Years ago, scholars (such as Didier Bigo) have already raised concerns about the targeting of individuals merely based on (indirect) association with a "terrorist" or "criminal". Originally used in the context of surveillance (see Snowden revelations), such systems would target anyone who would be e.g. less than 3-steps away from an identified individual, thereby removing any sense of due process or targeted surveillance. Now, such AI systems are being used to actually kill people - instead of just surveil.
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.
It always starts with making a list of targets that meet given criteria. Once you have the list its use changes from categorisation to demonisation -> surveillance -> denial of rights -> deportations -> killing. Early use of computers by Germans during WW2 included making and processing of lists of people who ought to be sent to concentration camps. The only difference today is that we are able to capture more data and process it faster at scale.
There's even books written about it. Shame on IBM for this. I suspect in the future we'll have lots of books like this, for other companies enabling this genocide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
The same author wrote Nazi Nexus, with separate chapters for different US companies' (Ford, GM) dealings with the Nazi regime. It can always be a case of "let's not bring politics into work" attitude or the belief that "tech is a tool only, can be used for good or ill" but at least in the years leading up to WW2 there was a lot of support for eugenics, antisemitism (Henry Ford was a notorious one) and other Nazi tendencies in the US too. I would not be surprised if many of those working on killer AI today were politically motivated and not just developers caught in projects they don't really have their hearts in.
Only recently someone here on HN posted a video about some big hall in the US, where nazi supporters gathered in droves. It made it seem like they had significant ideological footing in the US as well. Unthinkable what could have happened, if they had had even more support. Not exactly this video that was linked, but this seems to be about the same gathering: https://invidious.baczek.me/watch?v=r4zRZ7XLYSA
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.
Don't forget Japanese Unit 731, all the scientists involved were whisked away to the US if they would give up their research on human subjects to the US military and help translate.
there's a lot of "these are some tested to failure limits for humans" results that are of use in medical settings, but they aren't really needed and end up being more of a "fatal dose" style measure.
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.
Years ago I read a blog post by a Jewish doctor who was trying to do hypothermia research without relying on Nazi data. His ultimate conclusion was that it was not reasonable to discard this data, because treatment would be very inadequate without it. It would unnecessarily hurt people today to give lesser care, and it would not be a positive testament to the memory of those victims to throw it all away.
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.
That's definitely my belief with it too, and it wasn't a blog but I remember a history teacher in high school pointed me at a couple similar papers when I expressed discomfort that we'd use such horrific research.
The weird thing is, I’ve seen this author post factually incorrect things about early Islamic history. I just wish he was more careful about things outside his area of expertise.
There's such a premium on outlining the crimes of the Nazis. Condemning eugenics and the culture of blind adherence to institutional norms is valuable. However the concerns ring hollow when we apply it in the retrospective or accusatory rather than the introspective sense.
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.
In the future, AI will be so good that it will detect criticism of IBM as you are typing and threaten to lock you out of "your" computer unless you delete your work.
Either that or genAI will be used to publish a bunch of books telling fantasy stories about how IBM personally arrested Hitler. :)
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.
they don't have to, they bought it. or hired it? dunno. for all you know I'm an AI intended to keep you distracted while at the same time you're just an AI bot keeping me occupied with pointless online discussions.
even if neither of us is actually an AI, this interaction will surely aid in training some LLM in the end...
Maybe some day in the future this will amount to an "organic" way of accidentally building up a simulation of human society, that will be the only thing remaining for some far into the future aliens, who come to visit our planet. And what conclusions they would draw from this.
Maybe that's the new Turing test; true AGI is reached when computers are smart enough to dismiss the possibility of IBM returning to competence. For a warm-up task, ask the AI about a hypothetical scenario involving an honest and ethical Oracle sales rep.
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.
Not today, no. But remember that IBM is critical to SERN due to the importance of IBM 5100 for time travel, so there's a bit of technological back and forth going on within the ~100 year period we happen to be at the center of right now.
It is both, and also a way of acknowledging that GP's comment points out that the main/only ridiculous fantasy in GGP's comment is that IBM specifically is involved, and not the whole AI part.
I do regret making the joke now, though, given the wider context of the thread.
Art and metaphors are useful tools to illuminate and elucidate. I think you were able to make a good point, and the tonal shift helped situate your comment in juxtaposition to the parents’. My point was not to criticize but to make the reference explicit for those who aren’t familiar with them, and confirm my own assumption regarding your usage, as well.
like the reddit "shadowban", where your comment isn't shown to others but is visible to you in the thread.
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
Welcome to the future of racial / political / ideological / social status segregation.
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.
It is already happening, just recently Instagram pushed out an update to 'quietly' limit political content (ie. pro Palestinian voices) to all users by default without informing them.
It's reasonable to view Palestine as a nation and it's reasonable to look at what's going on and see forced starvation of a nation coupled to, as we are discussing here, cruelly relaxed standards for enemy combatants that make a mockery of international law and are de facto indiscriminate by any standard. Sneering about agendas is distasteful in this context. Vast majority of us aren't really keeping score or trying to advance anything at all, just horrified, as horrified as we were by 10/7, while 10% hurl insults at each other and lash out at anything anyone else says.
I see it as open season. One under resourced side wants a fight with a well resourced side. I don’t expect them to sing songs. I expect them to very violently kill each other till on one side goes, ‘we lost’.
The entire Palestinian war doctrine is built around attacking Israel, then running for cover of well intentioned Western public. Hamas just needs to survive this to declare victory, and then the clock resets until the next cycle of violence. Hamas assumes Israel will not be allowed to have a decisive win, one where its leadership down to its last junior operatives are hunted down and eliminated.
This method of elinination can only be carried out via a Holocaust. Killing half the 2M citizens won't eliminate Hamas it will recruit 3 generations as justified in their violence as Israel. The cost of their crimes will be paid by both sides grandchildren or we will witness a final slaughter of 2M people.
Sorry, but I don’t buy this. West Bank is both more peaceful and less radicalized than Gaza, the difference being that the Israeli military operates in the West Bank but not in Gaza. Gaza was left unchecked to be run by Hamas and we’re seeing the results today.
Long term the only solution is systematic deradicalization, but before any of that happens, Hamas needs to he destroyed and the war in Gaza needs to serve as a lesson to why peace is better than war. So far, for all Palestinian suffering, we’re not past that point.
Hamas leadership can be killed, but Israel is effectively waging a was on terror by another name. And terror is a concept you can’t blow up. By inflicting horrific damage on a civilian population Israel creates more people willing to give up their lives in military struggle.
The problem isn’t individuals with a wish to kill. They can’t do much damage. West Bank is full of those people and Israeli security apparatus deals with them just fune. The problem is institutional terrorism; an entire enclave of tunnels, rockets, special forces and a structure all designed to murder Israelis. That can, and has to be destroyed in a decisive way.
So policing the west bank has left it more peaceful so we can certainly now murder our way to peace in gaza by killing another 30,000 innocents in order to kill another 0.5% of the militants. 30,000 dead innocents can't possibly generate more than 300 soldiers among survivors.
For practical purposes the degree of force required to pacify it would kill 98%. Its possible that a better policed Gaza would be more peaceful this doesn't mean present efforts are reasonable.
I'm presuming that intelligence about the exact location of targets in a ruin is going to be far less precise and starvation and privation are going to start killing faster than bombs. Ironically the armed gang will probably weather than particular challenge than the general population. Incremental improvements in number of combatants dead is going to come at the expense of a much larger contingent of dead civilians.
Hamas was I believe said to have what 50,000–60,000 fighters. By the time they get to the halfway point half the population will be dead.
> The entire Palestinian war doctrine is built around attacking Israel ...
Let me correct that for you - The entire Palestinian resistance is built around the idea of fighting a foreign occupation of their land. Israel is a coloniser state, and the Palestinians are justified in fighting them, even violently, for their land and existence as many other colonial countries have in the past against their oppressors. The denial that some Israelis have about this is the height of political stupidity.
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
The problem with Israel is not PLA or Hamas, but the the right-wing religious fundamentalist Israeli-Jews that have captured power in Israel. Right-wing religious fundamentalists around the world thrive by creating a climate of fear and hate. Unless Israeli Jews and Palestinian muslims hate each other, they cannot be in power. And if you look at the history of the Israeli religious fundamentalist Jews, you will find that they have assassinated their own people, Palestinian politicians and ven foreign diplomats and leaders, to ensure that there is no peace and a climate of fear and hatred flourishes.
Why do you think Netanyahu and his predecessor formulated the policy of supporting and financing Hamas when the PLA started exploring diplomatic and non-violent means of peace, and gaining international support? The reality was that that these religious fundamentalist Israeli politicians need some religious fundamentalist violent Palestinian faction to brainwash and radicalise their followers to retain power. So they deliberately create conflict. The Likud party that Netanyahu now heads, was found by religious fundamentalists in Israel who were a jewish terrorist organisation that took please in killing and slaughtering Palestinina men, women and children. Albert Einstein once warned the Israel polity about the dangers of such people capturing power in Israel because of the atrocity them committed against Palestinians in the name of Israel.
It is not a co-incidence that Netanyahu and his other religious fundamentalist buddies allowed Hamas to attack Israel, when he and the right- in Israel are in a very politically precarious situation. The current war allows them to create hatred among the new generation of Israelis and Palestinians, so that they can cling on to power.
