Russia at least tries to not have Russian military officers just say the quiet part out loud.
Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't.
Some questions worth asking: what is international law? How is international order maintained?
I agree that images and footage from Gaza are disturbing. But I encourage you to think systematically about what it is we are seeing.
https://archive.is/2024.04.02-205352/https://www.haaretz.com...
> With unintended strikes, there's "we work hard to avoid this, but based on bad intel made a rare, tragic error," and "we've encouraged RoE that foreseeably makes tragic errors frequent, but this looks bad and in hindsight wish we hadn't done it."
> Israel's strike on WCK food aid workers is the latter
Israel has long had pretty plain issues with its rules of engagement. Recall that earlier in this conflict, the IDF shot three of the hostages whose recovery is one of the main goals of the operation!
Yet still, even that its the most important, friendly fire still happens
Readers might still find it helpful to read both pieces, of course.
On the other hand of course there are also those that jump on any claim that makes Israel look bad. Claims of which there are many. Of which far too many have become pretty evident. Which far too many people do not want to be true and will ignore.
So what can one do? I guess keep an open mind and give claims a couple of days to be proven or disproven. Only then judge.
They say the objective is to destroy Hamas and save the hostages.
I think the actual objective is to murder as many palestinians as possible. At the very least that is the actual objective of some IDF soldiers. They've said as much publicly.
Whether or not that's the actual objective intentionally or unintentionally is just arguing semantics at this point.
Their invasion of the Gaza city went way better than expected by most analysts, with minimal casualties among Israeli. So probably? Hard to compare with the alternative reality where they select the targets the old way.
That their stated objectives are likely unachievable is a different issue.
Hamas has been considerably diminished. It's not accurate to say the war has been a "total failure".
It seems to me that Israel's overall position - politically, diplomatically, and in terms of physical security - has become much worse since the October 7 attack and it has been their own actions that are responsible for the change. A different response should have seen them politically and diplomatically strengthened.
I understand the emotive reasons for not doing so, but I think most people would consider that Israel has bungled their response to October 7.
I would call this attack on Gaza a total failure. If nothing else a failure of humanity.
It's looking more and more like the 'winners' in this situation are Hamas and the losers are the Israeli government, the US government, and the Israeli and Palestinian people.
Months ago the IDF claims that Hamas is operating out of tunnels under the hospital, they raid the hospital. A few weeks later, they raid the hospital again, and again, and again, up until this recent raid some days ago.
You claim Hamas is diminished, but how diminished can they really be if they keep popping up in the same predictable place over and over and over? In North Gaza, the place the IDF has been fighting to secure for the longest, Hamas just pops up one day in the same place they have many times before and so they have to raid the hospital again.
This is all according to Israel's own claims. If Israel's claims are true, then Hamas is one of those mystical enemies that pops up everywhere and is super strong and justifies all sorts of things to defeat, while also being weak and "diminished".
I think the truth is that Israel wants to destroy the health system in Gaza and drive the people out. Shifa hospital is basically rubble at this point.
The legal question is whether the civilian casualties are proportional to the concrete military value of the target.
A question that's worth considering is whether, when considering proportionality, all civilians (as defined by law) are made equal in a moral sense.
For example, the category "civilian" includes munitions workers or those otherwise offering support to combatants on the one hand, and young children on the other. It also includes members of the civil population who are actually involved in hostilities without being a formal part of an armed force.
The law of armed conflict doesn't distinguish these; albeit that I think people might well distinguish, on a moral level, between casualties amongst young children, munitions workers, and informal combatants.
I wonder if you would say the same on the other side where every male or female above 18 years is required to serve in thr military and in the reserve afterwards? [1]
By your argument would you say that all of these are legitimate targets?
Sure would be convenient if Hamas is 6% of the population
For 100 targets, 90 are 'correct', plus 20x civs per-target is 90/2100 or 4% real accuracy.
Say you use a model that's only 50% accurate and limit yourself to 10 civs per-target, you're at 50/1100 or 4.5% accuracy!
I guess my point is that no self-respecting datascient would release a 50% accurate model, let alone one used to make life or death decisions and yet, in the application of this model, decisions made by humans about its use has made it no better than doing exactly that.
"we really need to missile this guy or he will kill more" vs "well we got 37 badies and also kim and yashonda, damn i really liked yashonda"
Actually after writing this my mind went farther, "since yashonda was a good person we actually have a whole bunch of hard facts about how good a person she actually was, did a lot of help for her community and was a real pillar of helping the next generation of kids be less violent...too bad we didn't add any of that info into the kill-algorithm "
The main crux of the story is the automated target acquisition and the policy to engage the target in civilian homes - there are intelligence errors and collateral damage.
The questions are: is the intelligence gathering and decision making ethical and is the accepted collateral damage ratio reasonable given the scale.
This is different from for example Russian strategy to target whole neighborhoods to inflict terror in the civilian population by indiscriminate killings.
Instead the West keeps supplying Israel with weapons and munitions.
Edit: We sometimes turn off flags when an article contains significant new information and also has at least some chance of providing a substantive basis for discussion. I haven't read the current article yet but it seems like a reasonable candidate for this, so I turned off the flags.
For anyone who wants more information about how we approach doing that, in the context of the current topic, here are some past explanations:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39618973 (March 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435324 (Feb 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435024 (Feb 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39237176 (Feb 2024)
Having a human in the loop prevents bad-faith actors from abusing the system to suppress information and discussions.
Kind of related thought - is there a topic you think is more divisive? And also, is there some way that this is measured officially or unofficially?
> According to six Israeli intelligence officers
Not 1 reservist, or 2 retired officers, or 3 contractors, but 6 active serviceman - whose day to day job is to figure out how to hide secrets.
There are more statistically impossible statements.
FWIW, I found this to be a really interesting story that I didn't previously know about, so I hope it stays up, and this is a story I'd be willing to vouch for.
I guess all you have to do, if you want to suppress information about something, is to ensure that its comments always devolve into unproductive discussions. Funny, I once read about this as a tactic for controlling information flow in online communities...
im not sure what other tools exist other than a block button like X
Admins can, and do, prune entire branches of comments off of posts.
These two methods would take a bit more work than just banishing the topic entirely, but with topics like the first time that "AI" kill lists are publicized, maybe exceptions should be made.
I wish people would let people decide for themselves what is productive or not...
For a high quality piece of tech-related investigative journalism like this, flagging is simply censorship.
Considering what regularly doesn't get flagged on this site related to AI, conflict, etc., this topic seems to fit in.
It's also currently dropping rank on the front page, despite being heavily upvoted.
Edit: Flagged after less than 9 minutes, I overestimated!
This is in contrast to how I feel about a statistical model flagging people to be murdered. That's not even remotely OK, even if the decision to actually carry out the murder ultimately goes through a person. Using a statistical model to choose targets is incredibly naive, and practically guarantees that perverse incentives will drive decision-making.
I also don't think there is a way to complain about abusing flags other than emailing the mods; I have no clue about the effectiveness of this complaint.
Edit: And the humans who approved the list should be help accountable, of course.
This does seem to be a big step more “AI” than previous systems I’ve heard described though.
No weapons are nice, but if the good guys don't develop AI weapons, the bad guys will.
From what I gather, many US engineers are morally opposed to them. But if China develops them and gets into a war with the US, will Americans be happy to lose knowing that they have the moral high ground?
Development of tools of death is not a good guy/bad guy thing. The "bad guys" think the "good guys" are bad.
I think "killing" is bad, no matter who develops the tools.
Western mainstream media has been very passive when covering the current situation in gaza, especially when you contrast it with how they covered the war in ukraine just 2 yrs ago. Its just that social media has allowed people to break through the canned media narratives.
The use of napalm in Vietnam triggered widespread protests.
WW2 was a considerably different war in scope, origin, and patterns of escalation.
They did and the newspaper coverage is the main reason why the Vietnam war stopped.
It's mostly business as usual. The technology makes the brutality more efficient, though:
Describing human personnel as a “bottleneck” that limits the army’s capacity during a military operation, the commander laments: “We [humans] cannot process so much information. It doesn’t matter how many people you have tasked to produce targets during the war — you still cannot produce enough targets per day.”
...
By adding a name from the Lavender-generated lists to the Where’s Daddy? home tracking system, A. explained, the marked person would be placed under ongoing surveillance, and could be attacked as soon as they set foot in their home, collapsing the house on everyone inside.
“Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas [operative] plus 10 [civilians in the house],” A. said. “Usually, these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were women and children.”
Using Google search, you can search new articles in previous years. You'll find older articles about Israel killing aid workers, for example. This is from 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/aug/24/i...
The interesting thing about how this conflict is developing is that this story is full of quotes from Israeli intelligence. Most plainly say what they're doing. Western outlets may put a positive spin on it (because our governments generally support Israel), but the Israeli military themselves are making their intentions clear: https://news.yahoo.com/israeli-minister-admits-military-carr...
No, the point of this program seems to be to find targets for assassination, removing the human bottleneck. I don't think bigger strategic decisions like starving the population of Gaza was bottlenecked in the same way as finding/deciding on bombing targets is.
> is it also behind the decision to kill the aid workers who are trying to feed the starving?
It would seem like this program gives whoever is responsible for the actual bombing a list of targets to chose from, so supposedly a human was behind that decision but aided by a computer. Then it turns out (according to the article at least) that the responsible parties mostly rubberstamped those lists without further verification.
> can an AI commit a war crime?
No, war crimes are about making individuals responsible for their choices, not about making programs responsible for their output. At least currently.
The users/makers of the AI surely could be held in violation of laws of war though, depending on what they are doing/did.
There is also another AI system that tracks when these target get home.
Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
I think "assassination" colloquially means to pinpoint and kill one individual target. I don't mean to say you are implying this, but I do want to make it clear to other readers that according to the article, they are going for max collateral damage, in terms of human life and infrastructure.
“The only question was, is it possible to attack the building in terms of collateral damage? Because we usually carried out the attacks with dumb bombs, and that meant literally destroying the whole house on top of its occupants. But even if an attack is averted, you don’t care — you immediately move on to the next target. Because of the system, the targets never end. You have another 36,000 waiting.”
It's not that the "AI" described here is an autonomous actor.
> During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing
Obviously all this is to be taken with a grain of salt, who knows if it's even true.
"An AI" doesn't exist. What is being labeled "AI" here is a statistical model. A model can't do anything; it can only be used to sift data.
No matter where in the chain of actions you put a model, you can't offset human responsibility to that model. If you try, reasonable people will (hopefully) call you out on your bullshit.
> There’s so much about this death machine AI I would like to know.
The death machine here is Israel's military. That's a group of people who don't get to hide behind the facade of "an AI told me". It's a group of people who need to be held responsible for naively using a statistical model to choose who they murder next.
I can't even imagine what it would be like to just like the idea of AI, study, get a job writing some Python, then one day wake up and learn you have quite a lot of blood (indirectly) on your hands.
Like either you need to become the kind of person that doesn't care, or one that learns to live with a lot of ambient guilt hanging around. Not sure which is worse.
Honestly feel so much for the ten thousand bright eyed, intelligent nerds eager for technology and the future. I know they will be compensated well, but that won't ever balance out what will happen to their minds one way or another.
But this is an old story at this point I guess.
> Lavender learns to identify characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ operatives, whose information was fed to the machine as training data, and then to locate these same characteristics — also called “features” — among the general population, the sources explained. An individual found to have several different incriminating features will reach a high rating, and thus automatically becomes a potential target for assassination.
It literally says that they use data from known Hamas members (we don't know what this data contains) as training data which is a recipe for making biased predictions. Hamas members represent a minority in Gaza (the total population is over 2 million people) and thus the real data is heavily imbalanced[0] and unless addressed leads to bad models.
On top of that, if you know anything about Machine Learning then you should be aware of models finding spurious correlations[1] in the data that make its predictions accurate on the available training and validation data and not so much once deployed and used with real data.
[0] https://developers.google.com/machine-learning/data-prep/con...
[1] https://thegradient.pub/shortcuts-neural-networks-love-to-ch...
Last year I would have said that Israel was reasonably well behaved and Hezbollah and Hamas’s rockets fired into Israel were utterly unjustifiable terrorism and served no valid military purpose.
It seems like Israel is busily lowering itself it to its enemies’ level, and it’s not particularly clear that its attacks serve a legitimate military purpose to a much greater extent than Hamas and Hezbollah’s.
Compare to the US’s war in Afghanistan. Regardless of whether one believes that the war was a good idea or we’ll executed, at least the US seemed to be trying to make Afghanistan livable for its non-militant residents, and they perhaps even succeeded for a while.
They're certainly not used to target any specific buildings in Israel. Only thing with targeting capability that Hamas ever repeatedly showed successfully used in videos is their home made Yassin-105 RPG shell and other RPGs. And these are used as short range defensive weapons, pretty much.
Maybe the international court will judge them in 20 years, but the damage will have been done and netanyahu's objectives will be achieved.
The only major power that can stop it is the US and they refuse to do so.
Basically AI is being used as a wheel-of-death and nothing more.
Anyone believing differently in my opinion is both delusional, and complicit
> Following a mission lasting just over two weeks, the UN team found 'reasonable grounds to believe' that 'rape and gang rape' took place during the attack on October 7, 2023, while acknowledging the limitations of its own investigation
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/03/07/u....
Even the NYT now admits (albeit quietly) that their "expose" contains no evidence.
And, as I'm sure you know, there are exactly zero videos showing rape. Quite frankly, I find it incredible that some people still believe the atrocity propaganda, even when it's so obvious and of such poor quality.
> 46. The law is thus clear: a hospital becomes a legitimate target when used for hostile or harmful acts unrelated to its humanitarian function, but the opposing party must give warning before it attacks
[1] https://www.icty.org/x/cases/galic/acjug/en/gal-acjud061130....
This is one prediction of many possible outcomes.
Independent of the probability of a negative downstream outcome:
1. It is preferable to correct the unwelcome behavior itself, not the acceptable events simply preceding it (that are non-causal). For example, we denounce when a bully punches a kid, not that the kid stood his ground.*
2. We don't want to create a self-fulfilling prophecy in the form of self-censorship.
* I'm not dogmatic on this. There are interesting situations with blurry lines. For example, consider defensive driving, where it is rational to anticipate risky behavior from other drivers and proactively guard against it, rather than waiting for an accident to happen.
The false choice dilemma is dead. Long live the false choice dilemma!
This is an explicit ideal in the 'Resistance Axis', to develop the ability to produce military equipment locally and not be dependent on brittle trade routes or smuggling.
The West Bank seems to get rifles from several sources, both american style that probably comes from PA or IDF and russian style, probably smuggled through Jordan from Iraq, Iran, Russia. They produce IED:s locally, quite crude ones, not the directed type with concave copper plates favoured by iraqi militias. Eventually they'll learn to make those too, I'm sure.
1) Where do you draw the line? 2) At what number does that one become two? 3) how long do you think until AI is justified to start killing those single digit persons?
4) What if that one person is you? (this is not that hard to imagine, suppose a fictitious near future where everyone that contributed to some extinction event is deemed killable: AI development, global warming, failed to do some recycling, etc).
(not talking about this conflict in particular, just making an abstract point)
Well the line would be at when you are causing more deaths than you are saving.
Would you rather a larger number of people die?
> What if that one person is you?
What if the people's lives that would be saved are you, and this number is much larger?
That argument actually works in favor of the option that saves the most lives.
There is no neutral decision here. If you choose to not save the much larger group of people, those people are dead.
So your only choice is to pick which groups of people will die. My prefer is to minimize that amount to be as small as possible. But if you want that number to be larger, and to have more people die, that requires some explanation.
I’ll guarantee that it’s the latter.
And that should be emphasized: the Geneva Conventions allow the targeting of military objectives, combatants (i.e. members of armed forces) and "civilians directly participating in hostilities". The Guidance just interprets the latter and arguably widens the scope, because - without the invention of "continuous combatant function" - you could attack e.g. members of Hamas' armed wing during an attack and in preparation of one. Now you can attack them at any time.
> First, the interpretive Guidance is an expression solely of the ICRC's views. While international humanitarian law relating to the notion of direct participation in hostilities was examined over several years with a group of eminent legal experts, to whom the ICRC owes a huge debt of gratitude, the positions enunciated are the ICRC's alone. Second, while reflecting the ICRC's views, the interpretive Guidance is not and cannot be a text of a legally binding nature.
The purpose and of the Interpretive Guidance is to provide recommendations, as the document itself states, in an attempt to persuade states. It does not claim to be authoritative.
Of course, the document itself would not make a statement on its authoritative nature since, despite the broad consultation with experts, they cannot predict the wider reaction.
But also at least then you have someone who is liable when things go wrong. When its fully automated, like the other comment mentions, they can just shrug and blame the AI. Who gets sued when a self driving car kills someone by accident? I don't know. Perhaps a lack of ownership is excusable. But when a weapon deliberately kills someone I think we need to have ownership somewhere.
Perhaps as a general rule the maker of the AI system should have liability for the AI up until someone else signs and accepts that responsibility. None of this "Company does not accept liability" crap. They have to make it clear that "customer accepts liability" or else it's them. That way they will be incentivized to make the military or whoever sign.
(This kind of human model hallucination is how and why I think Genesis got written and taken seriously).
Yeah, I mean, black-box murder is never really desirable... but is it fair to assume AI will never be able to elucidate its reasoning? And that also seems a bit of a double standard, when so many life-and-death decisions made by humans are also not entirely comprehensible or transparent, either to the general public or sometimes even to the other individuals closest to the decision-maker.
Sometimes it's a snap judgment, sometimes it's a gut feeling, sometimes it's bad intel, sometimes it's just plain "because I said so"... not every kill list is the result of a reasoned, transparent, fair and ethical process.
After all, how long have Israel and Hamas (or other groups) been at each other's throats, with cries of injustice and atrocities about either side, from observers all over the world? And it wasn't so long ago we destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq, and Russia is still going at it because of the desires of one man. AI doesn't have to be perfect to be better than us.
If there's one thing humans are really, really bad at, it's letting objective data overrule our emotional states. It takes exceptional training and mental fortitude to be able to do that under pressure, especially life-and-death, us-vs-them pressure.
Humans make mistakes, too, and friend-or-foe identification isn't easy for humans either, especially in the heat of battle or in poor visibility. Training for either humans or AI can always be improved, but probably will never reach 100% accuracy.
Maybe we should start putting some hypothetical kill lists in front of both humans and AI, recording their decisions, and comparing them after a few years to see who did "better". I wouldn't necessarily bet on the humans...
And that's just when we even try to limit damage, vs indiscriminately firebombing or nuking entire cities.
We shouldn't demand perfect accuracy of AI when we don't expect the same of humans. Long ago, we decided collateral damage in war is acceptable, especially when you end up winning the war and there's nobody left to prosecute you except historians =/
Do you have a single, strongest one? Copypasta rarely advances an argument.
Pick your favorite from i, ii, iii, iv, v, and xxv, or give then entire document a read and tell us what you think.
Very clearly not, as admitted by the man himself. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/obama-says-u-s-drone-stri...
If you want Al Qaeda-specific cases, they take about three seconds to find. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/18/pentagon-dro..., for example.
edit: The Yemen case cited in my link above was AQ; https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/02/19/wedding-became-funeral...
"They were an adult male near a target" is not a safe way of determining guilt for capital crimes. We should not accept it.
You really think Israel coordinated with WCK for weeks now only to suddenly decide to kill a few aid workers intentionally? It makes zero sense.
And if you wanna go all conspiracy theory, why not just make it to look like Hamas killed the aid workers? It would be extremely easy for Israel to do so.
> why not just make it to look like Hamas killed the aid workers?
Because they simply don't care, obviously. They even feel safe enough to film their own crimes.
Seems like negligence and not caring for collateral damage is much more straightforward reason compared to intentionally targeting them.
It's an army incompetent enough to recreate the rubble of Stalingrad to help its enemy.
How would they go about producing officers that could enact such pressure? How would they recognise the difference between a specialist and a charlatan whos family is good friends with the army rabbi?
It's well known that the IDF refuses to use dismounted infantry to protect their wagons, and that they've turned cities into rubble and given themselves some of the same kind of problems that the Nazis had in Stalingrad.
https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/military-rabbinate/
You'll also find interesting stories in israeli papers. Rabbis are important to the IDF because the state it is part of is based on religious convictions, and quite often there is no other justification for what they do.
Run it through some panel of experts and demand algorithm changes?
Send it to some Judge API and get back some JSON?
I dunno, what?
They're not exactly very good at preventing or punishing human atrocities, either... it's more of a symbolic group, or a tool of the victors, than anything resembling actual justice. I'd argue textbook authors have more of a lasting ethical impact than the ICC.
You should move your questions one step up in the thread, I'm not the one saying it might be better to let computers design or commit atrocities.
> Lavender listed as many as 37,000 Palestinian men
> they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes
37000 * 15 = 555000 37000 * 20 = 740000
Like I said, I don't agree with this particular topic getting flagged (I saw it go back and forth numerous times), but I also would push back hard on any allegations of "censorship". There are plenty of completely open forums online anyone can access with a click, and HN is most decidedly not that, by design, since the beginning of the site.
Quote: "I would invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every day. I had zero added-value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It saved a lot of time.”
The ICRC stated that they couldn't reach consensus and that the Interpretive Guidance provided their own recommendations and does not necessarily reflect the majority opinion of participating experts.
The DPH meeting reports show there was considerable contention beyond the requirement of a continuous combat function or IX. Dissension was significant enough that over a third of the experts involved asked for their names to be removed from the Interpretive Guidance prior to publication which led the ICRC to remove all the experts' names.
Then there are all the papers published criticizing the document for reasons that go beyond just the two most contentious issues, several by experts were among those consulted by the ICRC (e.g. Schmitt, Parks).
Given the dissension, I find it strange that such a document could possibly be widely accepted as the authoritative interpretation of what constitutes DPH by States as you claim.
Just FYI, all the examples I mentioned I read on our public broadcaster's website.
> In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.
I'd agree with you that once you decide it's worth to kill 100 civilians for one target, it's really hard to call it "assassination" at that point...
If the features are things like “wears a scarf” or “has a beard” then I agree unintended bias is likely a problem. But given we don’t know. How can we comment?
Additionally, juging from the amount of data such models would have to go through in order to make predictions (social media, camera footage, etc.) I would assume that they are using neural networks. This type of model performs best without raw unprocessed data e.g. raw camera footage instead of preprocessed features like "wears a scarf" or "carrying a weapon". They are also well known to be black boxes whoe mredictions cannot really be explained [0].
We can still comment on this topics based an assumptions and previous experince. I don't have experience working in the military field but I have experience working in the AI field and these are strong assumptions I am making.
This is not true you can just google Qassam brigade to see their uniform, they have a very emblematic headband. They are hiding in tunnels though so you're not just gonna find them everywhere, Hamas does not have military equipment to be able to fight head to head with a modern military, it's just an insurgent group.
> once something is used for military operations, it is fair game as a military target.
Except you have to prove it was used for military operations, not just bomb hospitals. This is called a war crime.
> Regardless of civilians
well well
Also, Hamas's leaders are worth over $10 billion collectively. They can at least afford basic uniforms and spray paint to mark their vehicles. But again, they won't do it, because civilian deaths are the last piece they have left for international support. Which comes in the form of aid, which they seize, and pad their $10 billion with.
Take the Mahmudiyah case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmudiyah_rape_and_killings
Lifetime imprisonments
The difference here is that when Israel does so - which is exceedingly rare - it is merely a slap on the wrist. Weeks to months in prison. Where's the deterrence in that?
Israel did themselves no favors by projecting a message early on that they would be able to "destroy" Hamas entirely in a very short amount of time. It was probably inevitable from the beginning that this would be a long, drawn out conflict. Hamas will continue to exist to some extent for quite some time. But the fact remains that their military capabilities are far diminished now, and continue to be futher diminished. That is the essential goal of the war.
Why didn't the IDF destroy the tunnels under the hospital the first time?
Hamas's ability to hold onto these places when they re-take them though is far diminished. Their tunnel network is in very poor shape, their weapons supply is surely being depleted, and thousands of their fighters are dead or arrested. They're going to fight to the bitter end (they're insane suicidal terrorists after all), but they are not as strong as they were when the war started. They are scattered, disorganized, and isolated.
Not measured, though, if you mean some kind of quantitative approach.
I also think it's the most divisive topic here (for the last few months at least), but since it's obviously very personal for me, it's hard to know if that's a bias in my view.
Maybe posts with high Flag and Vouch counts?
And Israeli hasbara? I see a lot of this take, that everyone is just blindly trusting, eg, casualty counts from the Gazan health ministry, but there seems to be very little questioning of and critical thinking about the propaganda the IDF is spreading in this conflict. Why should we take their word for it that killing a bunch of aid workers[1] was just a mistake, for example?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/israel-idf-air...
Speaking of "armchair international law experts", this is completely wrong.
BLUF: Failing to distinguish does not deprive you of fundamental guarantees of humane treatment, including the prohibition of torture and summary execution - both of which are war crimes.
The individual obligation to distinguish is linked to Prisoner of War (POW) status - those who do not distinguish, do not get the protections of that status. That is the only consequence of the failure to distinguish. All those persons who are not POWs are automatically civilians, as made clear by the residual clause in Article 4(4) Fourth Geneva Convention (GC IV). While civilians can be interned for "imperative reasons of security", they are entitled to their own detailed treatment obligations (Articles 79-135 GC IV). In any case, even if they are somehow not entitled to that treatment, the fundamental humane treatment guarantees of Art 27 GC IV [1] and Art 75 Additional Protocol I [2] (which, as customary law, applies to all parties to a conflict) nonetheless apply. If we argue that it is a non-international armed conflict (which knows neither POW status nor the obligation to distinguish), Common Article 3 [3] similarly obligates humane treatment. Humane treatment is also a norm under customary law [4].
Under these rules, you cannot torture people and you cannot summarily execute people [4]. Read the provisions yourself. In fact, summary execution and torture are actual war crimes [5]. If you want to punish a person, you need to give them a fair trial (IHL does not prohibit the death penalty).
You seem to be hinting at the Bush-era "illegal enemy combatant" theory but even the Bush Admin never argued that those persons are not entitled to humane treatment (it was mostly about fair trial rights), and the US (as its lone defender) has long since abandoned the position.
Whether Hamas is actually subject to such an obligation to distinguish is highly controversial. On one level is the issue of conflict classification, since POW status and the obligation to distinguish only exist in the law of international armed conflict (IAC). If we accept that there is an IAC (e.g. because of the military occupation), then the question still arises if Hamas somehow "belongs" to the State of Palestine or if they should just be seen as civilians directly participating in hostilities or as being in a parallel non-international armed conflict between Hamas and Israel. In turn, if we accept that there is an obligation to distinguish applicable to Hamas, then Israel also needs to treat Hamas fighters that distinguished as POWs (and, as set out above, if they failed to distinguish, as civilians).
[1]: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949/art...
[2]: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977/arti...
[3]: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949/art...
[4]: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule87 https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule89 https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule90
[5]: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule156
I'd be more inclined to believe that this was all it was, if the IDF didn't just blow up a convoy of foreign aid workers who had already received clearance and pre-registered their route with the IDF.
Sure, accidents happen, but it speaks volumes to the general level of diligence that goes into approving each strike, and this makes me very skeptical that other incidents that get coverage are simply attacks on plainclothed militants.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-israel-air-str...
There’s quite a bit of literature, history, statistics on women terrorists as well as soldiers.
Do you primarily work with invalids or children? Heck, even children can kill, but it usually requires working together. I was reading the other day about a group of under 10yos that buried alive another kid in a village because he looked weird.
Of everyone person I've ever met between the ages of 16 and 60, I'd say 99% are physically capable of killing somebody - you only need to push someone at the right time to have them fall to their death. Frail old woman have killed babies by covering their faces. There are poisonings.
Do guns make it easier or more accessible? Absolutely. Can a 95 lbs woman physically take on a 250 lbs man? Not likely in a 1:1 fight, but I met one who killed her husband with a knife.
That, and that it is non-trivial without a gun, or more powerful weapon, to kill someone.
Which is why, in a lot of places it's extremely difficult to own or have a gun. And sane people consider very carefully a guns use. Most refuse to own or even consider even holding one never mind using one.
The AI discussed here is similar to me. It shouldn't be available or in use, ever. It even strips away the benefit a gun has of the user contemplating the end result.
You claimed the vast majority of people you know are physically unable to kill. I think that is laughably naive.
If you mean that it is harder than you'd imagine to kill someone bareheaded, I also agree. But humans are tool makers and users. A big stick or rock to the back of the head was a common way to die in our distant past. And if you want to not allow any mechanical leverage in the killing, most people are _physically_ capable of pushing someone. That could be off a cliff, down the stairs, or on level ground where someone trips and hits their head.
This isn't a question of morality: it is a matter of physics.
On your point I'm not sure where you get the assertion any human could kill any other in pre-technological society. That appears evidently false to me. How did you come to that assertion?
I would say it is evidently true to me. As stated, humans are fragile. A punch or fall can easily cause brain injury leading to death. Get in an advantageous position on a person and they are going to have a real hard time preventing you strangling them unless they're trained/experienced in hand to hand fighting. On a purely physical level it is not hard to kill a person. This isn't even considering assistance from tools or infection, where a direct kill from fighting isn't required.
The number of people capable of this isn't 100%, sure, but it's closer to 100% than your posited 10 in 1000, 0.1%
So when the war crimes trial happens the higher ups can throw their subordinates under the bus and claim ignorance. The Nuremberg defense was about blaming superiors. I wonder if the reverse, blaming subordinates and computers will be known as Hague defense, after the apartheid officers in Tel Aviv are taken to court. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
First time I am reading this on Hacker News.
Germany and Japan were killing millions of innocents in WW2. Not only that, but those killings were entirely unnecessary.
At least with Israel I can give some of the benefit of the doubt that their civilian casualties have some strategic outcome. You cannot say the same of Germany and Japan in WW2.
(please be charitable to the above; there is a lot of nuance here; I don't want to explicitly spell it all out. look at my other comments if you want to know my views)
That's delusional. Hamas’ operational capabilities have been highly diminished. Their leadership is in exile. It looks increasingly likely that their ground forces will be destroyed. While they've found sympathy among the Arab population, it's notable that not a single government--outside Iran--has offered to materially support them. And even Iran is starting to be constrained in its regional capabilities.
Israel isn’t winning. But Hamas isn’t either.
I don't think anything in the grandparent post suggested that. If someone used to be a combatant and then ceased fighting, usually they then become a civilian. They don't stay a combatant for life. Reserve forces not on duty are not generally combatants. You have to be in the fight to be a combatant.
Things get more complicated with combatants who don't fully wear uniforms, which is why failing to wear a uniform is a war crime.
It should be noted this isn't so much the grandparent's personal opinion as they are just paraphrasing what the geneva convention says. However there is of course a lot more details to it then that and the devil is in the details.
[Edit: i think i read the post too quickly. The grandparent is incorrect when saying "[Civilians] also includes members of the civil population who are actually involved in hostilities without being a formal part of an armed force.". If you pick up a gun and start shooting the other side, you are not a civilian. It doesn't matter whether you are formally part of the armed forces. Civilians get protected because we want to protect the innocents stuck in the middle. People who are taking part in a war dont get that protection]
I say all this because to call it "Israeli" is inaccurate. For example, in the US Christian Zionists outnumber Jewish Zionists by at least 20:1. Many of those Christian Zionists themselves are antisemitic. This is another reason why our language here matters and we need to be precise with our termminology.
[1]: https://www.newarab.com/news/understanding-hasbara-israels-p...
Just like this war is not about Judaism or Islam, there are Israelis, who regret the actions of their government and military. And there are many jewish people out there, who have said "Not in our name!". Lets not forget them. This is not about Jews or being Jewish. But Zionists do not care about actual Judaism. They care about power and expansion.
What I do find sad though is, that there are also many non-military Israelis online, who still seem to have some kind of national pride and think that Israel is the best country in the world, while actually their country is being overtaken by right wing extremist militarists. Maybe it is compensating/copium for knowing, that the country they live in has no regard for human rights, ongoing for decades and the shame that comes with that.
Lets not forget what happened before the newer hot phase of the war Israel is waging. Tenthoudands of people demonstrating against Netanyahu's intention to limit the power of the judges, presumably to absolve himself from his own corruption. But now we need those voices to cancel Netanyahu, if they still can and their country has not already been lost to some kind of autocracy.
I was just browsing /r/ukpolitics just now, and it is mind boggling how many pro-Israel comments come from people that apparently are only commenting about that topic. No activity whatsoever on popular subs, on hobby subs, but instead their entire posting history is composed of months and months of tirelessly defending the state of Israel.
Sounds like work, and it seems that many forgot about the Mossad-operated propaganda farms that made the news a decade ago. Most people are so blind to propaganda that these fake personas do not even have to be particularly subtle about it.
It would be so easy to identify these paid state actors with some simple code, but I do not want to give ammunition to those other cretins that would use such a tool to target Jewish people as a whole; so I just notice the propaganda and move on.
Of course on a main sub like /r/worldnews for example, the astroturfing there is even more noticeable and blatant.
You know what makes it even more obvious? How seemingly few Israeli or Jewish people on social media seem to be against the current massacre and/or the Netanyahu government. Of course there are many in the real world, but these dissenting voices are drowned by the massive pro-govt propaganda operation.
> This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.
> Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity.
> “We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
Compare this to the situation prior to October 7.
With regard to your belief that it looks like Hamas ground forces will be destroyed, I doubt this very much. All indications are that this is not happening. Every area that Israel claims to have 'cleared' they are having to return to. Israel claims to have killed some 9000 Hamas militants, but with fatalities of around 32,000 in Gaza so far this would mean almost every one of those fatalities that was not a woman or child was a militant. That's beyond unlikely.
This attack on Gaza will be wound back long before Hamas is eradicated (and this includes the militant wing). When that happens Hamas will emerge in a better position than prior to October 7 and Israel will be in a worse position.
Hamas' stated objective of exposing Israel is being achieved. The Israeli government has been extremely naive and short sighted in this regard.
Right. This is the best support Hamas could muster. Unguided pot shots. That’s the point. Nobody real put anything at risk except a proxy force in Yemen.
> attack on Gaza will be wound back long before Hamas is eradicated (and this includes the militant wing)
Doubtful but plausible. That doesn’t bring back the military infrastructure. They’re highly degraded, from the loss of their tunnels to operational supremacy. It’s also naive to imagine Israel isn’t placing surveillance infrastructure that will take Gazans decades to debug.
> Israeli government has been extremely naive and short sighted
Agree. But it doesn’t look like Hamas will win anything. They’ll get a minor PR win, maybe even an ICJ ruling, and their delegates will complain comfortably from Doha for the rest of their careers. But their days as a relevant fighting force appear numbered, though as you say, that’s not a given.