> And what should the 12 million people living there now do?
Accept the idea of a single state where Palestinians and Israelis have true equal rights and live together as the best solution. The opponents to this are the religious fundamentalists on both sides, especially the Israeli-right. Or, alternatively, accept the two-state solution by creating a State for Palestinians.
Would Hamas dissolve? Their charter specifies that their goal is to kill all Jews. What happens after they are citizens?
The two state solution was offered repeatedly. Israel isn't in charge of that. Hamas refused every time. So, I support you there, but it's not up to the 12 million living there. It's up to the handful of Hamas psychos holding Gaza hostage.
> Would Hamas dissolve? Their charter specifies that their goal is to kill all Jews. What happens after they are citizens?
The same thing that happened to jewish terrorist organisations like the Ḥerut (“Freedom”) Party (who, like Hamas used to rape and slaughter woman and children) - their leader Menachem Begin founded the Likud party (which toned down its terrorist roots and became a right-wing fascist political party). PLA too has toned down. Hamas too can. Note that Hamas was democratically elected but was never allowed to exercise its democratic right to govern because Israel and the US didn't like it, and forced a civil war on Palestinians by urging the PLA to attack it, while using their propaganda machinery to demonise Hamas. The Israeli-right (and US) never wanted democratic organisations in Palestine to flourish because it makes it harder to demonise them and deny them their right, and would lead to a peaceful resolution between Palestinians and Israelis that they do not want.
> The two state solution was offered repeatedly. Israel isn't in charge of that. Hamas refused every time.
The Israeli-right doesn't want peace. It desires all the land of the Palestinians for the State of Israel. If you look at Israeli history, you will find that it is Israeli-religious fundamentalists who have always sabotaged the peace talks, while using the settlers to attack Palestinians and occupy more and more of their land. They killed their own Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin (The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin: ‘He never knew it was one of his people who shot him in the back’ - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/31/assassination-... ) as he was working for a peaceful settlement with Palestinians. They succeeded in sabotaging the peace process. Netanyahu's mentor, Ariel Sharon later gave the order for assassinating PLA's Yasser Arafat (Yasser Arafat: The Assassination - https://www.palestinechronicle.com/yasser-arafat-the-assassi... ), to create anger and hate amongst the Palestinians and sabotage the peace process. They succeeded. Hamas too has many times offered to negotiate peace with Israel, but each time they were rebuffed by Israelis (Israel Rejected Peace with Hamas on Five Occasions* - https://inkstickmedia.com/israel-rejected-peace-with-hamas-o... ). Why do you think Netanyahu continued to support and finance Hamas? (Why Israel Created Hamas - https://swprs.org/why-israel-created-hamas/ ). Even recently, Netanyahu has bluntly said he will never accept the two-state solution (Israel’s embattled leader has long opposed the emergence of an independent Palestine. - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/01/22/netanyahu-bi... ) and has instead used the recent tragedy to do the same thing the right-wing religious fundamentalists in Israel have always done - kill Palestines brazenly and seize their land in both Gaza and West Bank (Israel unveils big West Bank land seizure as Blinken visits - https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2024/03/israel-unveils-... ).
Israel's greatest enemy are their religious fundamentalists in power. They need to get rid of them, starting with Netanyahu, if they want lasting peace.
That's unsubstantiated, and besides the point. PLO and Hamas have still refused any and all two state options, including a 98% land swap offered with Bill Clinton at the Camp David summit.
The two state solution isn't on the table no matter what anyone other than Palestinian leaders say, so we can ignore that part of your argument. It doesn't serve as constructive criticism of Israel. Maybe of Arafat specifically, if you're intending to criticize.
Look at Israel's history and you will find that religious fundamentalist Israeli Jews have always been at forefront in sabotaging all efforts at peace and in fostering violence whenever they can because it benefits their politics. (I've already cited many examples). The slogan "from the river to the sea" was originally the genocidal slogan coined by the fascist Likud party, by Netanyahu, in 1977 to highlight their policy of subjugating all Palestinians and occupying their land for the State of Israel (The controversial phrase “from the river to sea,” explained - https://www.vox.com/world-politics/23972967/river-to-sea-pal...). (And now the same religious fundamentalist Israelis cry crocodile tears about "anti-semitism" because some muslim fundamentalists and secular pro-Palestinians have usurped the slogan for their own cause).
As long as these religious fundamentalists thrive in Israel, Israel is doomed to be a country to live in hatred and anger.
And, if you support Israel, it should worry you. I am an indian who had great sympathy and respect for Jews, and later Israeli leaders. Today, thanks to Netanyahu and his vulgar war to just cling on to power, I am a pro-palestinian now. It is important for people like you to understand this because while in the short-term you think that Israel is "winning" the war by "defending" itself by killing 30,000+ Palestinians, later on, you are going to wonder why the rest of the world don't "like you". Netanyahu and his other religious fundamentalist jews will use identity politics and try to convince you its because you are a jew, and the world hates Jew. No. If people look down on Israelis today and tomorrow, it will only be because you were cowards to not stand up to your genocidal leaders, and even supported them, like the Nazis cheered on Hitler.
(Now, Netanyahu has deliberately attacked and provoked Iran too because he knows Israelis are losing patience with his promises to bring back the hostages - most of whom the IDF has already killed with their bombing of Gaza. So expanding the conflict to war with another foreign state, by provoking Iran, is his only way to further distract the public, foster even more hate between jews and muslims and cling on to power.)
>Israeli Jews have always been at forefront in sabotaging all efforts at peace
I'm not seeing that. I'm seeing that they offered a 98% land swap that is extremely contrary to your claim. (That's not the only time Israel agreed to a two state solution, either.)
Let's look at your other argument.
>because some muslim fundamentalists and secular pro-Palestinians have usurped the slogan for their own cause
"From the river to the sea" is in the Gaza charter. If it's Netanyahu's slogan then we must also conclude that it's so inspirational to Gaza's government that they wanted to include it in their constitution. That doesn't sound like "some." That sounds like the government of Gaza, regardless of how much citizen support, is intent on conquest and extermination.
You're also acting like "from the river to the sea" is bad for Israel to say. Those are Israel's borders. Any less than that means they need to evacuate somewhere. India isn't offering to accept 12 million Israelis for immigration. Right? If they are, it would be easier to accept 2 million Gazans.
Of course that's what Gaza included in the charter. They want Israel erased. They want the Jews dead. That's also in their charter. It's very specific. They didn't mince words there. It says the rocks will divulge that Jews are hiding behind them so that they can be killed. I encourage you to read it.
Israel, however, has no intention of conquering Gaza. It withdrew completely from Gaza, nearly 20 years ago. Gaza invaded Israel. Not the other way around. They are now occupying Gaza as a response. But they were not occupying Gaza before October.
If you are going to bring up the import restrictions, you should criticize Egypt too. They are also on that front. Why pick on Israel? Egypt is the bigger army.
>you were cowards to not stand up to your genocidal leaders
I don't have a horse in the race, so "you" isn't really appropriate. But this is exactly what people are thinking about Gaza, that they are cowards not to stand up to their genocidal government that beheads children and films it.
Regardless, you still haven't given a single viable solution.
It looks to me like Israel has no choice, as you've proven here. You're criticizing a victim forced to act in a way no one likes. Gazas' goal is to make you not like Israel by forcing it to act. They won you over with baby beheading and terror apparently.
Do you feel it's okay for Gaza to invade Israel?
Would it be okay for Pakistan to invade India?
What about if Pakistan's founding documents direct all Pakistanis that all Indians must die? Is that acceptable?
The previous commenter didn't say "Israeli Jews have always been at the forefront of sabotaging peace" (which would have been a nationalist slur that presumably would have been flagged off the site); they said "fundamentalist Israeli Jews" --- a particular minority cohort of Israeli Jewish people with particular policy goals.
There are some problems and differences that you're ignoring.
The goal of previous terror groups wasn't extermination. In fact their goals were largely in alignment with Western morality. Targets included key infrastructure, not specifically civilians. This is similar to Western military efforts.
The US hasn't needed to do much propaganda, Hamas has made themselves intolerable in Western society by beheading children, recording it, and disseminating it, among other similar media interaction. Their goal is to alienate Islam in order to preserve it in the face of westernization. They don't want Palestinians to be accepted in Western society.
Given the historical dissimilarity, why would any Western government believe that Hamas would suddenly gain Western idealism within the confines of a Western democracy?
I don't see any reason that we should, especially when relying on the historical accounts you've provided.
You think Israel is winning? It's hate that has won and it will consume the Israelis soon. Unlike you however, I feel sorry for the Israelis too who will be harmed because of Netanyahu and his ilk - hopefully Israelis will realise this sooner and get rid of these selfish religious fundamentalists politicians.
First off, the fact you wrote that unironically and with such surety and verve means this is, at the very least, if you're in a place where your interlocution hurts Israel.
There's no way to explain this, even at length, in a way that's convincing. It's something that settles in over weeks, at best.
I'm intimately familiar with the branching arguments from here: ex. Hamas is stealing the aid, it's not Israel's job to make sure aid gets in, of course aid has to be screened, UNWRA radicalized palestine so UN isn't a reliable aide distribution partner, etc.