> Hamas' stated objective of exposing Israel
Winning sympathy while losing ground, infrastructure and fighting forces is a terrible trade. (It’s also one virtually everyone who loses a war gets as a consolation prize.)
You're not a civilian while you're holding the gun, but you are once you stop shooting again: you lose your protection as a civilian during your period of direct participation. Should have been more clear on that.
It's probably also worth saying that -- while there's a degree of subtlety and complexity when considering the legal and moral position of Israel's armed forces -- there's very little to debate when it comes to actions like the Re'im music festival attack. That kind of action is obviously illegal and morally repugnant.
No, there is no such complexity. There are very obviously undebatable incidents of war crimes by the IDF. Like this footage from a drone who deliberately killed civilians in plain sight and trying to cover the bodies[1] and the IDF targeting aid workers in a location they knew about [2]. Also, there are widespread videos by IDF soldiers committing atrocities and crimes in Gaza and posting it on social media. That is hardly self-defense. This is obvious war crimes against civilians. Not to mention the mass starvation and carpet bombing of civilians. There is very little to debate, and denying them is immoral. You are just using a very old tactic of trying to minimize IDF crimes by claiming their position is complex. Remember the old say "Middle East is complex mess, let's just ignore what is happening there"
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/3/22/gaza-dr...
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/central-world-kitchen-aid-worke...
I am not your parent commenter, and do not necessarily subscribe to any of their arguments, but I can answer your question directly: yes, to some people, the conscription of all people in a certain age range does make them legitimate targets.
In particular, from my perspective, one of the primary downsides of the inclusion of women in the armed forces is specifically that it legitimizes taegetting (other) women as a military target.
So, to be explicit, if an organization I conscripts women into their military and someone else targets I women militarily, then I will hold I morally responsible for their fate. Similarly, if an organization H utilizes children as soldiers (or human shields) and other children are militarily targeted, I will consider H morally responsible for their fate. (And to be more explicit still: sucks for all the men everywhere.)
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/02/20/695941323...
You’ll find these bad ideas never really die. Look and you’ll see it throughout time and location. Russia, Germany, the U.S., Japan. Tyranny isn’t something accidental, exotic or mysterious. People take their eye off the ball and get clobbered with it from time to time.
I’ll always argue we’re better off with a world war than tyranny, but the whole goddamn point of the UN Charter is to prevent both. The lesson was learned. It was written down. And we’re still fucking it up again.
For decades, Nazi-adjacency has been just another insult to be hurled at the political opponents we've othered. Depending on where you are on the political spectrum, "Nazi" could be synonymous with Elon Musk. In one breath we trivialize the evil humanity is capable of inflicting upon itself. In the next breath we exclaim, "Never again!"
The American Eugenics Society rebranded itself into, "Society for Biodemography and Social Biology". Ambiguous terms like, "bioethics" are used by eugenicist think tanks like "The Hastings Center" where explicit appeals to eugenics are undesirable. The Club of Rome evolved into the WEF. Paul Ehrlich's ideas are as popular as ever. The same eugenicist appeals for population control remain in the forefront of public discourse. Even here on HN, you will regularly find posters lamenting the impending doom of climate change. The answer, if you ask many here is the eugenicist policy of population control.
There are other themes in parallel, but I'll try to keep it somewhat concise and less controversial.
It isn't only the "Banality of Evil" or an engineer only who wants to go home to watch Netflix after designing a killer drone. Similar authoritarian ideas are celebrated in our popular discourse. Instead of examining these ideas critically, we accuse political others, dehumanize them and finally rationalize them into the Nazis.
Either that or genAI will be used to publish a bunch of books telling fantasy stories about how IBM personally arrested Hitler. :)
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/isra...
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2022/02/qa-israel...
The ends were admirable. The means are debatable and in some cases regrettable.
already the AI detects criticism of itself. except its response it's to shadowban you meaning you can continue to post but nobody sees your opinion online.
eventually, you're "bubbled" by AIs.. all your interactions online are surrounded by an AI and you'd think you're interacting with other people when you're just AI-bubbled so to not disrupt the rest of the workers.
you'll still see likes, and other interactions with the social media posts you leave behind, but as a flagged critic of the system, all these interactions are merely faked to keep you calm. as the AI advances you'll even see responses, retweets and other interactions.... all AI driven in order to keep you busy while IBM keeps a calm overwatch over all. the end.
Or at a higher level, at the ISP level.
Targeted via DNS tunneling and all.
fudge the up/down votes to make it look like it's been seen but not reacted to.
but do you need to burn cycles on AI to keep these people engaged? if someone is spamming stuff you don't want seen have them throw out a basic response and then shadowban or just straight-up ban them. if they're very negative bad actor types just give em the boot
Enough frustrated people will use AI to quickly generate the code for an alternative platform to avoid this bubble system.
It will be individual platforms all the way down...oh wait.
On platforms like Facebook or YouTube where the feed is algorithmically generated and you can't easily view a filtered list of topics (like Reddit) something like this would be very easy.
The interactions don't even need to be generated by AI, it just needs to keep you seeing interactions with other people in your social status circle. And if you try to venture too far outside of that it shadow bans you.
Heck I'd be surprised if the way the news feed algorithms work today they don't already do something like this, as a byproduct of optimising for viewership.
They'd just need to take it a bit further by preventing you from seeing viewpoints outside your circle. So taking the WWII example, people in the Nazi group would not be able to see pro-Ally content. All they'd see about Allies would be content that paints them in a bad light, and vice versa.
The attack itself was allowed to have a 15x to 100x number of civilians killed depending on the supposed importance of the target.
UN Estimates, as of March 1st, are "10,675 [civilians] killed, 20,080 wounded" -- on both sides.
The number of soldiers killed on both sides (combined) is certainly no less than 100k, and might even exceed 400k.
In Gaza, more than 25,000 civilians have already been killed. https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/01/1145742
This is a callous, inexcusable massacre. By comparison with the Israelis, the Russians look like "gentle and parfait knights." But the former are presumably on our side, and the latter are our geopolitical opponents. So.
There's the two-wrongs-make-a-right atonement for the holocaust aspect on the German side and the promise of the rapture for Americans also.
Maybe most importantly willingness to show eager support for something that may seem 'bad' such as genocide functions as a shibboleth to display allegiance to one's political party and society because ultimately what's happening in the news has no deep significance for most westerners beyond that of a football match. Showing you're not an anti-semite is the most important thing one can do, and there's no better way to do that than support whatever the current Israeli government feels like doing (perhaps sparking a large regional conflict) and rounding up any Jewish people who object on charges of being race traitors.
Now that we've established that this is horrific, please turn a small portion of your attention to American predictive policing systems (digital and not) and the circumstances that lead to mass incarceration (including the War on Drugs).
Of course it's perfectly ethical, why do you ask?
I’ve worked at the UN. I know the Rome Statute. You’re citing it wrong. (Also, your link doesn’t work.)
The operating law is also NOT Article 8, but the Geneva Conventions. Art. 8 is about giving the ICC jurisdiction, not what is and isn’t illegal. (The entire Rome Statute is about establishing the ICC as a venue. Again, not what is and isn’t illegal.)
> IF war crimes are committed AND a company's product features prominently in the planning of said THEN it stands to reason that the executives and major investors of the company should share a slice of the responsibility for the war crimes
This isn’t how the Geneva Conventions work. (“Features prominently” doesn’t factor into jurisdiction nor criminality.)
But again, do you have an example of even an alleged war crime being committed where Lavender is being blamed? (10% error rate isn’t a war crime.)
I’ve been genuinely asking for facts on the ground, not misquoted international law. To my knowledge, Lavender hasn’t been cited in the targeting of an aid convoy—if anything, having that happen in code would make intent trivial to demonstrate.
> but I imagine the residents of kibbutz be'eri and the 100+ hostages still held in Gaza would disagree that Isreal is fighting for "basically no reason."
On the contrary, I think that those exact people would agree the most. Do you think that they do not wish that Israel did a hostage exchange instead of starving and bombing them together with their captors? To bring the "low hanging fruit" example, do you think that the three hostages who were waving white flags nearly entirely naked, and who were subsequently murdered by the IDF; do you think that they or their families prefer(preferred) this devastation that lead to their deaths instead of a simple hostage exchange?
What do you think would happen if IDF killed most of Hamas and had their last few forces cornered with no escape, and were getting close to them? Do you think the hostages would not be killed by either their captors or by IDF as collateral damage in such a scenario?
Claims that the systematic destruction of Gaza and genocide(-lite?) serves the goal of bringing back the hostages is such an obvious cover for bloodthirst that it is honestly intellectually-insulting to keep reading it over and over again.
The war has explicilty been about removing Hamas from power for a while now. To the degree there is opposition within Israel to the war, it's in the hostage-retrieval prerogative having been subsumed.
In 1999 Yugoslavia killed ~12 thousand Albanians and displaced ~85 thousand more. Bill Clintons secretary of defense had no problem calling that genocide: "The appalling accounts of mass killing in Kosovo and the pictures of refugees fleeing Serb oppression for their lives makes it clear that this is a fight for justice over genocide.". This led NATO to drop bombs on Yugoslavia [0].
In this conflict Israel has killed ~31 thousand Palestinians and displaced ~2.3 million more [1]. For all its tough talk the Biden administration has responded by selling Israel jet planes [2].
I'm not saying bombing Yugoslavia was justified. But there is plenty of historical precedent to call this conflict genocide.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_Yugoslavia
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_invasion_of_the_Gaza_S...
[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-administration...
Here we have a war. You cannot compare the two, not to mention the 31k number being unhinged from any credible source.
You're twisting their words, I'll assume out of a misreading. Read the comment again. They clearly said that there's no good reason to bomb Gaza the way that they have been doing, resulting in the murder of thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of civilians.
At the moment of the Russian invasion, so many countries banded together in supporting Ukraine, both in materiel and moral support. Russia became a pariah overnight. It was an awful situation but it was uplifting to see how we all cared about sovereignty, peace, self-determination and the well-being of civilians.
Then civilians in Gaza started getting slaughtered and... nothing, or worse - full support of it. The exact same freedom-loving world leaders had become mute.
I consider myself more cynical than the average person, but this still caught me off guard. Two horrible situations, two suffering peoples and such different outcomes.
As a father of a young child, it was a gut punch to see what we were suddenly trying to justify and it left me numb for days until I adjusted to the actual reality. The reaction to the Russian invasion had little to do with the welfare of Ukrainians; it was more about political affiliations.
Israel also gets away with encroaching and colonizing palestinian territory (that they don't even deny isn't theirs until they "settle" it). Again, Russia at least gets international condemnation when it does so
E.g. the IDF targeted and killed a Canadian UN peacekeeper in 2008 (because he got too squeaky) and the Canadian gov't barely lodged a protest.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/un-officer-reported-is...
Which is what I kinda assume Hamas wanted in the first place.
Unilateral withdrawal from Gaza led to the tripling of rocket attacks. Multiple peace offers have been rejected. Limited Israeli retaliation and extensive international aid has meant the Palestinian civilian population is sufficiently insulated from the violence that they have no incentive to demand peace from their leaders.
When Palestine was sending children as suicide bombers, Israel decided to play defense and built walls that dramatically lowered the efficacy of suicide bombings. So the Palestinians switched to rockets. So Israel again played defense and built the iron dome. So Hamas switched to Oct. 7th. Do you think they should play defense again?
Tell me: what peace offer do you think Israel could make the Palestinians that would lead to a lasting peace? Tell me: if Israel surrendered unconditionally to the Palestinians, would the Israelis live in peace?
You don't get to massacre tens of thousands of people because they fight back against brutal occupation and repeated massacres, then paint yourself as the victim.
The world's eyes are open. We've seen what happened to those WCK aid workers; to Hind Rajab, to Reem and Taleb, and all the others. We've seen the mosques, churches, hospitals destroyed, and the wilful, wanton disregard of international law and basic decency.
What Israel has done over the last six months hasn't made Israelis safer, nor Jews. These atrocities won't ever be forgotten.
To get hostages back? Hostage exchange.
To dismantling Hamas and armed resistance from Palestinians? Stop ethnically cleansing the West Bank and remove the boot from their necks so that people in Gaza see that there is a better way and that going down fighting is not the only choice.
Plenty of alternatives to death and destruction when those are not the actual goal itself. Of course those alternatives do not go hand in hand with the idea of an ethnically-cleansed Greater Israel, so here we are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident
> The combined air and sea attack killed 34 crew members (naval officers, seamen, two marines, and one civilian NSA employee), wounded 171 crew members
The only consequence for them was "paying compensations" as if there was a price to put on human lives.
There's only so many times the phrase "human shield" can be uttered by aggressors before it starts to lose its effectiveness.
They dropped a JDAM on the building. After repeated pleas on known channels to stop.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/palestinian-killed...
You've got two sides, Able and Baker, with a range of opinions on both sides, from a moderate majority to an extreme minority.
Able extremists attack Baker in a way which is big, shocking and violent.
Baker is provoked into retaliation against Able. Crucially, the retaliation is against the whole of Able, including the moderates.
When it all dies down, there are less Able moderates and more Able extremists. (Because if someone dropped an Acme piano on my family, I'd be tempted to strap on the Acme exploding underpants, too).
This "leverage your enemy's strength to radicalize your own people" approach is common. 9/11 is probably the clearest example, but you could even see the non-violent Civil Rights protests in America in this light (march, provoke violent response, gain converts and sympathy). If this wasn't one of the factors behind the October attacks, Hamas are dumber than I give them credit for.
Thus, I see "the Palestinian people will not forget this" as "the cycle of violence is locked in for another generation".
It lowers both those barriers significantly.
I assure you, they do not. In point of fact, the hobby can get rather onerous to upkeep due to maintenance costs and the burden of magical thinking individuals like yourself employ, necessitating constant vigilance and correction.
People kill people.
AI, gun, explosive, makes no difference. Long as there are two blokes atound with irreconcilable opinions/worldviews, somebody's gonna want someone else dead. And that is the problem. The tools do not move until the mind employs them.
for being more mentally available, I was just reading about some asshole that shot at a car that pulled into his driveway. Yes, he is mentally unhinged. I don't feel it is a stretch to say that owning a gun enabled him to feel safe and shoot the people from a distance and had he needed to get into a physical altercation, it very likely would not have ended with dead kids in the driveway.
I'm a gun rights supporter. I own guns. I take my kids shooting. People need to be held responsible. People can kill without guns, of course. But there is no way to argue that guns don't make killing more accessible.
[1]:https://time.com/6960587/meta-instagram-political-content-li...
Now Israel can say that they didn't stop aid, they just "accidentally" killed an entire envoy of aid, which unfortunately led to the WCK withdrawing from Gaza.
2) The Israeli army comes across as extremely unprofessional - I honestly believe Israel doesn't have full control over them. It's a car-crash of "soldiers" who believe Palestinians are inhuman beasts, combined with commanders who don't give a shit and probably couldn't control their squad in any case
Israel could glass the entire Gaza strip and the reaction would be a slap on the wrist at best.
It says that perfidy is a war crime. However, I don’t see anything supporting summary execution.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summary_execution says the following:
“Francs-tireurs (a term originating in the Franco-Prussian War) are enemy civilians or militia who continue to fight in territory occupied by a warring party and do not wear military uniforms, and may otherwise be known as guerrillas, partisans, insurgents, etc. Though they could be legally jailed or executed by most armies a century ago, the experience of World War II influenced nations occupied by foreign forces to change the law to protect this group.”
The search term that might help here is “previous judgment, pronounced by a regularly constituted court.”
Also: if one is outside of the protection of IHL/LOAC, might other laws protect him?
You didn't answer my questions.
Hamas had the run of Gaza and could have built whatever society they wanted there. They used that chance to built up for explicitly slaughtering civilians instead.
You repeatedly referenced a single piece of law and did so incorrectly. Now you’re failing to bring any on-the-ground facts to the table. (Not asking for conclusive facts, just even reasonable accusation.) It’s fair to say you don’t have an alleged war crime.
>"According to an interview on CBC radio and multiple print sources, retired Canadian Major General Lewis MacKenzie, referring to an email he had received a few days previously from the now deceased Canadian peacekeeper Major Paeta Hess-von Kruedener, stated that "...what he was telling us was Hezbollah fighters were all over his position and the IDF were (sic) targeting them and that's a favorite trick by people who don't have representation in the UN. They use the UN as shields knowing that they can't be punished for it.""
>"UNIFIL maintained that Hezbollah fighters were not allowed into any of its bases. However, they reported more than 20 instances of rockets being fired from less than 500m from their positions, as well as a number of cases of small arms and mortar fire from within 100m. Additionally, UNIFIL reported several instances of their positions and vehicles being hit by Hezbollah mortars, small arms fire, or rockets."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_incidents_during...
I however disagree with the framing in the example. Starting from the event that Able attacked Baker without mentioning the reasons or the context clearly portrays Baker as not having done anything to provoke such an attack. Nothing ever happens in a vaccuum.
Adding at "step zero" with that information in would not change my argument at all. The relative righteousness of the two sides has nothing to do with strategy selection. For the purposes of this abstract argument, it's unnecessary fluff.
Terrible trade with respect to what objective? Hamas never had the capability to defeat Israel in a conventional war. Their infrastructure and fighting forces were a means to a political and ideological end. They are closer to achieving those ends now than before October 7th.
Israel's high-tech export economy, the US diplomatic shield at the UN, and diplomatic alignment and domestic stability in Egypt and other Arab states are things that Israel needs for its long-term survival, and this war is undermining those things. Israel is in a position of strength now, but there may come a day where one of their neighbors surpasses them economically given significantly larger population sizes. Sort of a China vs Japan situation. That will be the real threat. Hamas is a blip in the bigger picture.
That said, this meme that "you can't defeat Hamas because it's an idea" is definitely false. Hamas are not just an idea, they are a government and a military, and just like with Russia's invasion of Grozny (another immortal "idea"), they can be defeated militarily, at great cost to innocent civilians.
We are further from a Palestinian state, much less one run by Hamas, than before. I don’t see what desirBle ends Hamas has brought closer.
People have always complained about Israel. There is more complaining now. That’s not a qualitative difference. On the other side, Gaza appears to be heading towards no government or some form of occupation, whether by Israel or a coalition including Arab states. Its civil infrastructure and economy are wrecked; an entire generation has likely already suffered permanent health debilitation. One has to be incredibly rosy and chart a course forward entirely separate from the history of modern conflicts to paint a picture in which Hamas, let alone the Palestinian people, come out of this ahead of where they were in September.
I will agree with you that there is a path forward where you are correct. Maybe Israel repeats what Russia did in Grozny. Hamas is defeated. Gaza is then rebuilt. Tensions then go down. It's possible.
It's contradictory to my understanding of what is happening.
By that, I mean, when the few remaining police left in Northern Gaza, who had reported to be critical to providing security for aid deliveries (and involved in coordination with Israel) where assassinated recently by Israel, and claimed as high ranking Hamas targets it pretty much cemented my opinion that nothing is true, or believable from Israel in this conflict.
How are you defining terrorist here as well? As other than the horrific events of October 7th, and the hostages from that day, the only visible acts of violence and terror associated with Palestine appear to be towards anyone Palestinian, journalists, aid workers and medical staff.
You can start with the large scale, multi year campaign of using MLRS ramps to shoot barrages of unguided rockets from Gaza and Lebanon into Israel.
That is indiscriminate - or even targeting civilians directly.
But because Israel has gone to extreme lengths to counter it there are few causalities these days and combined with medias extreme one-sidedness that means we don't even hear when they hit a hospital in Israel last year.
Cynically speaking, Iron Dome has been an expensive PR disaster for Israel, but that is what one get for caring about ones own citizens and not being allowed to just do counter battery fire until the enemy stops.
That could in theory allow the asymmetris side to kill less civilians and more military targets.
Would that make the whole situation better? There would no longer be outrage that they use -unguided- missiles.
The unguided missiles that are used to today are of such poor quality that they seldom hit anything. A majority are tracked by Irondome but never targeted since the system predicts it wont do any harm
Properly targeted missiles would be far more likely to hit a target unless Iron Dome manages to shoot it down.
In the end is it not the case that "unguided" missiles are an advantage for IDF rather than a problem?
Israel has had rockets fired at it. It was frightening for the population (understandably), but it didn't affect us much.
So I agree that's an impact of terrorism. But, it's really saying we haven't been impacted since October 7th is it not?
Not a criticism, and a good thing. My response is just related to earlier questions. Which are now reopened.
That's a wildly inaccurate statement. There has been continual rockets fired into Israel, as well fairly regular incidents of stabbings, shootings, etc.
https://www.tzevaadom.co.il/en/
https://www.timesofisrael.com/three-seriously-wounded-in-ter...
Not intending to make any justification or moral comparison in either direction, but it is objectively untrue that violence/terror has only been in one direction post Oct 7th
Hamas Police is Hamas. Hamas is a terrorist organization (e.g. where I live in Canada). I.e. everyone in Hamas is a terrorist, at least in Canada, the US, the EU, and I'm pretty sure in Israel. They earned that by indiscriminately attacking civilians and according to organizations like Amnesty International committing crimes against humanity.
Soldiers, even if they commit war crimes, are not generally labelled as terrorists. I know sucks to be a terrorist. They fight by different rules so they get different names (they wear uniforms etc.).
There is an alternative, sure, prepare for a year and then invade Israel. Which they did, after decades of "mowing the lawn" as the israelis call it.
The terror organisation classification of Hamas isn't as much about the political party or its affiliated militia as manufactured consent to relations with Israel and traditions among colonial states. The modern 'West' usually calls its enemies terrorist, like it did during the Mau Mau uprising. This is why so few states agree with this classification.
You don't have to like Hamas but compared to the PA they're not very corrupt, and since they stopped doing suicide bombings they've been quite successful as a resistance movement. Since several years back they've also been quite good at unifying and coordinating the political parties and militias on the Gaza strip in preparation for and during periods of israeli military aggression, including with their main competitor in Palestinian Islamic Jihad, socialists from PFLP/DFLP/Fatah movement, Iran's Mujahideen movement and so on.
Hamas isn't just a political party with a militia, it's also a charity movement. To most people it seems weird to call people terrorists because they take care of their vulnerable neighbours and run soup kitchens and the like.
On the execution of civilian police I don't find it acceptable to label civilians as you want and then execute them. Those are obvious war crimes. In the case I'm talking about the group of police were some of the last able to assist aid getting through and had been doing that in coordination with the IDF.
I find the reporting we get (UK) very IDF/Israel based, with no real perspective from Palestinians, but still it's clear that the deaths and suffering in the current conflict day to day are pretty much all a result of Israel's deliberate actions. It's not excusable what is happening.
Does it matter what you are called if you are deliberately committing war crimes?
If nothing else what will Israel be like as a place to live in with so many people who have deliberately and consciously decided to kill, starve, maime and persecute so many others? How will Palestine and Israel ever recover?
That is backed by them refusing to answer you with specific examples, engaging in a gish-gallop instead.
I am just smart enough not to make it trivially easy for the entire internet to harass me.
At 2:1 civilians to combatants, this is an unusually low civilian death count.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain...
“The latest death toll from the attack is now 767 civilians, 20 hostages and 376 members of the security forces, giving a total of 1,163. One person remains missing.” https://www.barrons.com/news/new-tally-puts-october-7-attack...
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-03-31/ty-article-ma...
- what entities are quoted using netral or confidence signaling language like "sier" (says), "i følge" (according to) and similar, "data fra" (data from)
- what entities are quoted using language that gives low trust connotations: "påstår" (claims, but in Norwegian signalling low confidence)
Feel free to also compare how the claimed Israeli bombing of a hospital early during Israels response affected the front pages, vs when it became clear that it was a rocket engine from Gaza that had hit a mostly empty parking lot ourside a hospital and left a dent in the asphalt.
Since I argue in good faith I also encourage you elygre to provide similar ways to try to get something measurable to show your perspective.
I pride myself (for the lack of a better term) with being able to change my views based on listening to others and have done so both when it comes to drug policies (I have gone from very strict to liberal), economics (I used to be anti socialism, now I have come to appreciate and defend our current Norwegian system very much), and I used to defend Israel in ways that I don't do anymore.
And someone needs to be held accountable whatever the reason is.
Many will call it resistance in an occupied territory in a lot of other contexts.
By this logic when the Nazis killed members of the resistance, of course they were also fighters in addition to whatever day jobs they had.
The most used one I've heard about is studying hypothermia because they took quite detailed notes on the different stages and how the body reacted.
I haven't been able to find that blog post again, but I often think about it and would love to bookmark it.
It's in a similar vein of ethical question to embryonic stem cell treatments, but certainly with very different aspects between them.
Some of the other things you mention have a lot of grey area, because whether or not they are a war crime don't necessarily depend solely on what happened, but on what Israel's intent was and what they knew at various points in time. Which is information that's hard to know from our vantage point. Some of them could be, but there is also potential that they might not be. Its not as clear cut as you make it out to be.
Jewish Voice for Peace giving a timeline of major violence against Palestinians for about a year before 2023-10-07: https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2023/11/24/countdown-to-...
2023-09-18: "2023 marks deadliest year on record for children in the occupied West Bank" https://www.savethechildren.net/news/2023-marks-deadliest-ye...
HRW on the above: https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/08/28/west-bank-spike-israeli-...
2023-01-13: "Last year Israeli forces killed at least 146 Palestinians, including 34 children, the Israeli rights group B’Tselem reported" https://apnews.com/article/politics-israel-government-palest...
In 2021, Israeli forces killed an American-Palestinian journalist on duty in plain sight [1] I will quote that from Wikipedia
"Israel denied responsibility and blamed Palestinian militants. However, it gradually changed its narrative until admitted she was "accidentally" killed by Israeli fire, but refused to undertake a criminal investigation"
and
"On September 5, the IDF released the results of its own investigation, finding that there was a "high possibility" that Abu Akleh was "accidentally hit" by army fire, but that it would not begin a criminal investigation"
Another example
In 1996, IDF fired shells on UN compound near a village called Qana and caused a civilian massacre. The UN investigated, and Israel refused the results and did not punish anyone [2]. Let's give them a benefit of the doubt, maybe they will just learn and avoid doing it again. Fear not, in 2016 they give us the second Qana massacre [3] without anyone getting punished.
And there are maybe hundred of these events which can establish that Israel doesn't care and IDF don't get punished.
I also refuse the logic that Israel should investigate war crimes by its army. That is absurd, like waiting for Russia to investigate and take their words for Bucha massacre. IDF have very well documented war crimes in the past and IDF is the occupying forces of Palestine and is mass starving 2.3m to death in Gaza right now. Believing that they will carry honest investigation and punish their soldiers is laughable.
And let's not forget to add the IDF lie, and they are blatant Liars. We still remember them claiming week days in Arabic are names of Hamas operatives [4]. Why do you expect us to believe them? Of course, the Israeli officials and cabinet members calling for violence, crimes against Palestinians are well known to everyone now (Feel free to ask me for examples).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shireen_Abu_Akleh
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qana_massacre
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Qana_airstrike
[4] https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/truth-or-fake/20231116-...
I'm not sure what your point is here. Accidentally shooting someone is not a warcrime (there are details here in that it still could be if there is a certain level of negligence), and generally a criminal investigation would only be started if there was sufficient evidence in the preliminary investigation to suggest it was intentional.
Could israel be lying about it? Sure. Militaries doing cover ups would hardly be a new story. But this isn't the (metaphorical) smoking gun you think it is.
> In 1996...
1996 was quite a long time ago at this point.
> I also refuse the logic that Israel should investigate war crimes by its army
That's generally what is expected of any army under international law. If they don't then the higher ups become responsible.
In the event of a failure to prosecute, then it goes to the ICC to investigate and charge (israel isn't a member, but palestine is, so anything involving palestine nationals or territory counts, which is basically this whole war. If ICC didn't have juridsiction over something, then the procedure is the UN is supposed to create a special tribunal).
So its not like its solely up to israel to investigate/punish. That is just the first step and what is required for israel to comply with international law. If they fail to uphold their obligations there are other bodies to enforce albeit in practise powerful countries are often ignored by them.
I don't think these things are as unequivocal as you suggest. I mean, you're assuming those people are civilians. Maybe they're not. Almost certainly we will never know for sure, and if you can't acknowledge that then you're not being objective.
I actually expected this reply from you. And expected that you will not see the video and will not get interested in the story. [1] The video shows that they were not armed. If you're just going to define anyone you kill as, maybe he was Hamas. Then of course you will kill everyone and claim that. You don't kill unarmed people walking in plain sight. If this not obvious to you, then you are just wanted to justify the killing of each Palestinian.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/19/gaza-journal...
>> The U.N. human rights mission in Ukraine, which has dozens of monitors in the country, said it expects the real toll to be "significantly higher" than the official tally since corroboration work is ongoing.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/civilian-death-toll-ukr...
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/more-than-8000-civilian...
There are more than 10,000 fresh graves in the city of Mariupol alone and many of them appear to contain multiple bodies - which was the case in other graves uncovered in places like Kherson and Lyman.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-erasing-mariup...
The actual civilian death toll is almost certainly in the tens of thousands, not a singular ten thousand.
Also consider the death toll caused by the withholding of medical assistance to those who refuse to take Russian citizenship, and the flooding caused by the destruction of the Nova Khakovka dam.
Perhaps the number is higher. What's your best estimate for the number of civilian casualties in Ukraine? How about military casualties on both sides?
And, quibbling over numbers aside, surely you can see that the nature of the war in Gaza and the war in Ukraine are very different. In Gaza, civilians are taking the brunt of the fighting. Ukraine, in contrast, is hell for soldiers, but civilians and aid workers are generally moved away from the front, and they're more rarely treated with the wanton disregard and disdain that Gazans suffer.
To all appearances, what's happening in Ukraine is a war, fought by and large by the accepted rules of war. In contrast, I don't think that Israel is fighting a war; they're marauding and taking shots at a densely populated civilian enclave that refuses to surrender to them unconditionally.
>And, quibbling over numbers aside, surely you can see that the nature of the war in Gaza and the war in Ukraine are very different. In Gaza, civilians are taking the brunt of the fighting.
I do not see the difference between Gaza and Mariupol, except that the population of Mariupol is older and the temperatures drop below freezing for months of the year. It was carpet bombed, residential areas were shelled, there were reports of civilians needing to drink water from puddles, incidents of torture and murder, practically the entire city was destroyed.
>To all appearances, what's happening in Ukraine is a war, fought by and large by the accepted rules of war. In contrast, I don't think that Israel is fighting a war; they're marauding and taking shots at a densely populated civilian enclave that refuses to surrender to them unconditionally.
With all due respect I do not see how you can possibly think this unless you've been ignoring much of what has been happening in Ukraine.
One example of many: https://www.wsj.com/video/series/in-depth-features/images-sh...
Another: https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/te9kvd/khark...
Another: https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/t5s44r/cctv_...
Another: https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/t4rfgy/russi...
Hospital hit with a 1500kg bomb: https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/170fues/russ...
Russians using a Ukrainian POW as a human shield during an attack: https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1azri7n/russ...
Russians using 3 Ukrainian POWs as human shields during an attack: https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/18hnvkx/clai...
You don't want me to share the video of Russians executing 9 Ukrainian POWs with their hands behind their backs, the video of Russians castrating a Ukrainian POW and then executing him, or the video of Russians decapitating a Ukrainian POW slowly with a knife.
And Bucha, and the Nova Khahovka dam, and the torture chambers, and the air campaign designed in the Russians own words to freeze Ukrainians over the winter, and the mass graves in Lyman where raped and murdered women and tortured Ukrainian men were discovered. And the Kramatorsk railway station attack. And the Kremenchuk shopping mall attack.
Literally yesterday the Russians hit an elementary school in Dnipro with ballistic missiles, the only reason it wasn't a mass casualty event was that they had 5 minutes warning to evacuate to bomb shelters.
This is literally just what I can remember off the top of my head.
It was called the Kosovo war. Why can we not compare the two? They seem VERY comparable to me.
But if Wikipedia and Al Jazeera are not good enough for you then you will see the following orgs also posted these numbers: NPR [0], BBC [1], NYTimes [2]. And if your worried those numbers are inflated there is an article in the Lancet that shows if anything it is the opposite [3].
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2024/02/29/1234159514/gaza-death-toll-30...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ6Ny8_QViY
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/world/middleeast/gaza-dea...
[3]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
I have, from the UK, seem zero presence of any war in 2024.
Seen plenty of what looks like vile and indescrimate killing of random civilians by Israel.
Is the war the one that's killing multiple aid volunteers, or something else?
It's not a war though.
Unfortunately every day in Gaza since has been as horrific, or more horrific.
Indescriminately killing and starving an entire population and destroying the surrounding infrastructure is not warfare.
The actions described in the linked article make this clear.
That figure was corrected a number of months back to 1.2k was it not. The most accurate figure I've seen stated is 11,600, although it doesn't seem to be in widespread use, although the 1,200 figure is often caveated.
The total isn't all civilians. No official figures have been released on the split is my understanding.
It's also not clear how many are attributable to Israel's response, but it's clearly non-zero and may well be a significant proportion.
2) So what is it? Does the idf targets aid worker intentionally as part of a idf/Israel policy or is it some rogue soldier/commander that decided to do it? Those are two very different claims.
Nothing. Literally zero consequences. Yet someone like you is not convinced.
2) could be both; Israeli commanders made clear that grunts can do what they want - "all restrictions are removed", and we now know that commanders designated "kill zones" where anyone was to be murdered. I believe it's both US-backed Israeli policy, and they haven't got full control of their "soldiers"
Agree. But we're closer to a two-state solution than the destruction of Israel.
> Gen Z and Gen Alpha's political influence in the US removing the diplomatic shield at the UN opening the way for sanctions
You're describing a political turning point decades away. And it doesn't lead to the destruction of Israel, just weakening its occupation. Also, Israel is a rich and vibrant economy. It wouldn't take that much for it to pivot to another security guarantor if the U.S. ditches it in 30+ years (when the relevant generations will be at the peak of their power).
> Hamas is defeated. Gaza is then rebuilt.
If Hamas is defeated fast, maybe. But again, Gaza would be rebuilt under occupation. And Israel wouldn't have been destroyed. Hamas--and the Palestinians' bargaining position--is weaker today than it was in September. Israel is, too. But not in as permanent a way as Gaza (and Hamas) are being dealt.
Even during the short cease fire there was at least one rocket barrage.
Say what you want but they surely have manage to do the things they prioritize.
If you follow their communications you'll see a lot of sniping, light artillery and RPG:d vehicles.
The mainstream israeli position is to hurry up and get it over with, there are daily protests demanding a change in government to one that, unlike Netanyahu who is perceived to use the military campaign to stay in office and avoid prosecution for corruption, would make a quick prisoner deal and then end the palestinian resistance as soon as possible.