I had to make a bit of a journey myself on this topic: I spent Oct/Nov/Dec talking about Gaza Health Ministry is the last place I'd go to for death totals, etc. etc.
At some point once things pile up, and up, and up, it crosses a critical line where you can see in reality that our jaundiced view from thousands of miles away is a map, not the territory. It's a list of excuses used to avoid taking the world's easiest layup ("we are defeating the terrorists and flooding the zone with cookies and cakes for the civvies"), and that layup has been avoided for 6 months, there's been plenty of time to take action to avoid a visible outcome, and that outcome's visibility may have just vanished into the wind as another complaint from uninformed antisemites.
Let's say that's not Israel's problem and it's being unfairly treated by a PR campaign by radicals who contain antisemites.
Then either A) world government's are too scared of their population to admit Israel is doing just fine or B) maybe all that stacked up stuff is a list of excuses to not have to take action to treat Palestineans like people.
That's not true. If you read anything, it's very, very, clear that the absolute very most you can argue is "40% of Palestineans love Hamas and want it to fight Israel".
Meanwhile, you're out here, doing in public:
- why would anyone ever call this a genocide
- they should be starved as they are the enemy
- yes correct I mean all of the Palestineans are the enemy and should be starved
- just listen to them for proof
I, completely honestly, 100%, believe its more likely you're astroturfing to make Israel and Zionism look bad than an actual Zionist. But I'm a Zionist, so it's just cope on my end. Terrible stuff my friend.
I'm trying to understand; it sounds like you feel that an AI selecting targets and letting some live is just as bad and indiscriminate as a group forming a charter that reads "exterminate all Jews." (Paraphrasing, but the meaning is not disputed.)
That's hard to agree with. I'd rather the group that tries to save some civilians over one that targets all civilians intentionally.
Wouldn't you?
That said, we can criticize. But we should do it constructively. Provide a better option, militarily, or otherwise. (I don't have one. And anyway I believe this article is baseless.)
Short of offering options, we're just picking sides, and to me it looks like you're picking the wrong one.
The criminal that hides under color of law while killing far more innocents is more odious on multiple fronts. Dead children and austere serious men walking through their blood reeking of offal and rightiousness is a disturbing contrast.
The US ought to disassociate ourselves forever from such undepentant criminals.
So the one that kills openly against the law prescribed by democracy is better? Do continue. The world is listening.
>ourselves
Please don't call yourself American. Your immorality is embarrassing me.
Israel: 10% acceptable civilian casualty as defense against Gaza. (An unsubstantiated claim without a source. But let's pretend it's true since that's what we're commenting on.)
Gaza: 100% intentional civilian casualty as defense... Uh wait, they weren't even defending anything. They were trying to uproot 12 million residents in a neighboring country. That is literally their stated goal.
How is the second one more moral? Don't bother answering because if you can explain that, you belong in prison, or you at least need a psych evaluation.
This post doesn't make any sense no matter how many times I try to parse it. You are part of the 10% I mention who lash out at anything anyone else says. Be well.
Which part didn't make sense? I'm happy to help you.
Start here: Gaza seeks to exterminate 100% of enemy civilians. It's in their charter and it's their stated goal.
Does that part make sense?
Next compare with Israel. According to this article their ugly secret mission is to save at least 90% of enemy civilians.
Which of those is preferable to you?
Lashes out
My commentary shows that desire to be moral does not always make for moral action. You thought you were rooting for the good guy, and it turned out that you're not. That can be upsetting. The right thing to do is to revise your view. I'm not lashing out. You're upset with yourself.
I don't know how you keep coming up with #s from the article that somehow indicate Israel's trying very hard to protect civilians. It's self-soothing but no one, absolutely no one, thinks the article is saying that.
n.b. not in their charter, not their stated goal. I'm a Zionist too, used to say stuff like this, I just had a wake up call in January about how I was unable to talk to other people anymore because I had walked too far down a path that was obviously us vs. them and the Likud-Gvir unholy alliance was doing truly evil things that made us vs. them look really, really, bad.
Well, October 7th Massacre wasn’t enough to wake you up from a 140 years long dream of peace.
But some social lack of acceptance in January did.
That’s telling.
It is a zero sum game.
It always was for the Arabs.
Time to wake up and face the harsh reality, not invented idealistic dreams (that are admittedly much more comforting, but lead to massacres October 7th style).
I can't tell if you're pretending or not. Are you?
ARTICLE 7:
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews."
INTRODUCTION:
"This Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS), clarifies its picture, reveals its identity, outlines its stand, explains its aims, speaks about its hopes, and calls for its support, adoption and joining its ranks. Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. It needs all sincere efforts. It is a step that inevitably should be followed by other steps. The Movement is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished and Allah's victory is realised."
They are accepting 10% casualties according to the article (probably bullshit). I didn't expect to have to explain this, but the % symbol implies it's divided by 100. That means there are 90% unacceptable casualties.
>absolutely no one, thinks the article is saying that.
I think most people here can subtract 10 from 100 and get 90. Am I the only genius on HN? I hope not. Help us all if I am.
Or are you talking about the 100% number for Gaza? I took it from their charter. I assume that "O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him" means that they want all of them dead. I didn't find any mention of rogue or rebel trees or stones that would allow Jews to hide behind them, so I have to assume they mean all of them.
But, I'm intrigued by your accusation. Where are you finding different numbers? I'd love to see even a single document that allows for saving a Jew authored by Gaza's government. Let me know where this document is.
For clarity, I'm no Zionist. I just don't understand why anyone would support a government blatantly claiming a hateful purpose in their founding documents.
If you want me to feel bad for people in Gaza, I do. I very much do. But this discussion is about governments, and you've made a comparison between governments where there is a very clear cut difference. One has the moral high ground and is attempting to minimize civilian casualties, while the other is blatantly maximizing them in practice and inarguably as their stated purpose.
They built shitty murderGPT and they think based on vetting a sample it can be 90% effective at picking out Hamas associates. In turn they are targeting homes and residential buildings with the stated goal of killing up to 20 people to get the lowest level flunky.
Their goal would allow them to kill 200 people to get 9 Hamas. 21 v 1
In fact
- Hamas is the local government many people who fulfill only civilian roles arent lawful targets.
- A dearth of smart bombs led to using dumb bombs which are less accurate and more likely to create collateral damage.
- There arent infinite lawful targets as the supply of lawful targets is smaller in relation to the pool of victims it is expected to get less accurate.
The 10% is supposed to be merely those targeted incorrectly. You can't leave out collateral damage from your calculation.
> 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.
For every 10 Hamas targeted for deliberate murder in their own homes while they slept to be splashed with the blood of their children and wives it is acceptable in their books if 1 was never in fact even a villain. It is further acceptable if the high tonnage dumb bomb dropped on your building kills up to 20 other people.
This means it is acceptable to deliberately murder a total of 200 people to kill 9 authentic Hamas. That is 191 innocents to kill 9 villains or 21 for every one.
> That is still objectively better than wanting to kill ALL enemy civilians.
They have objectively killed more innocents than Hamas and stand to kill more but that isn't entirely what makes it more loathsome. When monsters strike at the innocent in a functional nation they have no end of defenders and comforters. The cops come in the shoot the bad guy, medics come to heal what can be healed, the press are shocked, their families come together.
When the innocents are made over into villains or villains by association who will stand for them. Who will even stop the slaughter let alone heal the wounded. As the people went about their daily lives while the jews were marched to gas chambers so the jews will go about their lives whilst the gazans are hunted by drones and bombs and starved.
Look at yourself. You would never have defended the gas chamber but you are defending wholesale slaughter and starvation. THAT is what makes it worse.
I'm not defending it. I'm putting blame where it belongs, on the perpetrator. No one in Israel asked for war. Lots in Gaza did.
When a woman defends herself from rape by stabbing the rapist I don't say, "She caused him more damage!" I blame the rapist.
Not everyone wants war and that's sad that people are caught in it. But Israel isn't at fault, any more than that woman. Hamas is firing from behind innocents. They have to kill innocent people to survive, typically. You can help them by eliminating their need to do it, or you can blame the victim.
Those are your options whether you like it or not. Just like they are Israel's options whether they like them or not.
> I'm putting blame where it belongs, on the perpetrator. No one in Israel asked for war. Lots in Gaza did.
Gaza is a population of 2M people run by an armed gang of a mere 50,0000. The IDF a fully fledged modern army has thus far proved unable to root out Hamas despite leveling most of Gaza. It seems hard therefore to blame the 1,950,000 not in said gang for its actions especially when half of them are kids.
> When a woman defends herself from rape by stabbing the rapist I don't say, "She caused him more damage!" I blame the rapist.
This is manipulative garbage. The rapist is singular unified in guilt and purpose. We are talking about a society. If you have anything else in this vein please keep it to yourself.
> Not everyone wants war and that's sad that people are caught in it. But Israel isn't at fault, any more than that woman. Hamas is firing from behind innocents. They have to kill innocent people to survive, typically. You can help them by eliminating their need to do it, or you can blame the victim.
We can demand lawful just behavior even in war. Letting murderGPT generate targets and blowing up women and children in there home isn't it. What happened in October was simply awful but Israel in modern times is not under existential threat from Hamas. They absolutely had the ability to prosecute the war in a different fashion. Acting like they had to either lay down and die or petpetrate horrors is again manipulative and dishonest. A few fuckin pointers.