Edit: And if you want to take a look at how IDF/Israel presents itself you'd look for soldiers on TikTok (preferred by israelis) or Facebook (preferred by foreign fighters), and Telegram channels like dead_terrorists. You'll notice some pretty stark differences.
Should probably also mention that you'll come across very NSFW, quite traumatising material.
Go to r/combatfootage on reddit.
Plenty there from all sides although you'll typically find the Ukrainian and Israeli viewspoints get more upvotes.
> We don't know yet whether or not Israel will charge the people involved in the aid worker bombing
To
> Could israel be lying about it? Sure. Militaries doing cover ups would hardly be a new story
> So its not like its solely up to israel to investigate/punish
Thanks for showing that this discussion is not useful.
PS:
> 1996 was quite a long time ago at this point.
So what? Holocaust was more than 80 years at this point? Does this make us forget this horrible history?
Since Israel doesn't attack first that will be the end of the hostilities.
We can then start discussing when and how to normalize the borders and reopen the airport as the situation normalizes.
No money. No bombs, No shells. Nada.
We should sanction any country that provides any of the above as well as political and military leaders and companies in Israel.
Until hostilities end and a lasting negotiated peace is established.
even if neither of us is actually an AI, this interaction will surely aid in training some LLM in the end...
i think the only plausible solution is that we don't know but we're just about to find out? as soon as the singularity hits we can ask the AI (...?)
then again, and thinking more broadly, all of life is one giant contest to guess the future, and later, to determine the future by taking precise action
so what you're asking means to try and guess how much of my current reality is predicted by AI (and more generally, by any possibly conscious actor) and how much is wildly unpredictable and chaotic?
Yes, loosely I think what you're asking at the end is somewhere slippery that I've been thinking as well. By introducing chaos or randomness in one's life it may be a way to incur computational cost to the "Sentinel AI" that is optimizing for predictive behavior (which humans are pretty predictive day to day).
Oddly this led me to realize that historical magic related to randomness may actually be a "thing" in such a system, and it was kind of a "wow" moment.
tl;dr use randomness to attempt to distort reality and run experiments, if results show anomalies then you may be in a reality at the very least "modulated" by an AI.
I do regret making the joke now, though, given the wider context of the thread.
Certainly starving civilians are being killed by the IDF. I'd be shocked if some of the deaths aren't related to self-defence. Given there look to be credible reports of the IDF operating kill zones, and allowing on the ground soldiers to set their own rules of engagement, as well as making it generally clear it's little issue in collateral deaths it's difficult to have much empathy with those numbers.
A number will be attributable to friendly fire and accident too. It wouldn't surprise me if that's a significant proportion, potentially the majority given the level of sniping, significant munitions and general anarchy.
Finally, I'm sure some are as a direct result of actual engagement with Hamas.
Any reporting by the IDF is obviously security checked propoganda, filtered through multiple levels of approvals and inspection.
What's your best estimate of civilian + military casualties in Ukraine, with whatever supporting evidence you care to muster?
Edited to add:
You've edited and added to your post after my response.
In response to your Reddit links, I think that they distract from the main point, which is that the Gaza war has disproportionately affected civilians, even in comparison with the worst of Ukraine's battlegrounds.
Ukraine has depth, and not only can its civilians move west to cities such as Lvov, its citizens have been invited into Europe.
In contrast, Gaza is a sprawling low-rise cityscape with a population of 14,000 people per square mile -- far in excess of anything in Ukraine; nearly double Kiev's population density -- and Gazans are, for the most part, forbidden from leaving. Egypt can't take them, save in special circumstances. All the privation of war is felt by this civilian population -- and, at least to an extent, this is used by Israel as a weapon.
Russia, for all its faults, has a straightforward strategy and straightforward, even realistic aims. I don't think you can say the same for Israel. It's just wild.
It's not wrong, you're wrong. You called it an estimate of casualties. The UN calls it a list of verified casualties and say that they estimate the number is "far higher".
I don't have a problem with citing those numbers if you call them what they are - the hard minimum that can be independently verified. "at least" 10,000 dead civilians, as opposed to "only" 10,000 dead civilians. That is a significant distinction. "everyone" uses those numbers to make Israel look worse at the expense of whitewashing Russia, which is appalling to me.
An actual estimate is extremely hard to find. It appears that Ukraine estimated in February 2023 that the number of civilians killed was around 100,000. The UN themselves won't say what they think the number is other than that it's "likely far higher" than the confirmed number in one statement, "tip of the iceberg" in another, etc.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-war-...
Mark Milley estimated around 40k civilian casualties in November 2022
https://www.euronews.com/2022/11/10/ukraine-war-100000-russi...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/civilian-deaths-ukraine-acc...
In any case, the highest the UN was ever able to count in Mariupol was around 2000, whereas there's more than 10,000 fresh graves, many of which are big enough for several bodies, alongside some mass graves. And that was over a year ago, in one city. Dunno what more to tell you.
If you want to compare apples to apples, then Hamas' claims of ~25,000 dead civilians should be compared against the Ukrainian government's claims of tens of thousands of civilian dead. Otherwise don't compare claims against numbers that have been independently verified to be correct (minimums).
And also, oh my god, don't say
> civilians and aid workers are generally moved away from the front, and they're more rarely treated with the wanton disregard and disdain that Gazans suffer.
or
>To all appearances, what's happening in Ukraine is a war, fought by and large by the accepted rules of war. In contrast, I don't think that Israel is fighting a war; they're marauding and taking shots at a densely populated civilian enclave that refuses to surrender to them unconditionally.
Because that's such utter horseshit. Everything the Israelis have ever been accused of doing, the Russians have done in Ukraine. Don't claim otherwise just because those pictures / videos don't get as much traction on TikTok
This is demonstrably false in trivially obvious ways. How many Ukrainians have left the country? How many Gazans have been permitted to leave? And the question you keep muddying the waters around: What's the military to civilian casualty ratio? It's much worse in Gaza, no matter how you slice it.
Even if we run your apples-to-apples comparison: 25k civilians dead in Gaza, "tens of thousands" (let's say 40k?) dead in Ukraine. (I am not sure how credible this is). The Ukrainians also claim that 180k Russian soldiers have died. Israel hasn't killed more than 12k Hamas members; Hamas claims 6k dead. In the one war, far more military than civilian casualties; in the other, the reverse. There's really no way to spin this.
It took more than three days of heavy fighting for the Israeli army to regain control, and left the country deeply traumatised by violence unseen since the country's formation in 1948.
Police are still working to assess the scale of the sexual violence that was reported alongside the killings."
I'm pretty sure "security forces" includes police and possibly firefighters and even ambulance drivers. What I found in the IDF site is 282 soldiers: https://www.gov.il/en/departments/news/swords-of-iron-idf-ca...
So the ratio is more like over 3:1. More importantly your statement not true ("civilian to soldier").
When the US fights a war we get drones bombing weddings, private mercenaries gunning down civilians in the streets of Baghdad etc. Armies engage in a very brutal practice called war which is different than the more brutal practice we tend to call terrorism. During most wars any western army fights (or really any army) there are usually many incidents one might call war crimes. Now in a post-truth world where words have no meaning you can call anyone anything you want.
When the US went to war after 9/11 what do you think its casualty rate was overall (even ignoring the fact that it didn't fight under similar conditions)? How many children did the US kill (by the way the US considered every male >14yo to be a combatant AFAIK)?
46,319 civilian casualties. I think a guess of 50% under 18yo is probably not off the mark. Some claims this number is under-reported. 52,893 "taliban insurgents killed". I'll bet a fair amount of those also under 18yo. 2,400 ISIL-K.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80...
There are a lot of differences between these wars. Gaza is much denser. The US was under no time pressure and wasn't getting e.g. continuous rocket barrages falling on it.
The IDF in general does not intentionally target civilians. It targets military targets. It might be very loose or too loose in this targeting and in this conflict but it still does as a rule. The Hamas on the other hand does intentionally target civilians and engages in other activities like mutilation and rape. It also uses civilians as shields and intentionally embeds in civilian environments for cover. There's also the little matter of who started the war.
So if you want to designate all military as terrorists then we'll have to find a different word for terrorists.
The expectation is that there are at a minimum 15/20% dead under the bombed and decimated buildings. It could well be much, much higher, even double, or triple is not infeasible, given the large scale untargeted bombing, population dispersement and recognised IDF tactics that don't allow for groups to even consider searching and rescue operations in most cases but leave possible survivors buried under the rubble to die slowly and horribly.
The current numbers are just not even close to verifiable given the circumstances, but are statistically clearly far worse in terms of civilians on all measures.
Earlier it has been said that based on previous reporting from previous incidents we can roughly trust the total numbers Hamas release evem if they are obviously wrong in that they claim every death to be an innocent civilian.
The current geopolitical outcome of Egypt accepting large numbers of Palestinian is that Israel does what it is doing now to Palestine, to Egypt at some point in the future.
E.g. you might compare it to ukrainian battles that took place in cities, but you wouldn't compare it to ukrainian battles that took place in the middle of nowhere where no civilians were. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio has some things to compare against. Part of the problem is it is often hard to identify who is a civilian, and often different battles will categorize them differently. For example, in the iraq war us was accused of significantly undercounting civilian casualties. All this makes it hard to do direct comparisons.
Numbers from:
Honestly, I'm not sure. Obviously humans make errors of all sorts as well, and even make intentionally unethical decisions.
I think the horror of this situation is that it makes war easier to wage. Accepting that all war has costs measured in blood, we should want less war. However, those in control of military forces always have incentive to wage war, so removing friction from the process is dangerous.
Off-topic of AI, but on-topic of your question:
The actual alternative to unleashing AI assassination is not human-selected targets, but not waging war. It isn't necessary to destroy Hamas with violence, it would have worked better to give Palestinians dignity and self-determination long ago. That can still work, although until it does Hamas will continue to be a problem. But as I said, war is useful for the political leaders of Israel, so they stoked and fed the flames for decades to maintain an excuse for the war machine.
During the Oslo peace process, when Israel was trying to address this in the way you propose, Hamas launched a suicide bombing campaign against Israeli civilians:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_suicide_at...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Accords
You can be critical of everything Israel does, in this war or ever - fine. But the Palestinians have no other accepted settlement other than shipping ~8 million Jews to Europe or killing them.
The people who suddenly developed this simplistic understanding of occupation/resistance/occupier have no idea what they're talking about. Often quite literally in the sense they don't even understand the meaning of what they're saying, not to mention the history of Israel or the middle east. EDIT: I realize this last statement can feel offensive but this is still my take based on two decades of interactions with a fairly random sample of people trying to explain wth is going on in this tiny piece of the middle east. The complexity of the situation doesn't yield itself to simplistic narratives (from neither side really, though my statement refers to one of those narratives the Israeli side simplistic narrative is also insufficient/inaccurate).
Israel has been sabotaging peace talks and applying divide et impera politics in the region since it was created.
Sheikh Yassin, the paraplegic spiritual leader of the Hamas movement was quite clear that their beef wasn't with the jews, but with the occupation and apartheid. He was assassinated by Israel in 2004. In hindsight Hamas was correct in not trusting the israelis in the Oslo talks.
It's more like 700000 jews that would definitely need to move, i.e. the illegal settlers in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
However, if you actually want peaceful coexistence in the long term, the only possible solution is to stop oppressing these people, and instead to build a better world for them. The Israelis won: they built their country, they got international recognition, they defended it from their neighbors. However justified this may have been given the horrors of the Holocaust, it is also undeniable that this was to a large extent to the detriment of many people who previously lived there. They now need to ensure those people can be content with the life that is left for them.
But the reality is that Israeli leaders (and a significant minority of the population) do not want that. They don't view the Palestinians as full human beings (as many in the Knesset have compared them time and time again to cockroaches and other pests), and they believe Israel has a right to even those small territories left to the Palestinians. They are continually illegally annexing more land in the West Bank, and some are preparing to do so in Gaza as well.
Netanyahu has been very open about funding, or at least supporting, Hamas as a means to ensure that moderate Palestinians don't get a voice and a two-state solution is never allowed to happen. He has said these things openly. Of course, a one state solution is also unacceptable, as it would threaten the Jewish character of Israel to have such a signficant (and growing) Muslim Arab population. Making them officially second-class citizens is also unacceptable as it would deny Israel's claims of being a democracy. Killing them all would be a bad look internationally.
So, what was happening before October 7th was in fact the ideal state according to Netanyahu and his ilk: the Palestinians are de facto second class Israeli citizens with almost no rights, they act as a convenient boogie man to scare the populace, and they are weak enough to be no more than a nuisance. October 7th was an embarrassment to the authorities on many levels (and of course a horrific crime), so they have to punish the cockroaches of Gaza to ensure they don't have the courage to try another October 7th anytime soon, and to prove their strength to their own population, then return to the status quo. Of course, if Hamas is destroyed, they will also have to find a new militant anti-Israeli organization to lead Gaza, lest they end up with credible peace attempts that could make their position difficult.
It isn't possible to destroy Hamas with violence, or apartheid for that matter. Israel has created hatred towards themselves that will last for generations, even if they could kill every last Hamas member, they've made damn sure that a subset of Palestinian (if not broader) youth will reorganize a militia and the cycle of violence will go on.
Fortunately, this is not what I'm hoping for! I'd much rather see another Rojava than another Western plutocracy.
After 10/7 almost every Israeli knows that the Palestinians are not interested in their own state.
Of the 32,000 Hamas stated deaths, 13,000 are terrorists, thus resulting in a far lower civilian-to-combatant death ratio than in other urban conflicts such as Mosul.
The lesson learned with Japan in Germany in WW II is that total military defeat is necessary. The AI technology enables the targeting of all terrorists, not only senior-level terrorists as before, resulting in a quicker end to the conflict than otherwise and thus resulting in fewer civilian deaths.
As we know these terrorists hide among civilians including in and under hospitals, making these legitimate targets. The high number of civilian deaths occur from the terrorists hiding among civilians.
13k out of 32k is around 40%. The estimates for the number of murdered children and women have been about 70% [1] for months, so the "40% are terrorist" claim already does not match that unless women and children are counted as terrorists. Anyway, even going with only 60% of those murdered being women and children, that still implies that every single killed male person is a terrorist. Now, I am sure that IDF already presents this as true in order to justify the murders, but that will not pass basic logical scrutiny of any critically-thinking person.
[1] 2024, March 14, https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/death-toll-children...
It's not hiding when you are on your own territory. It's not a shield if your enemy kills non-combatants with impunity. It's also very hard to discern "terrorists" from resistance fighters when you're an occupier operating in occupied territory, which Israel doesn't even try to do.
Do you think that's a genetic inclination? My guess is you don't.
So if it's a cultural inclination, do you think it can be changed? Seemingly no, so why not? Why wouldn't goodwill and nation-building be able to change Palestinian minds?
Taking lessons from the final acts of WWII is extraordinarily myopic and foolish. It seems to assume that whatever did happen must have happened - why would we believe that? It's contradicted by the simple and undeniable fact that humans make errors in judgment. People chose to cause suffering. People chose to respond to suffering with war. People chose to pursue war to "total military defeat" (I would say that is actually a fiction but we can go along with it as it's close enough to the truth for our purposes here).
For more context: Camp David (peace with Egypt) was in 1978 and Oslo started in 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Accords
The right wing in Israel now refers to Oslo as the "Oslo Disaster" due to the large number of Israelis killed in what they claim is a result of giving the Palestinians control over some of the land, arming their police force, and letting Palestinian leaders from abroad (Tunisia) return to the region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_suicide_at...
The left (whatever is left of it) says Oslo never had (EDIT: never was given) a chance to succeed and wasn't implemented properly.
Just a total mess like it always is in this region.
---
I do agree Israel has just cause to "remove" Hamas from Gaza post 10/7 (for some definition of remove). I also think Israel has been waging this war very poorly. I agree Palestinians don't want peace. They want Israel erased (which they sometimes put in different words but with the same end result). They say so out loud (see street interviews with Palestinians e.g. on YT, even before this war, and surveys etc.). I also know this from talking to a small sample of Palestinians myself. But, as we say in Hebrew, wise people don't get themselves into a situation that a smart people knows how to get out of, and unfortunately post Oct 7th even smart people have a hard time getting anywhere. That said, the blame lies on the Palestinians. They are responsible for the public in Israel moving right. Which in turn created this pathetic excuse of a government and general erosion of Israeli society. Which in turn is resulting in Israel's heavy handedness in Gaza (though even the less heavy handed version would be not that different in scope). They are doing that because they think that's how they'll get what they want. Hamas (supported by the majority of Palestinians) thinks that right now they're actually getting what they want. I think it's unlikely they'll get what they want. Israel is bound to take ever more aggressive approaches and nobody is going to help the Palestinians. Stopping the violent struggle, accepting Israel is a fact, and talking to Israel, is the only way Palestinians will get anything, but they're not willing to do that for various reasons (and when I say they I mean the vast majority + a way of imposing its will on the minority, i.e. if Palestinians can't get Hamas to stop killing Israelis then it doesn't even matter).
That's not the whole story. For example, we ban certain kinds of weapons -cluster munitions, chemical weapons, biological weapons, ideally we'd ban bloody mines- not because they kill too many people compared to "conventional" weapons (they don't) but because they are considered especially ... well, wrong, in the moral sense.
So maybe we decide that being killed by a machine, that decides you're a target and pulls the trigger autonomously is especially morally wrong and we don't accept it.
Chemical and biological weapons are banned because, like nukes, escalation of their use results in a scorched earth scenario.