- Drop bombs only on human vetted intelligence
- Fire on armed resistance not children
- Drop bombs on people participating in conflict instead of homes even if its harder and less effective
- Drop bombs only when the probable collateral damage is either zero or the tactical gain is high eg killing 0-5 to get a top tier leader is probably acceptable killing up to 20 to get each and every flunky is insane.
If the war can't realistically be prosecuted successfully on those terms then set up an actual acceptable no mans land between gaza and Israeli settlements instead of letting a bunch of idiots build settlements adjacent to the people who want to murder them. Fire back when shot at and continue assassinating leaders and those directly responsible for the October horror. There is every reason to believe that October need never come again.
If this is unsatisfying nobody gives a fuck. Morality is hard. Decency in an indecent world is hard. Man the fuck up and develop a sense of honor.
The current trajectory is unsustainable. The only way to pacify gaza is to kill everyone and that endpoint is probably unachievable without the world turning against Israel and stopping it and if leave a genocide partly done you'll be worse off than if you had never started.
This is the train we are on. The conductors are mental midgets and the people laying the track are oblivious.
You're defending people rather than nations which means you've changed the subject because you can't defend Gaza's actions and you're being forced to sustain that Israel is a better actor.
Stay on topic. You want to defund Israel.
Gaza intends to kill 100% of civilians (according to charter). Israel intends to kill less than 100%.
Defund Gaza?
If Israel had a kill all policy that would win your moral favor?
Disgusting. For real dude. Not even a little criticism for Gaza? Only Israel? Why?
I have realized you are uninterested in reasoned dialogue and prefer sentence fragments and manipulation. I don't think you have anything more to contribute so I'm ejecting. Good day.
> think most people here can subtract 10 from 100 and get 90. Am I the only genius on HN? I hope not. Help us all if I am.
TLDR: You are the only HN genius who forgot to multiply by allowed collateral damage.
They suggest based on thin evidence that it selects 90% Hamas associates given relatively clean data at start of conflict. There are oh so many things wrong with this.
- Hamas is the local government. Those who don't participate in the fighting aren't lawful targets in the first place
- They preferentially strike homes during the night maximizing collateral damage in order to obtain a higher chance of killing the target. They set the acceptable losses at 20–100 based on rank and importance of the target.
- Their initial accuracy was assessed by vetting a small sample earlier in the conflict.
What happens to your targeting as the conflict proceeds? Your known targets die, flee, and move around. New soldiers are recruited but don't provide clear intelligence from a chaotic warzone of their present status. You would logically expect such a system's accuracy to decline towards randomness as such a conflict proceeds and intelligence and targets become thinner on the ground. There is no reason to accept the initial 90% targeting accuracy on faith.
Even where we accept we must not forget to multiply by acceptable collateral damage.
I'm apparently at least one genius on HN that doesn't multiply unrelated sources.
I took each claim as coming from a separate source because the article specifies that they did.
By itself, a claim of 10% allowance, implies a 10% allowed civilian casualty rate.
Also, if you down vote, it prevents me from commenting. If you just want to get the last word in, say so. You're not important enough for me to care if I do.
Neither is this hearsay article.
More telling, you completely dodged the racism in Gaza's charter. Swept it under the rug.
Israel is bad for using AI, but it doesn't bother you that Gaza wants to kill all civilians?
Really, I think that last one makes moot all of your points entirely.
You can't downvote direct responses nor does a downvote prevent a response. YOu might find that the reply button is not present on a comment immediately after it is made. If you click on the stamp eg "1 hour ago" you will note the reply button is evident and can be used.
The predicted false targeting rate is explicitly NOT the civilian casualty rate nor is it even supposed to be. You are seizing dishonestly on a low number because it appears justifiable.
It's not the overall civilian casualty rate which appears to be 2–3x nor the expected casualty rate of AI guided bombing of residences which appears to be much higher yet. It does appear that the maximum allowable rate according to Israeli policy is 21x for such bombing raids.
So in summary what you're saying is, we should go with hearsay and sum all hearsay together, multiply all false claims and use those to guide our government.
Nice.
Hey, why do we use significant figures to guide our multiplication?
Anyway even if we do believe all hearsay, you have to admit kill 99.999999999% of civilians is still a better policy then kill 100% (Gaza's policy).
So your other points still don't matter.
You've opted to defund the kill some policy while still funding the kill all policy. And simultaneously you're critiquing it. You have to admit, there's not just a little bias there. It's something deeper.
Yeah, that's a very specific error for a specific function. HN has a thing where they can manually mark accounts as throttled - my understanding its when you have a habit of replying emotionally and repeatedly to the same thread. So this, helpfully, gives you a pseudo-timeout to reflect before jumping back in, which in theory increases constructive responses, and at least prevents littering.
"Your account is rate limited. We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars."
What part of this differs from how I described it, except I was more polite and didn't say you were posting low-quality comments, or doing a flame war?
Your argumentative confusing responses used to frustrate me but you're putting a smile on my face now. Idk what's going on over there, but I have a feeling you know you're doing it, you're enjoying it, and I'm genuinely happy to hear that. יברכך יהוה וישמרך
How would you automate a system that throttles low quality posts? It relies on downvotes. When people downvote your comments, you are "rate limited" for a short duration.
That, of course, leaves open the problem of people downvoting stuff they disagree with, regardless of quality.
Essentially, the system works, but in many cases, a downvote means you're right and the downvoter doesn't like being wrong. That causes an unjustified throttling. Oh well...
82% of the so-called “Palestinians” approved of October 7th Massacre back in October. 75% approve of it in March 2024. For every armed terrorist there were 5-10 Gazans perpetrating the atrocities on October 7th.
Every other house in Gaza is full of weapons.
“There are no innocents in Dresden”, Winston Churchill
> They are accepting 10% casualties according to the article (probably bullshit).
I genuinely can't parse this. What does it mean to "accept 10% casualties". Casualties means injured/dead. Do you mean 10% of the total population injured? 10% of those injured in a strike are non-combatants? Steel-manning while gently guiding back to the material: lets ignore the 100:1 extreme in the material, and say 10:1. That would mean roughly 90% are non-combatants. Not the inverse.
I'm a Zionist and I'm shaking my head at the majority of what you wrote, there's no need to be this rude to anyone, ever. The condescension harms you more than them, you're trying to win them over, you shouldn't be ranting and pretending they don't know what a % mark means, its detrimental to your argument because it increases perception you're missing their point
More widely, at some point we have an obligation to engage with people and avoid silly side debates like "the charter says kill all the jews, here's the 1988 charter, oh you know they have a new charter? sure they revised it, but the revisions are stupid pandering to ignorant Western sympathizers" and "find me a document allows for saving a Jew authored by Gaza's government. Let me know where this document is."
There's a really unfortunate tendency to conflate any criticism of this war with "Hamas good" or even "Hamas okay" or "Hamas bad but not that bad" etc etc. Not claiming any of that. I'm on the right of Israel opinion polls because I want the war to continue until Hamas is eliminated because I do believe that the 1988 charter describes how they see Israelis to this day.
But I, like everyone else, contain multitudes, and see a straight through line from IDF concerns about targeting rules getting looser and looser and looser over the years since the 90s, what I've seen since October, and now this information we have in the TFA. I'd rather acknowledge that publicly and remain clearly morally superior than start long arguments over if its okay using things like 1988 charter.
What you're saying requires a belief that you are the official speaker of Hamas. And that they don't mean what they say, they mean whatever you say they mean.
It's a stretch. I can't say I believe you. I'll go with the documentation and official statements pending some more compelling evidence to establish your authority.
Dude this post doesn't make any sense, like it's not even attempting to respond to any of it. If you're on tilt, bless, this is overwhelming for me too. But it's bizarre to tell me I'm "trusting Hamas" when I virtue signalled 4 times I don't believe them.
If it's any help to either of you, I'm completely lost in what you're both arguing about, and sometimes on HN you can get caught up in an endless over-explaining trap that sends the thread off into the right margins and really makes whatever important point you were originally trying to make impossible to find.
We all have trouble (me especially) accepting the idea that our interlocutors here sometimes just aren't going to agree with us, no matter how many ways we restate our case. Sometimes the most persuasive thing you can do is just leave off.
No I'm saying that I'm trusting Hamas. I'm not trusting your implied claim that the new charter doesn't say that. It clearly does.
I gave a short response because it seemed like you were claiming that a new charter doesn't call for the killing of Jews. The new one only calls for the killing of the ones in Israel for now, because they are Zionists, even if not by choice.
I am pointing out that the implication is not for you to make. The meaning is expressed by the authors. The same ones who entered a neighboring nation and gave inarguable meaning to their already stated purpose. Furthermore, they NEVER deny the original 1988 meaning either. As a point, they don't.
As for 10% casualty; it means when making 10 calls for 10 kills, if 1 is a bad call that's acceptable. If 2 are bad, that's not acceptable. That was stated pretty clearly in the article. I didn't read it a second time, but I'm sure it's there.
So, Israel, even as demonized in this hearsay article, still sounds 90% better than Hamas.
Stated another way, even if Israel were to state that they intend to only save one Gazan civilian, it's still better than the stated purpose of Gaza. Your earlier comparison then is problematic.
I'm sorry for the percent sign explanation. When you tell me the article doesn't say that, I make a genuine effort to understand what you've missed. The article says 10% casualty, and I said 90% as a cup half full expression. Since you said the article didn't say that, I guessed that you didn't see 90 in the article. I tried to help you look for the 10.
I'm not calling you an idiot despite the seemingly implication. Not everyone understands how percentages work and I can't be expected to make any assumption about what you do or don't know.
It says that they are willing to kill up to 20 innocent people for e en the lowliest Hamas stooge in addition to wrongly 1 in 10. That is in order to correctly kill 9 its justified to kill 200 innocents adjacent in addition to 1 yahoo who was poor fellow who was miss-targered.
It obviously says the exact opposite of that unless you conflate multiple separate hearsay accounts. Injecting YOUR racism doesn't add meaning to the article, instead it only serves to discredit it.
Bloviating isn't the same as explaining. You make no sense and are actively damaging Israel. Are you a Hamas plant? Your posts are composed of verbal and mental gymnastics completely unrelated to the post you're replying to. I already told you I'm on Israeli right and agree with you the 1988 charter is what to rely on
You made the comparison:
"It's reasonable to view Palestine as a nation and it's reasonable to look at what's going on and see forced starvation of a nation coupled to, as we are discussing here, cruelly relaxed standards for enemy combatants that make a mockery of international law and are de facto indiscriminate by any standard."
Gaza's policy is objectively indiscriminate. Israel's is objectively not indiscriminate.
I don't care what political party you identify with, and I don't care which country I'm damaging. I'm with the "Everyone Must Learn Science and Remain Objective" party. You were objectively wrong.
Marked? I don't think that's how it works, but thanks for the sentiment.
Non-sequitor? The last comment is a literal quote from you, and an explanation about how it doesn't fit the charter that you agreed in the preceding comment.
You're offended when I explain the argument, and then when I don't, you say you don't get it.
/shrug
Look it's simple; Gaza is worse than Israel. Objectively. That doesn't mean Israel is a model of human morality. And I don't think anyone is claiming that. But let's not pretend it's the same as Gaza. Israeli troops aren't rolling in beheading children while dancing and posting videos, right? It's nowhere near, even if we take everything in this garbage hearsay article and multiply it by 1000, it's still better than Gaza.
There's nothing you can say other than, "Yeah, I shouldn't have made that comparison." Any other statement at this point just looks like you condone beheading children. How do you not see that that's what you implied unintentionally?
They are deliberately targeting civilians based on nebulous association knowing they will kill up to 20 others without even that thin justification.
There is absolutely reason to believe such missions could range from 10-50 civilians to one actual soldier.
They are claiming kills as justified that never received human vetting. Even the kills that would be lawful are by any reasonable analysis fruits of a poisonous tree.
Done at scale its hardly different than running a gas chamber.
Well it's like facebook pushing trump content and saying "well it's not us, it's the algorithm that decided". Same thing, I think it's to just put blame on something else, even if nobody sensible believes it.
One of the reasons for the adoption of the Hollerith Tabulator in the great 1890 Census - arguably the birth of computing in the United States - was the increasing concern about . . let's say ethnics. To be frank, there were too many of them. "Japanese," "Chinese," "Negro," "mulatto," "quadroon," "octoroon," "negrito", etc etc. So in 1890, we needed dozens of new categories, and the old methods simply would not work. At least in terms of usable - actionable[1] - data in a quantitative setting.
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.
Just to make it clear: the firebombing of German cities full of civilians, and the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were gravely immoral. It doesn't matter if it had shortened the war or not (which is dubious anyhow). This is true even though the German state itself targeted civilians at a massive scale, and systematically destroyed entire cities along with its populace (most famously Warsaw). I'm going to assume that this is perfectly obvious to anyone with sufficient moral clarity (which rules out utilitarians).
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
When people complain that disadvantaged people fighting asymmetrically
use "unguided missiles" it makes me think that we need to provide them
with the technology and means of production and infrastructure to shoot smart missiles instead.
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?
> 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
That's a wildly inaccurate statement. There has been continual rockets fired into Israel, as well fairly regular incidents of stabbings, shootings, etc.
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
Not sure what's the point of your last paragraph. Clearly there have been many documented visible "acts of violence" towards the IDF in Gaza. There have also been rockets fired from Gaza into Israel for weeks since Oct 7th and even in recent days. Plenty of "visible" acts of violence. By the way, Hamas also killed Palestinians they suspected of collaborating with Israel during this time.
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.).
The palestinians have a right to violent resistance to the occupation. On the Gaza strip they're denied international relations and trade so they can only make very primitive military equipment, which means that to reach an effect at all they pretty much have to fire unguided rockets into Israel. When they tried non-violent protest against the occupation, the "March of Return", by demonstrating at the border they were systematically mutilated by the IDF.
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.
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.
> People keep saying “right to a violent resistance” but it’s not a thing
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.
Israel withdrawing its soldiers from Gaza doesn't mean that Gaza is not under occupation. There's no Palestinian soveriegn state. All of Palestinian lands and the entire Palestinian population are under occupation, and according to International law, the responsibility of the occupier, and have the right to resist.
I agree with almost all of this, but you lose me at "the right to resist". What, precisely, does that mean? The right to blockade roads in Gaza, to use force of arms to prevent IDF vehicles from entering Gaza? That makes sense. October 7th, though? Obviously not.
Nobody calls them terrorists because they run soup kitchens. People call them terrorists because they take children hostage and kill civilians. Destroying the Israel and killing its inhabitants is literally in their founding charter, and they act upon it whenever they get the chance. That is why they are terrorists.
No, they got the designation because they used suicide bombings in the nineties. But OK, so you'd call Israel a terrorist state then? And consider Israel the bigger problem due to the scale of their actions?
The Hamas charter is from 2017. Do you have any specific complaints about its contents?
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.
> Thank you for posting this. Honestly, my social media bubble exposed me to exactly 0.5% of the videos on this site.
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.
OK, so you remove Hamas and al-Qassam brigades. Now what?
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.
> OK, so you remove Hamas and al-Qassam brigades. Now what?
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.
> Honestly, my social media bubble exposed me to exactly 0.5% of the videos on this site.
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.
OK, when I look under the "mass rape" tag there, it's just Amit Soussana, who says vague things like 'at one time a guard forced me to do a sexual thing'. The rest is people who probably suffered torture or could be just about anyone.
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.
> Amit Soussana, who says vague things like 'at one time a guard forced me to do a sexual thing'.
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.
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.
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?
Your response reminds me of back when Noam Chomsky was going around saying that Khmer Rouge cannot possibly as bad as Americans say they are, and most of it is probably a CIA psyop anyway.
(The fact that he was wrong was not, of course, a valid justification for what US did in Cambodia back then.)
Relevant here is the probable alternative reality that the Khmer Rouge very likely would not have taken control and become "as bad as Americans say" were it not for the United States-backed military dictatorship of Marshal Lon Nol that they fought against and the horrific tonnage of American bombing directed at them in support of that US dictatorship (that exceeded WWII bombing tonnages in Europe).
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.
Chomsky was publishing on this after the "evacuation" of Phnom Penh, though - and claimed that it wasn't a mass murder. Which is why it reminds me of Hamas apologetics after 10/7 that claim that nothing particularly horrible happened on this day (in fact, in some far left circles that I hang out, people even seriously say things like "they were all colonizers and therefore combatants", "there were no civilians killed, it was all legitimate targets in a war of national liberation" etc).
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 the October attacks on civilians committed murder, just as any forces that kill children are also murderers.
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.
I don't dispute that Israel has been doing the kind of stuff that has produced the likes of Hamas for a very long time now. Nor that what Israel is doing right now is well into war crimes & genocide territory, and should be treated as such- i.e. no military aid whatsoever, severe international sanctions, its leadership subject to arrest and trial if it sets foot into any civilized country, and ideally a UN-sanctioned military intervention in Gaza to stop the bombings, by shooting down Israeli planes if necessary.
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.
You say you don't deny atrocities, but you keep making statements that seem to "excuse" Hamas or make it seem like they weren't specifically targeting civilians for slaughter. And I don't understand. It is incredibly well-documented that they did target civilians. Not just by "Israel", mind you - there are thousands of articles showing this. Thousands of reporters who saw a fuller atrocity video and explained just how awful some of those acts were.
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"?
I gotta say it's been interesting finding online discourse that denies an atrocity that occurred only a few months ago. Never really paid attention when people talked about holocaust denial and denial of the Armenian genocide but now finding comments implying hamas did not torture, rape and murder their way across southern Israel when we have literal video footage of these savages enjoying their orgy of violence makes me understand those people a bit better.
The footage picked out for, I think, the #Nova documentary doesn't really corroborate that claim. In swedish it's called Massakern på musikfestivalen, I'm not sure which name it has internationally.
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.
Don't be obtuse, there are many more forms of terrorism than suicide bombing. Israel should be more careful with the Palestinian population as a whole, but Hamas specifically have always been shitbags, are still shitbags and deserve every single shell coming their way.
Maybe there are, but the reason they got designated as a terrorist organisation by a rather small number of states were the suicide bombings in the nineties.
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?