Remember COVID-19? Whether you believe in it being natural or a lab leak, it is a good model of how a handling mishap with a mediocre bioweapon would look like.
Remember the scene in Men In Black where the recruita do target practice? They were all accurate at hitting what they shot at but only Will Smith's character was accurate at selecting a target. This AI chooses targets; it does not fire weapons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORHAP6duw9E
The job is not "shoot aliens". It's manage aliens, including Earth's population of legal resident aliens (like the taxi driver who he delivers a baby for). The Big Bad of the film is indeed posing as a human, and Smith's character runs into an endless procession of innocent (or at least non-capital-crime) aliens he should not shoot along the way.
There's a reason he gets hired over all the military folks in the scene immediately blasting away at the aliens in the shooting range.
It’s a criticism of letting the AI pick targets.
So the issue isn't that there's errors, it's that the army knows there are errors and expect humans to pick them out in 20 seconds- which they know realistically won't happen. The human only has two realistic choices- approve every target, or disapprove every target (which gets you reassigned to another role).
It's the classic statistics case of two medical diagnostics for an underlying value that isn't directly observable.
I think you've misunderstood the "zero-error" statement. It's not saying "there must be zero errors", rather that "errors don't exist - only some level of collateral damage". Hence the follow up about things being viewed statistically.
They view it in the same way that you suggest they should - that there will always be deaths and the questions is whether the system leads to more or less of them.
Personally I view that as a very utilitarian argument when applied to a machine of war. It embeds the concept that some loss of innocent life is acceptable.
What we may be witnessing is the first information age level genocide, where the killing is done at the behest of a statistical function with near infinite computing power.
This is a strong accusation, but it has the evidence behind it. The most recent of which is a report published at the UN Human Rights Council[1], but also the case filed at the World Court by South Africa in December with addenda added in March[2]. The evidence for this claim is both public, overwhelming, and has been filed at the world’s highest court.
All that said, I actually didn’t make the claim here—though I have elsewhere—I merely said we should be open to the possibility that this is the case.
1: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa_v._Israel_(Genoci...
I’m disgusted by this, I don’t care anymore what happened in October, this needs to stop. Israel government cannot be trusted to run this war, it’s turned into genocide and we’re all complicit letting them do it and supporting them. I can’t believe people actually support this, it’s clear they’ve forgotten Palestinians are people.
35000 dead, almost 2 million homeless and starving, ~10000 more buried under rubble and ~10000 taken prisoner is somehow less brutal in your eyes than ~1500 dead and several villages deserted, 10000s of thousands homeless, and 200 taken prisoner?
You and I have different definitions of brutality, so afraid I’m this discussion is at its end.
The “biased” video I posted is simply a recording of an interview of a survivor of the kibbutz on an Israeli talk show. Do you have any substantive critique of the video, besides just lazily dismissing it as biased?
If you watch footage from Nova you'll see large patches of obvious damage from Hellfire missiles, and footage from kibbutzes commonly show damage way beyond what you'd expect from handgrenades or RPG:s.
And if they could, why would they help Israel displace the palestinian population from palestinian territory?
The only resistance groups in the Gaza strip that might have militia units for women that I know about are PFLP and DFLP, and I forgot which one I've seen a video of militia women from. They are probably very small and not deployed at the moment. This means that kids and women aren't in the 'brigades', and that a majority of killed palestinians are "civilian" for sure.
Israel claims that every male they kill is a combatant, and israeli pundits and politicians routinely equate terrorist and palestinian and say things like 'there are no innocent civilians in the Gaza strip'. Neither is true, many they kill are elderly or obviously unaffiliated with the 'brigades'.
Of course, this is irrelevant, since Israel is starving the entire population of the Gaza strip and kills or maims pretty much anyone they see in the areas where they operate, sometimes even other IDF soldiers or hostages.
All reporting I've seen has made it clear that any movement of population in Gaza has been subject to IDF and more broadly Israeli control.
Every reported case I have seen appears to have been demanded by Israel, and the Palestinians have had no choice in it.
I'm not sure we're you think Hamas are involved in this at all?
It's all been forced displacements by Israel. And none of it has been willing. Where people have stayed and not moved often they have died, even with not the slightest involvement with Hamas.
Addressing your second paragraph: Not quite sure if your point, but the numbers of deaths/casualties are broadly (my interpretation) seen as being as accurate as are available, and likely to be a significant undercount of the real number.
I have to say the continual questioning of, what by a number of significant indicators, looks to be an undercount of the total number of people deliberately killed by Israel, in such a short period is appalling.
It's highly likely that when we say 30,000 it's a wrong figure because it's 40,000 Israel deliberately killed.
If it's wrong and it's only 20,000 Israel killed it doesn't matter. They should still stop the killing.
The most upsetting(for me) thing is reports of all the kids killed by snipers and just in general, as a father I cannot imagine losing my child to this.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/gaza-palestini...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/23/israel...
The mistake the west made was not recognizing that some Israelis are just as capable of the same level of savagery as the original Hamas attacks. 'They share the same values as us westerners', they said.... they assassinated their own president!
In 1999 Yugoslavia killed ~12 thousand Albanians and displaced ~85 thousand more. Bill Clintons secretary of defense had no problem calling that genocide: "The appalling accounts of mass killing in Kosovo and the pictures of refugees fleeing Serb oppression for their lives makes it clear that this is a fight for justice over genocide.". This led NATO to drop bombs on Yugoslavia [0].
In this conflict Israel has killed ~31 thousand Palestinians and displaced ~2.3 million more [1]. And now we sell them jet planes [2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_bombing_of_Yugoslavia
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_invasion_of_the_Gaza_S...
[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-administration...
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/03/08/ukraine-russian-assault-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/26/russia-accused...
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/03/ukraine-human...
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/08/1085097957/what-the-war-in-sy...
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-blames-russia-a...
https://press.un.org/en/2022/sc15023.doc.htm
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/russia-filtra...
https://www.hrw.org/report/2022/09/01/we-had-no-choice/filtr...
About military-to-civilian casualty ratio: again, compare like-for-like. Mariupol is the best analogue for Gaza, and Mariupol suffered tremendous civilian casualties despite not having all that many soldiers in the city. I would be shocked if the ratio was not comparable to Gaza if not worse. Had Kyiv been encircled it would have suffered the same fate or worse.
Even if you use the UN-confirmed deaths in Mariupol (around 2000), which we agree is an undercount, that's around 0.5%, compared to 1.2% in Gaza. On the other hand if it's 10,000, which still might be an undercount, that would be significantly more than Gaza.
But yes, Ukraine has "depth" and a larger population, so yes, lots of the fighting takes place away from cities. That doesn't, of course, prevent Russia from bombing and striking apartment buildings and kindergartens. Like this incident from a few days ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm6j9_XQNtY
Or this one, from yesterday
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-missile-damages...
But no, geographic reality shouldn't let Russia off the hook. If the conditions were right they'd treat every city like Mariupol, or Grozny.
https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1776318157348540724
But more than anything, I can just look at the conflict itself and there's no genocide going on. It's war in a dense urban area where Hamas hides among the population.
The scandal is more that (surprise, surprise) the human oversight isn’t doing its job and the soldiers just follow orders.
For what it's worth I'm not suggesting anything, just pointing out the obvious fact that this war doesn't end with the whole of Gaza population being turned into martyrs. Looks to me like Israel responded exactly like the jihadists wanted in the first place with their attack.
Can you point to policies of removing west bank settlements to show that before the horrific attack, accepting Israel was going well in the west bank? If anything, the not-being-kicked-out-of-your-home was going better in the violent Gaza strip, and they overstepped their hand
You're also wrong about Israelis at the time not worried about the west bank. The Israeli left was extremely worried about the occupation of the west bank. I would say resolving the status of that territory was an important thing since 1967 (though I was born in 1968 so I don't have the entire experience in my head) but for some of that time the state of war with the surrounding Arab countries was a show stopper to that. The peace with Egypt was one of the factors that enabled the start of the peace process with the Palestinians.
Today you'll maybe find 5% of Israelis are agreeable to that two state solution, at best.
I'm not quite following your second question here. Settlements in the west bank have occasionally been removed but before the Oct 7th attack we're in a process of the right wing getting more embedded in the west bank and the extremists more emboldened which is sort of the process I'm alluding to here. I'm not sure if you're referring to violence forcing Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 here as some sort of benchmark for the west bank? Supposedly Arik Sharon's plan was to follow the withdrawal from Gaza with a unilateral withdrawal from most of the west bank.
Keep in mind that most of Gaza was handed to the PA before the 2005 withdrawal as part of the peace process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza%E2%80%93Jericho_Agreement I don't remember all the details any more, I'd have to look them up.
My point is the Palestinians could have gotten all the West Bank and Gaza through peaceful negotiations within the Oslo framework. It is true that what pushed Israel to even talk was the first intifadah though I'm convinced there was no need for violence even then.
A complete treatment of this topic would require a lot more time and effort. But anyways, the move right is again extremely significant for Palestinians, in a bad way. (EDIT: It's pretty bad for Isrealis a way in many ways)
We know such things are possible, but we can't actually do them.
> The supporters of the region's administration state that it is an officially secular polity with direct democratic ambitions based on democratic confederalism and libertarian socialism promoting decentralization, gender equality, environmental sustainability, social ecology, and pluralistic tolerance for religious, cultural, and political diversity, and that these values are mirrored in its constitution, society, and politics
So… you want a western liberal outcome?
No, I was referring to western liberalism that’s why I used the term western liberalism not “neoliberal hegemony of wealthy Western nations.”
But when a friend's brother was there, it was a communist spot
Because there has to be a number, right? Is 30k dead palestinians too many? Is 50k? is 200k? How about all of them?
The population of British Palestine was 31% Jewish, 9% Christian and 60% arab in 1946 UN Survey. Jews got more land after partitioning but a huge chunk of that was the Negev desert. Arabs rejected partitioning and the Arab nations started a war to destroy Israel. You can confirm this from any source you like.
dang: can you kill this article? The article has biased language (Israel is fighting Hamas not “bombing Palestinians” as if the war is on the civilian population) and the conversation here is political advocacy.
Of course, the war started because surrounding Arab nations didn't accept the UN plan of splitting up that territory - with both good and bad intentions to be sure. But even if you think the intentions of those nations were entirely mosntruous, my point is that the Arab population of Mandatory Palestine were victims of this whole war, and they (and their descendants) are the people who today live in ghettos of Gaza and the West Bank. And it is understandable that they would bear malice on those who caused them or their parents or grandparents to lose their homes, especially when they now live in squalor. And it is also to be expected, though sad, that some of them will turn to terrorism and hurt other innocents in their own turn.
But the existence of terrorists among a population does not give one carte blanche to attack that population.
That the narrative of Israel stealing land is false.
Israel encouraged arabs within their partition that were not resisting the new nation to stay. You can find many references to this, and it was Hertzl’s origin intention is his writing. This is why the 2M Israeli arabs - that have more freedom that in any arab nation - exist. Pity the arabs that left.
> is understandable that they would bear malice on those who caused them or their parents or grandparents to lose their homes
They don’t though. They have no malice towards their leaders that constantly started wars trying to destroy Israel and resulted in their losing their homes. They just hate Jews.
> But the existence of terrorists among a population does not give one carte blanche to attack that population.
Yes agreed. This is why the war is on Hamas rather than Gazans (even though Gazans overwhelmingly support the slaughter of their Israeli neighbours) at the cause of a great many Israeli lives.
Jordan took a large number in the past and they were terrible guests -attempting to overthrow the sovereign government- and got expelled. Black September left a very bad taste in nearly everyone’s mouth. Governments friendly towards Palestine are very much against physically taking them after those events
Also, why would Egypt let in those that might provoke conflict and war with Israel?
It's a fools mission, and one which Egypt was quite clear on in November/December it didn't want to embark on.
That border is even more tightly controlled than the Israeli one AFAIK.
Also, some useful conext:
The Israeli border wasn't always like today. It has been progressively tightened step by step as nutjobs on the Arab side used whatever leeway they had to stage suicide attacks and smuggle in rocket parts.
From Google: ================= Egypt, however, has warned against an influx of refugees. It facilitates humanitarian aid into Gaza, but has said a mass exodus of Palestinians out of Gaza into Egypt is a red line, saying it fears Israel might never let the Palestinians go back. =====================
And Egypts real fear is that the Palestinians in Egypt will try to take back Palestine. Which wouldn't be very good for Egypt and engage them in a war with Israel.
> that’s why I used the term western liberalism not “neoliberal hegemony of wealthy Western nations.”
the latter often cloaks itself as the former when asserting itself.
For example, in France (one of the "birthplaces" for, and current bastions of, western liberalism) there is a phrase often used as a blanket push back against almost any criticism of Israel's actions: "Israel is the only democratic state in the Middle East!". It's so prevalent that academia has written an entire book around it: https://www.cairn.info/moyen-orient--9791031803364-page-113....
Depending on how often and how recently they have been encountering things like this (given current events) in their daily life, I can understand the other commenter mistaking your position as such.
For my part, I am unsure of exactly what would happen if we lift the oppressors' thumbs (starting with Israel, Hamas, and wealthy "western" neoliberal hegemony, namely, but the list doesn't stop there). I don't think that anyone knows, for that matter, as it's never happened in any historical circumstances that remotely resemble our own. I do think that if you want western liberalism as the concept, and avoid some of its historical failure modes like boom&bust cycles and exacerbated economic inequality paving the way for populist anti-democratic revolts, you need to aim for much higher than its current outcomes in terms of dignity and self-determination for all groups of peoples. To your point, I've read some reports that Rojava has deteriorated, especially post-US-withdrawal, to very much not be either "western liberalism" or a society I would want to live in.
To be crystal clear, the below isn't attempting to justify targeting children but it's important that those who are blindingly critical of Israel understand the complex realities.
Hamas does employ combatants under 18yo (which is what counts as children in those counts): "There have been reports of children below 15 years of age in Hamas, with the lowest recorded age being 12, but the process of selection for the Izz al-Deen Al-Qassem Brigades is reportedly long and rigorous and has not to date included children." - https://www.refworld.org/reference/annualreport/cscoal/2001/...
"Amnesty International is gravely concerned about reports that earlier today a 16-year-old Palestinian child was found to be carrying explosives when attempting to pass through the Israeli army checkpoint at Huwara, at the entrance of the West Bank town of Nablus" ... "a 17-year-old Palestinian detonated an explosive belt he was wearing as he was being tracked down by Israeli soldiers," - https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/mde150...
"However, children receive military training and are used as messengers and couriers, and in some cases as fighters and suicide bombers in attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians.21 All the main political groups involve children in this way, including Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.22
At least nine children carried out suicide attacks in Israel and the Occupied Territories between October 2000 and March 2004" - https://www.refworld.org/reference/annualreport/cscoal/2004/...
I.e., according to the only available source, and one that has proven itself reliable in past conflicts.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/what-is-gazas-ministry-of...
>Throughout four wars and numerous bloody skirmishes between Israel and Hamas, U.N. agencies have cited the Health Ministry’s death tolls in regular reports. The International Committee of the Red Cross and Palestinian Red Crescent also use the numbers.
>In the aftermath of war, the U.N. humanitarian office has published final death tolls based on its own research into medical records.
>In all cases the U.N.’s counts have largely been consistent with the Gaza Health Ministry’s, with small discrepancies.
>2008 war: The ministry reported 1,440 Palestinians killed; the U.N. reported 1,385.
>2014 war: The ministry reported 2,310 Palestinians killed; the U.N. reported 2,251.
>2021 war: The ministry reported 260 Palestinians killed; the U.N. reported 256.
It's perfectly reasonable to question data from an organization known for propaganda and terrorism. But please also try to find answers to your doubts.
You do realise that statistically that argument is insane by several orders of magnitude?
There is no rationale, or sane, argument for killing this number of children indescriminately. Never mind the tens of thousands that have been disabled and maimed.
There's things like making children lie in graves so they get accustomed to being martyrs, this is the longer story: https://aish.com/the-jihadist-who-converted-to-judaism/
I think it's important to understand this to know who Israel is dealing with.
On Israel's side of this I think it's clear Israel has been using fairly indiscriminate force at times. However even if Israel used has the most discriminate use of force a lot of children would get killed.
What do you propose Israel can do against Hamas? What would you do when 30,000 combatants are sitting on your border, embedded with civilians, in civilian clothing, want you to kill as many civilians as possible, use them as shield while launching attacks at you? Half of the population is younger than 18yo. What do you do when thousands of rockets are launched at you from densely populated places? Let's reset to Oct 8th, how do you wage this war?
The reason is simple: it’s the combination of forced military and being the descendants of a generation that migrated and ethnically cleansed Palestine are overwhelmingly potent sources of indoctrination. Most people tend to assimilate and therefore they will blend into the Israeli military (and you see what kind of ethics they have) and most people find it difficult to condemn their parents and grandparents as genocidal monsters so instead they will favor whatever narrative absolves their lineage.
Overall it still points to "what is the right response to guerilla warfare?" Or, "if even children want to kill you for what you're doing, what makes you so sure you're in the right?"
It's important to note that Hamas' suicide bombers were in general manipulated. I.e. this is not some grass roots child that decided they want to "kill you". This is cold blooded recruiting, conditioning, sending people to blow themselves up. I recommend you read up on that a little bit, there's a fair bit of material.
This (the start of the wave of suicide bombings) was also during somewhat euphoric time in Israeli-Palestinian relationships with the peace process happening, it wasn't a time of extreme repression.
You should also look a little at the textbooks and curriculum taught to those children.
Nobody has the "right" to kill other people. That's not a right.
Gaza was not occupied, so they specifically didn't have the right you claim they had that doesn't even exist.
> On the Gaza strip they're denied international relations and trade.
This is also not true. When Israel left in 2005 they pretty much had control of their destiny. They chose to elect Hamas, that said its goal is to kill all Jews in the world. They chose to keep attacking Israel after Israel left. The full blockade on Gaza from the Israeli side was only imposed after Hamas came to power in 2007. Gaza still has a border with Egypt where they were free to negotiate any trade or relationships they felt like. Except the Egyptians didn't like them any better than Israel because they supported ISIS in Sinai.
Your link says it is a thing:
“In international law, the right to resist is closely related to the principle of self-determination. It is widely recognized that a right to self-determination arises in situations of colonial domination, foreign occupation, and racist regimes that deny a segment of the population political participation. According to international law, states may not use force against the lawful exercise of self-determination, while those seeking self-determination may use military force if there is no other way to achieve their goals.”
> Gaza was not occupied,
Gaza was openly occupied until 2005, and after that Israel “disengaged” but still actively patrolled Gaza’s waters, maintained what was in effect a free fire zone on the Gaza side of the border (with declared entry rules and prohibitions within certain distances, but the shootings occurred both well beyond the declared distances and when civilians were complying with the declared conditions), and otherwise used military force to effectively dictate conditions inside Gaza.
Moreover, Palestine remains occupied whether or not the Gaza piece of it is.
Yes it is. It definitely is. It's definitely very much a right to start killing soldiers if another country invades yours and starts occupying it.
Yes it is. Israel controls the borders, airspace, finances, communications, water, and so on. This amounts to occupation.
Your views are so very weird. IS in Sinai has executed people suspected of helping to supply weapons to the Gaza strip, they're at war with Hamas.
But Hamas is not a legitimate resistance movement. It is a fundamentalist, oppressive, terrorist regime. You do not stand to gain anything by associating with them.
They've also shown a lot of ideological pragmatism compared to e.g. Hezbollah, and their main competitor on the Gaza strip is a splinter called Palestinian Islamic Jihad which considers Hamas too pragmatic, too invested in 'soft' projects like social or charity work. I'm not as sure that the alternatives are better.
Except they killed all opposition.
Someone will have to root them out like the German nazis, put the area under military occupation until they are ready to elect a new government - just like postwar Germany - and sadly that someone is Israel since no one else steps up.
I'd personally love if some other country told Israel to get lost, rooted out Hamas and administered Gaza until they were ready for elections.
I'm sure most Israelis would love it too.
If your society's two choices are a.) lots of corruption, and b.) less corruption but with terrorism, then you've pretty much shown that you're incapable of self-governance as a people.
> and since they stopped doing suicide bombings they've been quite successful as a resistance movement. Since several years back they've also been quite good at unifying and coordinating the political parties and militias on the Gaza strip in preparation for and during periods of israeli military aggression, including with their main competitor in Palestinian Islamic Jihad, socialists from PFLP/DFLP/Fatah movement, Iran's Mujahideen movement and so on.
Sounds like if Israel didn't exist, these guys would just be fighting against Fatah instead. Or fighting between themselves.
Yeah, possibly. In the West Bank militia groups have been fighting PA forces recently due to them harassing and killing militia men and generally assisting the IDF in the occupation. After the 2006 election the PA tried to oust Hamas from the Gaza strip and got violently expelled.
On the other hand, over the decades since 2006 Hamas has co-existed with lots of political movements in the Gaza strip and helped make sure their militias continued recruiting and exercising. It has been a politically repressive environment for sure, in large part because you can't survive as a political movement under occupation without developing a serious paranoia.
Hamas terrorizes Palestinians, threatening those who dissent with cutoffs from basic amenities and even certain death. All of the aforementioned militia have good reason to distrust PA, because PA is the recognized representative of the Palestinian people by every single country in the world. No country gives a shit about Hamas. When aid is delivered to WB or Gaza, it's delivered in the name of the PA, even if they have lost control over Gaza for so many years.
And why does Hamas oppose PA? Because their ideal government is one with roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a designated terrorist organization in the West as well as every surrounding country in the Middle East.
One could argue that Hamas is the rightful representative of the Palestinian people. But is it really? Elections held in Palestine are often a sham affair, with threats and coercion abound. But even if they won with a resounding majority, the fact that Palestinians en masse chose to elect an organization that cuts their water supply to make rockets from pipes says a lot more about the kind of people Palestinians are, and why they shouldn't be supported too much (something which every Arab neighbour of theirs has figured out pretty much).
The Hamas charter is from 2017. Do you have any specific complaints about its contents?
Did you completely miss their actions on October 7th? They didn't stop that kind of thing after the nineties.
The environment they operate in neutralizes a lot of the IDF's advantages. Dense urban, many civilians, tunnels. You can't bring F-35s to bear if you have battles inside your own towns. It took the IDF about 3 days to recover from the initial attack including scenes like tanks firing into Israeli houses.
There are a lot of Israelis with military background that claim that the Oct 7th attack wasn't far from being an existential threat. Hamas was planning to connect with the west bank and also to proceed much farther into Israel than it managed to. There were some heroics e.g. from the police in stopping that on the roads leading out of the south. In combination with a land attack from Hezbollah in the north that could have been a scenario that has some probability of getting 10's or 100's of thousands of Israelis killed at the very least. It's hard to imagine but then Oct 7th was also hard to imagine.
It starts with uncomfortable chairs and a written test on flimsy paper without desks; Smith's character noisily pulls over a table to write on while the military folks do the expected thing of struggling through. "You're everything we've come to expect from years of government training", they get told, and then their memories are wiped. Smith's character, instead, gets a briefing on the MIB and an intro to alien bugs pouring Kay some coffee.
(Said briefing also indicates Earth is a neutral zone for alien refugees. Again, "shoot first" is not what they want people doing!)
Yes, because he's Will Smith.
Not to be the tone police or anything, but a HN discussion of AI-powered mass murder really isn't the time to be glib.
No problem with tone policing for me. I think that's how this board works, although more implicitly.
Claiming that IDF infantry and the armed resistance groups in the Gaza strip are pretty much equal in equipment is just insane. It's, you know, not even wrong.
How long would it take to walk to the West Bank? Are you sure they planned to "connect with the West Bank"?
You just don't get it.
The hatred Israelis feel towards Gazans right now is not driven by racism. In general Israel's feelings towards Palestinians is related to the violence Palestinians have inflicted on Israelis and the violent conflict in general. Israelis think Gazans want to murder all of them and that feeling has support reality.
I agree there's some amount of indoctrination but that's also a simplistic world view.
I really wonder, if you think this is what Israelis think, what do you think Palestinians think? You know, the ones that have been murdered by the tens of thousands. The ones that have been made refugees in their own country.
> They don’t though. They have no malice towards their leaders that constantly started wars trying to destroy Israel and resulted in their losing their homes.
Of course, they are living under propaganda and they are being actively oppressed by Israel, not by other Arab nations.
> They just hate Jews.
This is just false and racist.
> Yes agreed. This is why the war is on Hamas rather than Gazans (even though Gazans overwhelmingly support the slaughter of their Israeli neighbours) at the cause of a great many Israeli lives.
If this were true, than the population of Gaza would not be starved, with aid being trickled in such low quantities that even the USA under Biden is trying to go around Israel's official quotas and provide aid separately. And if this were true than the IDF would not be deliberately targetting aid workers, hospitals, nurseries and so on.
And for every Palestinian happy to see an Israeli killed, there is at least one Israeli happy to see Palestinians killed. Both sides have their disgusting extremists. The difference is that one has access to every weapon on Earth and is currently rampaging and killing tens of thousands of civilians, while the other side has killed a few hundred civilians in the worse attack they have ever mounted. And flaunting every international law they can find, such as recently bombing an embassy in a different country.
Yes. That doesn’t prove that the arabs were driven away by Jews though.
> they are being actively oppressed by Israel
No. As we’ve discussed Arabs tried to destroy Israel 3 times and lost. If you have a response to this historical fact then post it, otherwise it’s fairly clear who is causing misery to the arab Palestinians.
>> They just hate Jews. >This is just false and racist.
No. Firstly Gazans and west bank Palestinians are not a race, Arabs are. Secondly accusing others of being racist is not racist. Finally you can easily look up opinion polls in support of the massacre in Gaza to confirm that Gazans hate Jews.
> if this were true, than the population of Gaza would not be starved
Yes exactly! The starvation is another myth. You can look up obesity statistics in Gaza to confirm this yourself. Or watch videos posted by Gazans enjoying their open markets posted every day, or other Gazans throwing away their rations because they don’t like M&Ms. Like the nakba or the MrFAFO videos a huge amount of what you see is simply fake.
> The difference is that one has access to every weapon on Earth and is currently rampaging and killing tens of thousands of civilians
No. Rampaging would be running around torturing people in front of their families. You don’t know how many civilians are killed in the fighting between Israel and Hamas. Your only source is Hamas and they don’t distinguish between fighters and civilians, they also increased the number by the same amount every day for a month before they realised it looks bad.
Given that the region was majority Arab, and that Israel was never going to be a majority Arab nation, the only logical possibility is that Israeli authorities always intended to drive out a large number of Palestinian Arabs from their land. That the Arabs realized this and opposed the formation of a state that would drive them out is not that surprising.
> As we’ve discussed Arabs tried to destroy Israel 3 times and lost. If you have a response to this historical fact then post it, otherwise it’s fairly clear who is causing misery to the arab Palestinians.
Even if the ultimate fault for their current state lied entirely with Arab leaders (which it doesn't) that doesn't change one iota the fact that it is Israel forcing Palestinians in Gaza to live in an open-air prison (as UN rapporteurs call it) for the past 60 years, and currently committing genocide against them. And you forget that it's even Israeli officials supporting Hamas as the rulers of Gaza, as Netanyahu has bragged.
> The starvation is another myth. You can look up obesity statistics in Gaza to confirm this yourself. Or watch videos posted by Gazans enjoying their open markets posted every day, or other Gazans throwing away their rations because they don’t like M&Ms. Like the nakba or the MrFAFO videos a huge amount of what you see is simply fake.
I don't need to look at propaganda videos or cherry picked social media. Serious news organizations and the UN have been investigating this, and unanimously discuss the fact that Gaza is very close to starvation and that rations are nowhere near enough. Even Israeli officials actually acknowledge that there is not enough aid going into Gaza (though of course they don't admit their role in making sure of this).
Please answer my questions.
Not as many as Israel since though.
The involved actor who could clear things up doesn't want to. If they don't want to, I take it that it wasn't very important to them.
Sure, they might be shitbags, they're led by politicians after all. Have you considered sending the IDF a message and ask them to change their priorities and start aiming their shells mainly at al-Qassam brigade militants?
It's unclear what you mean by dissent. Before October 7th dissent was likely the majority political position in the Gaza strip, they weren't very popular. Suspected collaboration with the occupier or its affiliates has been dealt with harshly for sure, and to some extent this has hurt LGBTQ persons specifically since Israel likes to identify them and pressure them to become collaborators.
Hamas opposes the PA because they are collaborating with the occupier. The ikhwan movement is feared by regional dictatorships because it is relatively egalitarian, hence they designate them as a terrorist organisation. It's been decades since they stopped using political violence, IIRC they did before Hamas began using it.
Elections aren't often held in Palestine, so they can't often be anything at all. Abbas knows he'd be ousted if he called elections, so he won't. His buddies in Israel and the US also prefer that he stays in power, so they won't pressure him to call for elections either.
As for aid, it goes through Israel rather than the PA. Same goes for money, the palestinians aren't allowed to have their own currency or financial system. Israel enjoys having the ability to refuse to pay out taxes they collect, for example.
Israel routinely cuts water supply to the Gaza strip, and in the West Bank it forbids palestinians to collect rain water through a rather nasty bureaucratic regulation while at the same time destroying or stealing wells. Under such conditions it's somewhat reasonable to use infrastructure to try to get rid of the occupier, don't you think? What would you do?
Probably recognize that 30 years of violent resistance only ever ends up harming me more, and strive to elect leaders that will opt for trying a truly peaceful approach. Instead of starting wars every few years with a far more powerful neighboring country, maybe... not starting such wars is a better idea.
Hamas drove out the israelis from the Gaza strip, that's generally considered a success among palestinians and something many palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem wishes they had too.
When another country occupies yours, then it's not you that's starting a war when you attack them.
- dealt with harshly -> torture and summary executions. Tied with a rope to a car and dragged through the streets. Thrown from a rooftop of a tall building. That sort of stuff.
- "Suspected collaboration with the occupier" -> being associated with the Fatah, PA, or just not doing what Hamas orders you to do in any civil or other matter. Basically any person that crosses Hamas members in any way. Think Mexican drug cartels hanging journalists from bridges and you won't be far off.
- occupation -> the existence of the state of Israel in any borders. occupier -> Israel.
- Gaza's occupation -> The blockade Israel imposed after Hamas took over Gaza by force and started launching attacks at Israel from Gaza. Please ignore the border with Egypt or Egypt's control over the Egyptian half of Rafah. Egypt doesn't exist. Waiting for the Muslim Brotherhood to take over there but in the meantime let's support ISIS in Sinai since an enemies enemy is my friend.
- "Israel routinely cuts water supply to the Gaza strip" -> Israel supplies water, food, electricity to what is essentially an enemy state that attacks it continuously. Gaza has its own power station, it has a desalination plant, it has wells, and it can also get all these things from Egypt or use the international aid money it's getting towards becoming more independent. Nah- let's dig tunnels and build rockets. Think Ukraine supplying Russia with water, food and electricity. Or South Korea supplying North Korea.
You are right that Hamas would win an election. Even more so after Oct 7th. The Pro-Palestinian crowd does its best to pretend it ain't so. They artificially separate Hamas, who the Palestinians want to represent them, from the Palestinians. Palestinians are peace loving people that need to be protected at all costs and the Hamas are people from another planet that just happened to have landed in the midst. There hasn't been an elections since 2006 so Hamas is not the legitimate government of Gaza and so we can't treat the Gazans as a side to this war. Even Israel says the same thing, our war is not with the "Palestinians" our war is with Hamas.
If they were that bloodthirsty, how come they haven't killed more in their own population? How come they weren't ousted by the local population?
Israel controls the means for sustaining life in the Gaza strip and uses that power arbitrarily, that's occupation. If you treat a couple of million people that way they will for sure try to hurt you badly. And it's not weird that they do, it's not surprising or savage, it's rather very reasonable to do. You would too.
Or that, as history tells us, that Arabs refused to accept partitioning and tried to destroy Israel 3 times and lost. I’m not sure why you would ignore well documented events in favour of deciding something else is the only logical explanation.
> I don't need to look at propaganda videos or cherry picked social media
Gazan obesity stats aren’t produced by Israel, nor are the social media accounts of Gazans.
> is Israel forcing Palestinians in Gaza to live in an open-air prison
The only open air prison with open fields and malls and luxury cars. Forced by Israel and Egypt which I gather you think is also secretly controlled by Israel.
What does one have to do with the other? The moment that the partition plan was announced, some Arabs were going to be expelled from the territory of Israel regardless of anything else that would have happened. They chose to fight this, and obtained support from those around them. They lost, and now Israel exists, is larger than the original plan, and they are forced to live in squalor. These people are angry that history turned out this way, and they are turning all that anger on their current oppressors, and will continue to do so as long as they are oppressed, all the more so when they are slaughtered by the thousands and starved as they are now.
> Gazan obesity stats aren’t produced by Israel, nor are the social media accounts of Gazans.
Are you seriously claiming that, despite the overwhelming evidence that they are being starved since this war started, Gazans are actually getting fatter? This is beyond ridiculous.
> The only open air prison with open fields and malls and luxury cars.
The existence of a handful of rich people doesn't mean anything. All objective thrid parties assessors have come to the same conclusion, that the people of Gaza are living under oppression.
> Forced by Israel and Egypt which I gather you think is also secretly controlled by Israel.
Egypt is complicit, but they only control a tiny part of the border, and have explicit agreements with Israel about what to allow to pass through there.
You keep claiming Gazans are poor because they are oppressed by Israel. I keep referring to history and the choices of arab leaders as the basis for their poverty.
> Are you seriously claiming that Gazans are actually getting fatter?
I am not claiming Gazans are getting fatter. The data says they were obese before they started the war, giving the lie to the open air prison fallacy. If you want to refute that, or claim that the videos produced by your fellow pro Hamas accounts showing markets open and food being thrown away are false, you are welcome to do so.
> The existence of a handful of rich people doesn't mean anything.
Not just rich people, the malls are for everyone as are the wide open spaces. It proves your claims about an open air prison are false. No reasonable person would describe that as a prison.
> Egypt is complicit
You didn’t write that Egypt is oppressing gaza.
You also didn’t take back your spurious claim that it was racist (?) to point out that Gazans hate Jews as evidenced by their overwhelming support for the massacre.
For the sake of other people who might run across your comments, the West Bank that Israel now occupies was captured during the Six-Day war from Jordan, who had previously illegally annexed it.
> that's generally considered a success among palestinians
Success narratives exist on both sides. From an Israeli perspective, peace talks with the Palestinians never went anywhere (unlike with Egypt, btw) - yet, whenever Israel went to war, it won. So it's not hard to understand why the mainstream Israeli stance has increasingly hardened. I fundamentally disagree with this, I think peace should be attempted over and over again until it works, but if you're going to apply realpolitik thinking to the Palestinian side, you ought to do the same for the Israelis.