2016 was the last suicide bombing by Hamas. Keep in mind those didn't stop because Hamas changed. They stopped because Israel built walls around the West Bank and Gaza, many other security measures, and joint effort between the PA and Israel to stop these. While suicide bombing attacks were thwarted there have been many attacks against civilians through the years (something around 13 attacks in 2023 preceding Oct 7th) using assault rifles or vehicles e.g.
Hamas are terrorists, yes. But that doesn't mean you destroy them at all costs. It doesn't mean you can "mow the grass" in Gaza at such high civilian cost. And while destroying Israel is Hamas's stated goal, it's about as delusional as thinking the Jan. 6 rioters could have overthrown the US government. 30,000 Hamas fighting with crude weapons against the IDF, one of the most powerful and advanced armed forces in the world? Come on.
Hamas is armed with pretty fine weapons including the latest AKs you can't even get outside Russia, Dragonov sniper rifles, RPGs etc. The attackers on Oct 7th were very well equipped, comparable to most modern military's infantry. This story about how primitive their weapons are is at least partly a lie.
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.
I haven't seen any sniper rifle besides the al-Ghoul in their combat footage since October 7th. Neither in PIJ:s, PFLP:s, DFLP:s, Mujahideens Brigades, or in Intifada al-Fatahs or the People's Resistance Committees'.
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"?
People can have different opinions on the way Israel is conducting this war. I know I am conflicted.
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.
I don't care whether they're considered legitimate or not, to me that's up to the palestinians to decide. Currently they're the most successful faction.
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.
> I don't care whether they're considered legitimate or not, to me that's up to the palestinians to decide. Currently they're the most successful faction.
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.
> You don't have to like Hamas but compared to the PA they're not very corrupt,
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.
Has HN descended to such lows as to idealize Hamas now?
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).
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?
> 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.
Abbas refuses to call elections and Hamas was trying to get in the PLO.
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.
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.
- 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.
Yeah, sure. What would you expect? Israel tortures, maims and kills to pressure palestinians, how would you compete with that if you were a politician in the Gaza strip? At least there's a kind of brutality forced upon them that explains it, unlike US allies in the region, like the house of Saud, that doesn't have to publicly execute people but does anyway. Who, by the way, are ambigous about the palestinian issue because they suspect that Hamas is too egalitarian, too democratic, to warrant their support.
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.
Who are you quoting? Sinwar is popular because he successfully organises resistance towards the occupation and apparently doesn't do it to enrich himself.
Russia had reasons, but I don't think they were particularly good reasons or enough to warrant the invasion.
What means do you think would be justified for Ukranian resistance? Would launching rockets at civilian quarters in Russia be OK? Or stabbing ordinary Russians in public transport? Is shooting at cars indiscriminately OK? At what point you think the western countries would consider withdrawing their support?
You have an interesting opinion of "successful resistance". What happens in the West Bank and Gaza is really difficult to call "success" for Palestinians. Can you elaborate what you meant with "successful"?
Happy to hear you don’t think rape and hostage taking are legitimate resistance. To follow up on this point – you believe Hamas didn’t do that? Or how do you simultaneously call them "charity resistance org" and disapprove of the extreme violence?
Not sure what you're getting at. Contemporary stabbings in Jerusalem and the West Bank are mainly aimed at soldiers, same goes for shootings. There are exceptions, but doesn't seem very common.
I'm not following the conflict in Ukraine as closely but aren't there militia factions there attacking into Russia?
Hamas has been relatively successful, more successful than their competitors. What success in some universal sense would look like, I don't know. Currently Israel has pretty big problems though so it seems kinda successful in some general sense?
What do you mean by "extreme violence"? Reading this I get flashbacks to photos of people run over by israeli tanks and the kid who in november last year filmed himself when experiencing a lack of drones for the first time, so I think that's the kind of violence that has made the strongest impression on me from the last six months or so. Impulsively throwing handgrenades at people in a shelter is gruesome, but it lacks the calculation and sadism of running someone over with a tank and turning them into mush, or forcing kids to grow up under the constant hum of weaponised drones.
As far as hostage taking and 'legitimacy', it's hard to come up with alternatives. Israel routinely takes palestinian kids off the street in occupied territories and put them in military detention centers, commonly abuses or tortures them, and keeps prisoners indefinitely on weak or non-existent grounds. To force Israel to release prisoners through other means than hostage exchange would likely require quite a bit more violence, and I'm not so sure that is preferable.
I didn't call Hamas a charity organisation, I mentioned that they also do social and charity work. Which they do, and that's how they started.
It's very common in the area to hand out sweets to other people.
Where can I read about the toddler case and "slashed throats of elderly"? It's somewhat understandable though, almost every palestinian knows about a toddler killed by the occupation, a grandparent killed by the occupation, a family deprived of their home and land on some flimsy justification, and so on. That some of them lash out at anyone should be expected, people tend to become abusive from abuse.
Yes, some palestinians see the conscription as something that makes every israeli guilty in the occupation. Some israeli jewish leftists have a similar view, they see israelis that don't engage themselves politically against the occupation as part of it. Still, as far as I can gather, most of the militant activity in the West Bank and Jerusalem seems to be aimed at soldiers in service at the moment. In Israel there has been some attacks with cars, where at least one, I think in Haifa, hurt civilians.
Still, nothing that compares to deliberately and proudly starving a couple of million people.
Controlling the borders, airspace, communications, finances and so on amounts to occupation.
Israel does not have "equal civil rights for every citizen". It's not just about palestinians being discriminated against, but also LGBTQ-persons and women. You know that Israel does not allow same-sex marriages, right? If you're gay and want to get married you have to travel abroad. A lot of things are done in religious courts, and some of them have weird powers, like being able to decide that a dead soldier's sperm can be harvested.
It's not "a few". I didn't mention carpet bombing. Israel kills about 75-200 palestinians in the Gaza strip per day over the last month or two, most in bombings of people who are sleeping in their homes with their families. Many while they are out looking for food, or helping with food distribution. Israel is habitually deceptive or straight out lies about its behaviour in the Gaza strip.
If sensible is an ideal to you, how do you explain Israel's incessant attempts to escalate against much stronger foes than the palestinian militias? The IDF is already in trouble against people in flipflops carrying RPG:s, why are they seeking conflict with forces that are equipped with targeted munitions, air force and the like? Why are they killing UNIFIL personnel? Is it sensible to kill US citizens in the Gaza strip?
And if "media and others" bother you, shut them out? I see some embarrassing haiku headlines in passive voice from NYT sometimes, but it isn't more than I can handle because I keep my exposure to bourgeois and imperial mass media to a minimum. I think Eylon Levy got fired and started his own media bureau, maybe you could watch only that for a while and then pick some of his favourite tropes and try to fact check them for a bit of 'reality check'?
> Georgia, the Baltic states, and Ukraine have all been drafted into an American campaign to surround Russia
None of this is true. The US government has for decades preferred to accomodate Russia at the expense of the security of their neighbors and chose to ignore imperialistic ambitions of Russia until the position became untenable. Even now, when Russia has launched the largest war in Europe since Hitler invaded Poland, the US is withholding military aid out of misguided hope that Putin will take the exit ramp that the Americans are offering. But Russia does not have a Khrushchev, instead they have a Hitler-like debiloid who keeps doubling down on a mistake of historic proportions.
If Russia became a normal functional European country instead of being an expansionist dictatorship, my country wouldn't even need a military because Russia is the sole reason why that exists at all. The fact that everyone bordering Russia are arming up is the result of Russian abusive behavior towards its neighbors in the past and in the present. If you go around looting homes, then don't get offended when people start setting up fences and security cameras - or as you'd call it, a vast anglo-american conspiracy to encircle honest thieves.
> Remember the Cuban missile crisis? How the US panicked over Russian presence in Cuba? There's an analogy here.
There is no analogy here. Europe had been rapidly and unilaterally demilitarizing until 2014, whereas Russia moved nuclear weapons nearer and nearer to Europe, recently installing them into the unstable dictatorship in Belarus. Russia just announced that they will be forming two new armies, larger than the ground forces of UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland and many other European countries COMBINED. Instead of responding to a threat (as their propaganda tries to depict), Russia is exploiting the historic weakness of European countries that have tried to build mutually beneficial relations with Russia over the past few decades instead of maintaining Cold War confrontation.
A much better analogy are the naive attempts to seek peace with Hitler in 1938 and 1939, believing that surely Hitler will stop at Poland, and the incredible discussions at the time whether it's ethical to bomb military infrastructure in Germany in response to the invasion of Poland or if the risk of damage to private property is be too large. Kicking the can down the road meant that four years later, allied air forces were carpet bombing German cities day and night without any disregard for such trivialities. Is that what you want, B-52s over Moscow?
European countries that had such relations with Russia now have them with Azerbaijan instead, as a proxy. Could for example look at trade in automobiles, or fossil gas.
Are you suggesting that palestinian militants routinely use sexual abuse?
If so, how come the reports from released hostages are so vague about it? Why would any media give credence to stories from Zaka-affiliated individuals if there were decent primary sources that didn't have financial incentives to make stuff up?
And if you have a problem with sexualised abuse, I take it you react negatively to the IDF undressing people and forcing them to participate in propaganda videos or parading them in humiliating and degrading ways?
What are the documented, visible acts of violence towards the IDF this year? I'm not questioning there haven't been any but it's difficult to imagine a more aggressive, punitive force at present. Everything I hear about them is them being the aggressor/instigator and in a high level of cases executioner.
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?
The resistance groups in Palestine publish videos of their operations pretty much daily, and the bigger ones publish text messages about their operations and political commentary several times daily.
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.
The person you're debating with is not interested in genuine debate. Look at their profile - it's an alt account for their religious dogma they're too embarrassed to associate with their public persona.
That is backed by them refusing to answer you with specific examples, engaging in a gish-gallop instead.
Trying my best to assume this comment in good faith... Low compared to what? For reference, in the recent war in Ukraine (post 2022), there have been approximately 11,000 Ukrainian civilians killed and approximately 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed [1].
Not to get into the debate about that other war, but there have almost certainly been many more Ukrainian civilians killed than the 11 000 formally confirmed deaths. That's just the number that can be properly verified, mostly in Ukrainian-held territory, and nobody is entirely certain how many have died in the Russian-occupied regions. Ukraine claims a much larger number have died, including more than 25 000 in Mariupol alone, for instance, but that can't be independently verified because it's still Russian-held.
This is at least as true in Gaza too is it not? And over a much shorter time frame, with a significantly smaller population.
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.
One significant difference is that Ukrainian authorities goes really far to evacuate civilians while Hamas goes really far to prevent civilians from evacuating.
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.
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.
Not saying it isn't, and I wasn't trying to make a comparison between the two conflicts. Only pointing out the inaccuracy of the quoted Ukrainian numbers.
Also Ukraine is a large country, civilians who were not drafted have mostly evacuated westward, and Poland and other countries have taken in other countless Ukrainian refugees. Meanwhile, Egypt has built barbed wire fences to prevent Palestinians from crossing the border and taking refuge there. And no other countries are presently accepting large numbers of Palestinian refugees at all.
The barbed wire fences were equally built by Israel, are they not? Israel definitely controls that border.
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.
Sadly, whoever takes the fleeing will likely have tremendous headaches in the future -to their own government- because of the people.
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
I think the Egyptian fence has been built by Egyptians.
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.
That response is just random propaganda. Can you provide some actual verifiable facts please, or at the very least, something based on your experience and insight?
Egypt currently definitely is, other than in very individual cases.
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.
Usually you would compare it to other instances of urban combat.
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.
A similar anti-terrorist war featuring large amounts of urban conflict, eg Iraq (3:1) or Afghanistan (4:1.1) — since much of Ukraine is designated armies across open fields.
That article appears to state that the use of human shields by Hamas is not true and fabricated by Israel.
It's not a term I've seen any real evidence for. If anything the opposite is true according to the linked and Guardian article. Israel is pursuing a policy of killing suspected members of Hamas in their family home/building when they are not engaged in warfare, using dumb bombs that guarantee there will be significant civilian casualties, likely in the low to high 10's and possibly higher.
How would that work? Is the IDF somehow forced to kill civilians? If so, how come the palestinian resistance groups aren't and considered accountable for it?
Since we're quoting might as well: "Under the cover of thousands of rockets fired from Gaza, they killed indiscriminately in streets, houses, kibbutz communities and at a rave music festival.
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."
So even if the ratio is slightly lower (also debatable whether every death they count as “combatant” is accurate), this makes a fundamental difference in terms of IDF’s behavior compared to that of who they designate as “terrorists”?
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.
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.
> Armies engage in a very brutal practice called war which is different than the more brutal practice we tend to call terrorism.
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?
You can find interviews with commanders and soldiers about it on israeli television as well.
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.
I don't know about the "Israeli Zionist European settler Jews", but a plurality of all Israeli Jewish people are indigenous to MENA, so summing the population up that way is a little bit racist. I may be misreading you, though.
I believe the poster above was referring to the biggest representatives of the extremist minority of Israel who are cheering this conflict on in those terms. Not all of Israel is pro-genocide, but those that are are more likely than not to be in that group.
Ironically: the extremist minority in Israel is probably more likely to be of MENA origin, not less. Ben Gvir is from Iraq, for instance. The Mizrahim are generally more conservative, and the Ashkenazim are generally more liberal.
You keep referring to "indigenous" Palestinians and implying that Israelis are themselves interlopers. That simply isn't true. The fact that Netanyahu is Ashkenazi doesn't erase the ethnic identity of the plurality of Israeli Jewish people who are from the region, and for whom Israel is --- like the Palestinians --- their only real home.
A lot of ugly stuff is certainly said by right-wing Israelis (who are, generally speaking, more likely to be indigenous than the left-leaning Ashkenazim). But there's also a great deal of erasure of hostile Palestinian advocacy in your summary as well.
These discussions would be simpler if we could keep focus on the actual misdeeds of the Netanyahu administration, and stop trying to generalize problems out to Israel as a whole. It's not that it's impossible to make such an argument, but as you can see from your comment, those arguments are treacherously difficult to construct reliably without leaving gross, obvious, and sometimes even overtly racist generalizations in them. If you want to condemn the entirety of Israeli society, you aren't putting enough effort into your comments to do so here.
At the end of the day, I don't think it's worth it to try to litigate that kind of question. We're not going to resolve Israel vs. Palestine in an HN thread. But if you must try, the guidelines ask you to try harder than that.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> the plurality of Israeli Jewish people who are from the region, and for whom Israel is --- like the Palestinians --- their only real home.
All but a tiny population of pre-existing Jews in historic Palestine are settler colonialists living in territory violently ethnically cleansed of the indigenous Palestinian population to make way for Jewish settlers.
If Israel is ever forced to abide by international humanitarian law, or through boycott divestment and sanctions, Israel is forced to become an actual democracy where Palestinians are treated as human, first class citizens-- either will lead to Palestinians being able to exercise their UN mandated right of return. With the changing demographics many Ashkenazi will likely leave voluntarily back to Europe/US-- many not only have another place they call home, they retain dual citizenship.
There will likely be a turbulent period with terrorist attacks by Jewish extremists. Palestinians who lost their families to Jewish violence may also engage in revenge attacks. There may also be terrorist attacks by (American/European) Christian Zionists in a last ditch attempt to start the war in the region, that they dream of. But, under Muslim Ottoman rule, people of all religions in Palestine, including Jews, lived mostly peacefully together, so it is possible that they can again. We also have the S. African example-- many of the white European settler colonialist Afrikaners remained citizens of a free S. Africa, but they no longer rule / oppress the indigenous population.
> stop trying to generalize problems out to Israel as a whole.
95% of Israeli Jews support the current genocidal massacre of Gaza. This _is_ Israeli Jews as. a. whole. Another poll showed 80% of Israeli Jews didn't think the genocidal bombing was enough, they wanted greater destruction i.e., greater death-toll.
You seem to think history of the atrocities by the settler colonialist Jews of Israel began with Netanyahu. The Jewish Zionist atrocities began prior to the founding of Israel. There has never been a period in Israel's history when they did not engage in atrocities against the indigenous population.
Netanyahu is a monstrous man, but if he were to be replaced today, his replacement would likely be just as bad, or worse. Israel is a sick society overtaken by blood lust (similar [but worse] to the US after 9/11 blow-back for US atrocities in the middle east [including support for Israel and their atrocities]).
I was unable to locate the study, but a professor of Middle East Studies (in an interview) mentioned a study conducted in Israel which found that those (Ashkenazi Jews) who experienced the Nazi concentration/death camps were more likely to be more aggressive and ruthless toward Palestinians than other Israelis.
Interestingly, Israeli society was also crueler to Jews who experienced Nazi concentration camps. These people were looked down upon as weak. No idea if this dynamic factored into the cruelty these concentration camp survivors exhibited toward the Palestinians.
We disagree, but Israeli polls, Israeli social media posts, Israeli leadership's public statements, and most importantly, Israeli actions, support my statements. Israeli Jewish society, as a whole (including Kibbutzniks living in a kibbutz on stolen land), is responsible for ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide, with extra responsibility to Ahskenazi without whom there would be no Zionist settler colonial project of Israel on Palestinian land.
> erasure of hostile Palestinian advocacy
An occupied, oppressed people, even if they were not experiencing a genocide at the hands of their oppressors have a right to defend themselves both morally, and under international law.
> overtly racist generalizations
I'm sorry that you perceive things that way. It is not my intent. I've been bending over backward to attempt to separate the genocidal monsters in Israel and their supporters, from Jews in general-- non-Jewish supremacist non-Zionist Jews are some of the strongest voices against Israeli atrocities and least likely to be forcibly silenced (but, I recall, in the US, every Muslim [I am not one] being forced to declare how evil the 9/11 attackers were, and I want to see the same with American Jews calling out the genocidal apartheid regime of Israel [or, at least, admit that they too are genocidal racist monsters]). I am also not willing to pretend that Zionism isn't a European creation. Nor that the genocidal monsters in Israel are not Zionist Jews-- recent settlers on stolen Palestinian land. The latter is important, as it is, in one sentence, what the entire "middle east conflict" is about.