> The data says they were obese before they started the war, giving the lie to the open air prison fallacy.
You brought that up in the context of the starvation to which Israel is currently subjecting them. Neither I, nor others, claimed Gaza was starving before the current genocide. The fact that it's an open air prison is related to the way Israel, and to some extent Egypt, are controlling access into and out of Gaza, not to obesity.
> It proves your claims about an open air prison are false. No reasonable person would describe that as a prison.
And yet every UN rapporteur that has investigated has reached the same conclusion. Almost as if they know some reality that you don't.
> You didn’t write that Egypt is oppressing gaza.
Yes, Egypt is also oppressing Gaza. That's what complicit means.
> You also didn’t take back your spurious claim that it was racist (?) to point out that Gazans hate Jews as evidenced by their overwhelming support for the massacre.
You are the one who claimed two million+ people are each and every one antisemitic. And also the one who seems not to know what it's called when you smear a whole ethnic/cultural group like this.
No, according to polls only 70% support the brutal murder of Israelis, as previously discussed.
https://www.hamas-massacre.net/
There are dozens of sites collecting footage that Hamas itself put out during the attacks. There are hundreds of witness accounts. There are countless news articles from reputable news organizations corroborating all these accounts.
If you're honestly looking for the truth, it's not hard to realize what that it is.
While I still think Israel is making the same mistake we did after 9/11, these videos help me feel a little of the vitriol fueling the IDF's actions.
Those are just the tip of iceberg, unfortunately. A lot of the more disturbing stuff was censored to protect the families, but you can see journalists describing seeing a 47-minute compilation of... harder scenes.
> While I still think Israel is making the same mistake we did after 9/11, these videos help me feel a little of the vitriol fueling the IDF's actions.
Quite possibly. Though let me make something clear about my views - revenge is never ok, and doubly not ok if it's carried out against innocent Gazans.
Hamas invaded Israel and slaughtered civilians, and in addition effectively shut down the country by launching dozens of rocket attacks every day for weeks, and have promised to do it again if they remain in power. So removing them from power is morally and legally right. But revenge should never be the goal.
Social media is cancer when it comes to delicate political conflicts and nothing exemplifies this more than the Israeli-Palestinian (formerly Israeli-Arab) war, where both "sides" get stuck in echo chambers. The roots of this conflict go back at least to the end of the 19th century (if you leave out the complex histories of the Jewish and Arab peoples before that) and both sides have legitimate grievances as well as their fair share of blame. For every claim that someone's going to make, somebody else can make a counter-claim.
It also shows Hellfire-burnt bodies at Nova and seems to claim Hamas killed them.
Could you be more specific about what footage there is so important? I mean, there were obviously civilians who were killed by palestinians during that day, which isn't surprising or something I contest. But sites like that and the documentary I've seen, what they show isn't a lot, it's nothing like the torture and arbitrary detention and murder Israel has been engaged in for decades.
What do you mean by vague? That's someone who was raped recounting her rape. That tag also includes other testimonies of witnesses who saw people being raped.
Other testimonies and videos there show the militants entering villages and shooting civilians.
Here, take this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAFDI63yvNQ&rco=1
Look at around the 1:10 mark, you can see some more examples. There's also this website, though I can't access it: https://saturday-october-seven.com/, so I'm not sure what it contains.
> I mean, there were obviously civilians who were killed by palestinians during that day, which isn't surprising or something I contest.
So what are you saying? 1,200 Israelis died that day. Hundreds who were at a music rave. Hundreds who were families in their homes in various villages. We have footage for some of these deaths, but obviously not all 1200, so even if I show you twenty videos, you can still say "well that's just a few". What exactly are you looking for?
There are hundreds of articles of journalists who got access to the 47-minute video compilation that is not publicly available, but contains far more material showing the various things Hamas did. E.g. this Tweet/video I randomly found by Chris Cuomo: https://twitter.com/ChrisCuomo/status/1735473602806399155?la...
Look, it's totally right to criticize Israel, but denying the many atrocities committed on October 7th is pretty indefensible. If you're engaged enough with this subject to discuss it in online forums to the extent you are doing, I don't think there's much I can say that you haven't seen, or that you can't find with fairly cursory searches. Thousands of mainstream media sources, of all political stripes, document exactly the same thing, and there's plenty of footage.
And for what it's worth, just talk with almost any Israeli, like me, and we can just tell you about the many people killed. Without doing any searching for it or anything, I can tell you I know about 8 people who lost loved ones, friends or family, on October 7th. It's just as anecdotal as seeing random video footage, I know, but I'm a real person who's been here on HN for many years.
It shows some indiscriminate killing, for example throwing handgrenades into rocket shelters.
Soon after October 7th there was a lot of video material circulated, claimed to be from Israel but which was really cartel snuff and similar. If you have some material you are sure isn't in this category then I'd like to see it.
I really don't understand your motivation in engaging in denial of the atrocity.
Business as usual, for sure. PIJ would likely fill the vacuum, continue _their_ rocket attacks, and not be as restrictive and predictable as the al-Qassam brigades. Mujahideen brigades and DFLP:s and PFLP:s military wings would also fire some rocket salvos when they think it's appropriate, for example when people affiliated with them in the West Bank are arrested or harassed by Israel.
And you could go on, keep starving and bombing and on and on like Israel has done for more than a decade. Either you commit genocide or you endure the violent resistance or you make peace, and every time you 'mow the lawn' you raise the barrier to peace.
You obviously having been following this for more than six months, October 7th is where history starts for you. Very little in the footage on that web site is worse than what palestinians suffer more or less constantly, from the IDF and from settlers. Most palestinians in Palestine know someone who lost a toddler due to very treatable starvation or israeli gun violence or whatever.
If it were up to me - you help someone who wants peace fill the gap that Hamas left, you:
1. Make every effort to help Gaza recover. Directly as much as possible, and by getting the world involved.
2. Help a better government form in Gaza, one that actually cares about the people, about economic development, and that wants peace.
3. Work towards peace with whoever you can possibly find that is willing to talk peace.
> You obviously having been following this for more than six months, October 7th is where history starts for you.
That's ridiculous. I've lived in Israel for 30 years, do you really think I believe that "history started on October 7th?". In addition, you can find plenty of comments of mine where I am extremely critical of Israel's actions over the last 15-20 years, both in not pursuing peace, and in actively blocking peace in many ways. (I'm also fairly critical of the settler enterprise which goes back much further.)
> Very little in the footage on that web site is worse than what Palestinians suffer more or less constantly, from the IDF and from settlers.
Maybe if you only look at the specific video footage I sent. But in general, that's a pretty wrong statement. The majority of Palestinians, especially Gazans, never interact with the IDF, until the once-every-few-years back-and-forth between Hamas and Israel. And until October 7th, there wasn't any operation near its scale.
Palestinians aren't mass taken hostages, despite lots of rhetoric to the contrary. The IDF doesn't enter random civilian's homes and kill a grandmother they find, while live-streaming the slaughter on her own Facebook account for her friends and family to see. Etc.
I don't understand this constant desire to see everyone as equally bad here. You can think Israel does a lot of bad things (I certainly do) without having to think Hamas is equally bad.
Please show me.
Many of those 1200 or so were soldiers. If you think numbers are important it's probably 797 or so you'd want, but it's unclear how many of those were armed. It's very common in Israel to be carrying a rifle as a civilian. It's also unclear to what extent the IDF killed israelis. We can be quite sure almost no palestinians managed to return to the Gaza strip though.
And yeah, it's just a few compared to what Israel is doing. In July last year Israel killed kids in Jenin with airstrikes. Up until September almost fifty palestinian kids in the occupied territories were killed by Israel, as everyday routine.
I don't think the resistance groups in the Gaza strip ought to have killed as many civilians as they did, but I find it somewhat understandable. It would have been better if the perpetrators were prosecuted than Hellfire:d together with israelis, to the extent that it took weeks before genetic testing lowered the death toll by a couple of hundred because the corpses had at first been counted as israeli and blamed on "Hamas".
I'm not denying any atrocities, but I'm very sceptical until I've seen very strong evidence due to the large amount of lies and half-truths that have been circulated by Zaka, IDF and israeli politicians. There were just one baby killed in the kibbutzim, by crossfire. Much of the reporting about sexual abuse has turned out to be hearsay or straight up lying. The woman who said she had identified sperm from many palestinians just relayed some made up stuff she had heard about. And so on.
I think the reaction to the violence of October 7th should have been 'OK, maybe we should adhere to international law and seek peace' rather than 'finally, let's become the ten plagues, let's eradicate Amalek once and for all'. I'm well aware that this is a minority position in Israel, and it's not for me to judge israelis, but if October 7th justifies undermining women reporting about rape and starving two million people, what wasn't the palestinians justified in doing on October 7th?
(The fact that he was wrong was not, of course, a valid justification for what US did in Cambodia back then.)
I'm not making a strong anti US statement here, more an observation about the behaviour of the post WWII US and former colonial powers in SE Asia and elsewhere and the lengths they went to retain control of former colonies rather than foster democracy and self determination.
A lot of bad policy was undertaken which seemed to all result in far worse outcomes from the pushback.
Which may remind some of the Levant.
you are
It's fine to think Israel is bad to, but how can you possibly deny acts that are so well-documented, or seek to excuse them? I'll show what I mean by some examples:
> If you think numbers are important it's probably 797 [civilians] or so you'd want, but it's unclear how many of those were armed. It's very common in Israel to be carrying a rifle as a civilian.
You write "unclear how many were armed". What's the logic here? If someone in their city is armed, because they are afraid they'll be attacked in their homes, and then someone attacks them, you think the attacker is then able to say "oh well but they were armed, so I'm justified in killing them"? What is the relevance to whether civilians in their own homes are armed for protection, in deciding whether or not it's an act of murder/terrorism to kill them?
And btw, I'm fairly sure the hundreds that were slaughter in a night-time rave were not armed, except for probably some security for the party. (Well there was security with guns there, does that make it a legitimate target?)
> Many of those 1200 or so were soldiers.
Let's be clear. Killing soldiers is not automatically legal or moral either. Invading an army base - fine, legal (though obviously, an act of war!). But shooting unarmed soldiers (as happened) and not allowing soldiers to surrender after you've taken over the base - not moral and not legal.
Also, some of those "soldiers" are counted because they are off-duty soldiers, e.g. ones that were in their homes or in the Nova party. Yes, they are technically soldiers, but again, not legal to kill them either.
> It's also unclear to what extent the IDF killed israelis.
Unclear in the sense that we don't know a precise number, sure. And some were definitely (confirmed) killed by the IDF. But... it's clear that the number is tiny compared to the overall dead. So yes, you can say "unclear" and be accurate, but that's exactly the kind of motte-and-bailey argument that only serves to obscure Hamas's culpability.
And btw, anyone killed by the IDF by accident is still Hamas's fault, because they were the ones who put everyone in this situation! It can also be some IDF commander's fault, and they might have to answer to Israelis about it, but that doesn't mean it's not Hamas's fault for attacking a village!
> We can be quite sure almost no palestinians managed to return to the Gaza strip though.
Do you understand that 250 hostages were captured and taken to Gaza? Do you think they walked there by themselves? Thousands of Palestinians had to drag those hostages in to Gaza, and you can see the triumphant videos of them being dragged around the streets with cheering crowds. So no, "almost no" Palestinians managed to return doesn't pass even a cursory sniff test here.
> And yeah, it's just a few compared to what Israel is doing.
Compared to what Israel is doing now? Yes. Israel is stronger. If it gets invaded and has its citizens slaughtered, it is able to inflict far more damage in return. Such were all wars in history won (e.g. compare casualties in Germany/Japan vs the Allies during WW2).
Maybe it would make sense to condenm Hamas even more strongly, both because they did despicable acts on October 7th, and also because of the horrible situation they've put Gazans in. And let's remember, they built an entire array of tunnels to hide in and keep attacking Israel, while building zero protection for any Palestinian civilians. Kind of the opposite to what Israel has done by spending vast wealth on things like Iron Dome to protect its citizens (and btw, this also protects Gazans in some sense too - because absent Iron Dome, the IDF would've had to stop the rocket attacks with overwhelming military force many times in the past!)
> I don't think the resistance groups in the Gaza strip ought to have killed as many civilians as they did, but I find it somewhat understandable.
Clearly.
> It would have been better if the perpetrators were prosecuted than Hellfire:d together with israelis,
Most weren't hellfire:d, and definitely not together with Israelis.
And yes, I would've loved for them to be arrested too - which many were. But are you really suggesting that priority 1,2 and 3 wasn't to stop them by any means necessary, while they were running around inside of Israel for two days?
I'm against anybody dying, ever. But in such a situation, if an arrest can't be made, then obviously killing them before they kill more civilians is better than not.
> I'm not denying any atrocities, but I'm very sceptical until I've seen very strong evidence due to the large amount of lies and half-truths that have been circulated by Zaka, IDF and israeli politicians.
Great. Don't listen to Israeli politicians or the IDF or Zaka. (Which is a convenient way to discount most of the people with the relevant facts, sure.)
So just listen to the thousands of reporters, to the governments of the US, UK, Germany, etc, who've independently verified much, or just listen to the Israeli public. Israel is a democracy - its government doesn't usually get away with lying, but even more importantly, there's freedom of speech. It's not exactly hard to confirm the hundreds killed, there are literally interviews with thousands of witnesses to the murders that occurred on that day.
> Much of the reporting about sexual abuse has turned out to be hearsay or straight up lying.
There are many cases where witnesses saw acts of sexual violence performed on women that were then killed. There's an NYT article about it, there's a UN report about it, that all say the same things.
There are a few hostages who've described what is happening to the hostages in Gaza. And yes, they're being somewhat vague on the specific acts that occurred, because they don't want to upset the families of hostages or their own families even further. But claiming there's no evidence because a witness says "I was sexually assaulted" but doesn't describe the specific acts done on them is... disingenuous, to say the least.
> And so on.
Great. So your strategy is to take the many wild stories that came out, most of which circulated not by official Israeli sources, but some that were and were later retracted. Take those stories, disprove them, and then say "well that proves there's no way to believe anything".
And then discount the thousands of witnesses, articles, examinations etc that have been consistent and proven since day one.
You say things like that, or like this:
> to the extent that it took weeks before genetic testing lowered the death toll by a couple of hundred because the corpses had at first been counted as israeli and blamed on "Hamas".
With the often-implied idea that things being retracted or later proven false is proof that you can't trust these sources.
Except it's exactly the opposite! The fact that wrong stories are shown to be wrong, that the death count is lowered when more info is available, is exactly proof that Israel is a democracy that's working correctly and that the truth is uncovered!
Under autocracies, you never have retrospectives and leaders saying they made mistakes. It's just deny, deny, deny. And you look at that, and praise them for their consistency, thinking that that makes them more honest.
> I think the reaction to the violence of October 7th should have been 'OK, maybe we should adhere to international law and seek peace'.
Great. Let's forget about the immediate aftermath of October 7th, which demanded a resposne while Israel was literally being invaded and attacked.
What is step 1 of your plan to "adhere to international law and seek peace"? Is it perhaps removing all soldiers from the WB, dismantling all settlements there, pulling back to the original borders? How is that different from what happened in Gaza in 2005? Which led to rocket attacks and eventually to October 7th?
You seem to think if Israel would just unilaterally give Palestinians all of some unspecified things they want, suddenly they would be peaceful. All of the history of this conflict has shown the oposite to be true - when Israel seeks peace, more terrorism happens. When Israel pulled out of Gaza, it led to this mess.
I'm very pro-peace, I think Israel has acted immorally for 15 years at least in not pursuing peace, and that Netanyahu carries a lot of moral culpability in the situation we're now in. Second only to Hamas.
But being pro-peace doesn't mean you get to throw out all logic or pragmatism. Quite the opposite - you have to be extrmeely pragmatic to get peace, since it's so hard and so important. If your step one of a peace plan would immediately be followed by Israel being invaded and quite likely attacked catastrophically, then it's a stupid peace plan which will only result in the death of far more Israelis immediately, and Palestinians in the counter-attack.
So without vague platitudes like "adhere to international law", what specifically would you have Israel do right now, given the current situation, given that Hamas is in charge of Gaza and that they have promised to carry out attacks again and again, etc. What is your step 1 that doesn't get followed by "and then a massive war breaks out in which hundreds of thousands die"?
As far as Israel in general and US foreign policy specifically with respect to it, I'm pro-BDS, now more strongly than ever. I just don't see why that should somehow translate to viewing Hamas as anything other than the murderous thugs that they are. It's not an either-or.
The people that executed those October attacks swore fealty to the Hamas of 2023 and represent the Hamas of 2023.
That Hamas is very different to the barely elected Hamas of 2006 who were then the lesser of other evils and swore blind to the people that they sought peace with Israel.
The bulk of the people in Gaza did not elect the Hamas of 2006, nor support the Hamas of 2023, nor deserve to be starved and murdered.
Somewhere in both stories lie similar questions; what actions transformed the Khmer Rouge that opposed Norodom Sihanouk in 1970 into the Khmer Rouge of 1975 more aligned with Sihanouk and prepared to murder those that ousted Sihanouk, what actions transformed the Hamas of 2006 into that of 2023. Both stories prompt asking what justifies, if anything, the slaughter of tens of thousands.
That said, by 2006, Hamas already had a fairly long track record of killing "collaborators" and "deviants", as well as several clear-cut terrorist acts against civilians (e.g. blowing up bus stops). The radicalization happened a decade earlier.