I would speak just as vehemently about the German Christian Nazis committing genocide against Romani and Jews of Europe. I just don't think Israeli Jews should get a pass on genocide and other crimes against humanity, just because someone else committed similar atrocities against the ancestors of some of them. And, it infuriates me that within discourse in the US and W. Europe, it is considered "antisemitic" or "racist" to criticize a murderous, racist, apartheid, genocidal, settler colonialist regime just because the oppressors and perpetrators of violence are Jewish. Imagine if criticism of Nazi Germany was instantly shut down by people claiming racism against Christians.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
You mainly have simply repeated yourself in your comment. (I am guilty of this to some extent too [necessarily so, otherwise is to concede that Israel has a right to ethnically cleanse, engage in genocide, etc., which I vehemently do not believe], but I hope you will see some of my comment as substantive content as well)
All but a tiny population of pre-existing Jews in historic Palestine are settler colonialists living in territory violently ethnically cleansed of the indigenous Palestinian population to make way for Jewish settlers.
This isn't just false, it's luridly, categorically false. A plurality of Jewish Israeli citizens are of MENA origin --- from Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, Ethiopia, and other countries in the region. They're the "Mizrahim", they're a huge chunk of the population, Israel is literally their only homeland, and they tend to be more right-wing than the "settler-colonialist" Ashkenazim, who tend towards the left.
> from Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, Ethiopia, and other countries in the region.
So, you agree with me. These are Jewish settlers from OUTSIDE Palestine. These followed after the initial European Jews had already engaged in violent ethnic cleansing.
When the English directed their colonialism against Ireland, the settlers were "from the region", but still settler colonialists.
This is what happened to the Palestinian _survivors_ of the original Nakba (violent ethnic cleansing of Palestine to make way for Jewish settlers):
Zionist Jews poisoned wells, planted bombs/threw grenades into bus stops and shopping centers, mortared Palestinian villages, etc. to mass kill Palestinian civilians and "encourage" them to flee.
What Israel is doing is putting Jews, Zionist or not, in danger everywhere, as many see the people of "The Jewish State" as committing genocide, and the Zionists are doing their best to conflate Zionism and Israel with all Jews (criticism of Israel is "antisemitic").
Outside the US and parts of the EU (especially Germany) news outlets are actually reporting on the genocide-- In the US, CNN even sends all their Israel stories, to Israel to be censored to ensure the "proper" narrative on the Israeli genocide and other atrocities i.e., Americans never hear about them.
E.g., did you see images of the row of Palestinians lined up, face down, on the ground, hands zip-tied behind their backs, then run over by a truck, crushing them-- on your US news broadcasts (or German)? Someone, anywhere in the rest of the world might have. The Israelis are committing monstrous acts for most of the world to see, while claiming that they represent all Jews.
I'm curious, why do you defend them? "Never again" should mean Never again for anyone.
Your apparent claim that poor rural Moroccan and Yemeni Jewish people forced from their communities by mobs enacting pogroms throughout the Middle East and North Africa are "settler colonialists" unworthy of "defense" is racist, and not in a "the real racism is against white people way"; it's Racism Classic(tm).
This is a long-dead thread and we need not keep it alive.
> This is a long-dead thread and we need not keep it alive.
Agreed.
You haven't outright admitted it, but your technique of repeatedly accusing those criticizing Israeli policies/atrocities as being racist while never addressing any of the Israeli atrocities is SOP for Zionists.
Good luck. Hopefully some day, you will consider the lives of the indigenous Palestinians of equal value to those of the brutal genocidal Israeli Jewish Zionist settler colonialists who stole the Palestinians homes, land, and the lives of their children, parents, brothers and sisters-- people who never had a quarrel with Jews before the Zionist Jews, of Europe, attacked them, and stole-- everything.
This is probably obvious, but just to make sure: This is the opinion of skinkestek, and not an objective truth. As another Norwegian, I do not share this opinion.
To avoid a back and forth here, people should feel free to find a way to analyse the confidence levels that newspapers use when quoting the different sides.
- 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.
On the flip side, in this war many of the Gaza combatants are either irregular forces or militants deliberately wearing civilian clothing.
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.
“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.”
Sorry I hadn't read the whole thread: I agree the "false colors" sense of perfidy generally is granted due process. I was thinking of the "feigning surrender" sense of perfidy, which is pretty much universally met with summary execution.
This is my fault; I hadn't read the whole thread. There's two acts that constitute perfidy: one is wearing false uniforms or displaying false colors; I agree that isn't usually met with summary execution. The other one is taking back up arms after signalling a surrender. That is absolutely met with summary execution.
> However, the Internet is full of armchair international law experts that are being played like a fiddle by Hamas’ propaganda arm.
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?
> 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.
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).
> On the flip side, in this war many of the Gaza combatants are either irregular forces or militants deliberately wearing civilian clothing.
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.
In the linked article the only check the IDF was still using on the target list provided by the AI was discarding any and all targets it selected who were women, as they don't believe Hamas would use them as fighters.
> At the height of the phenomenon, Avraham Burg, former chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, speaker of Israel's Knesset and interim President of Israel, stated his view that, given Israeli indifference to the tortured lives of Palestinian children under occupation, suicide bombings come as no surprise.
... Palestinians have been tortured from birth for decades. Acting surprised when they fight back is either disingenuous or stupid, or both.
As long as PA pays pension to terrorist families, UNRWA teachers teach math with "how many jews killed" and Iran and Qatar actively sponsor islamist terror, the society will remain the way it is now.
Does child soldier only mean toddlers though? I thought it was more commonly 16, 17 year olds.
Presumably recruiting 17 year olds is against international law.
But for a guerrilla fighting group that doesn't care about international law, a 17 year old is almost the ideal recruit. They can fight almost as effectively as an 18 year old can, and if they die in combat you can also claim, technically truthfully, that the enemy is deliberately targeting children.
It seems that you're claiming the only way to violate international law is to bomb all their people at once.
This is very wrong.
Targeting hospitals without clear proof of military activity is against international law. As is collective punishment, using starvation as a weapon of war, and many other things which are currently being livestreamed to the world.
If you understand a topic this poorly, why not read a little about it before 'contributing' to the discussion?
I'm convinced that there's no way to fight a war without pissing someone off.
Even more so, it's impossible to fight an _assymetric_ war without pissing a lot of people off.
> Targeting hospitals without clear proof of military activity is against international law.
What's "clear proof" is in the eye of the beholder.
> As is collective punishment, using starvation as a weapon of war
I'm actually willing to give Israel the benefit of doubt here, as they actually have no experience whatsoever in coordinating large scale aid deliveries, even if delays somewhat further their goal of punishing palestinians.
> UK government lawyers say Israel is breaking international law, claims top Tory in leaked recording
So what? Every major player on the world stage breaks international law whenever they damn well please, UK, US, Israel, China, Russia, they all do, to the point where in my eyes "x is breaking international law" is a completely worthless statement. Nobody is really going to do anything about it if you're on the right side of the new iron curtain.
This might be very cynical from me, but honestly, can you name the last time when the words “international law” carried any real weight?
It's far less complicated than you make it out to be. I'm on whichever side that doesn't deem it acceptable to deliberately kill kids by the thousand. Whatever else you type does not change that determination.
> I'm on whichever side that doesn't deem it acceptable to deliberately kill kids by the thousand.
Unfortunately, that side doesn’t exist in this world. Civilians have died in every war ever known to man. Whether they are kids or not is completely irrelevant.
Now whether the right-wing soldier who has seen his friends murdered in a music festival and has been sent in with a tank into Gaza care? Very likely less so. Does every member of this right wing government care? Likely less. However the independent court system in Israel can also enforce the various conventions Israel is a signatory to (e.g. the Geneva convention). The situation where young soldiers are in Gaza armed to the teeth fighting an enemy that blends in with civilians is the creation of Hamas.
If Israel follows international law 100% you will still see a lot dead toddlers in this kind of warfare. So just that fact doesn't prove much.
I wonder if we track this sentiment how far back it would go, I'd suspect it goes back about as far as there have been public complaints about child deaths.
You are aware you’re parroting war propaganda, right? I mean sure, this does happen in some cases I’m sure, for that matter I have seen the IDF _on video_ use Palestinians as human shields. But the entire article is about the fact that nobody is even looking if there are civilians there before dropping bombs, and 20K+ of women and children are now dead as a result.
"When people cite deaths from numbers supplied by Hamas, they are parroting terrorist propaganda."
No. Stop it. Numbers provided by the Health Ministry historically have been largely verified. The 30 000+ figure is not in question. All you have is a propaganda talking point doubting its source, not questioning methodology or providing a reasoned alternative figure. The fact Israel can't, and doesn't care enough to, provide numbers of its own IS THE PROBLEM.
Just parrot 'terrorist figures' and you have a license to continue. "Women and kids have killed" as a license to continue killing women and kids. Except you don't and this ugly tribalist brutality will never be forgotten.
When a country is run by literal terrorists, there are no figures that can be trusted. I'm not sure why that's difficult to understand. How many did Hamas themselves kill because they tried to leave an embattle area because Hamas wanted to use them as human shields?? You want to blame Israel for everything, but HAMAS IS THE PROBLEM.
Without Hamas using the entire country as a staging ground for terrorism (and continuing to do so), none of this would have happened.
"Hamas is the problem" but how then to explain increasing settler land theft, and supportive government decisions, in the West Bank where Hamas is not in charge? Who is common to both conflicts?
Keep squeezing those people and eventually Israel will have the terrorist pretext it needs to annex the West Bank entirely. Rein in the settlers and you might have some credibility. Until then this will remain an obvious war on all Palestinians.
It's also interesting (and I guess typical for end-users of software) how quickly and easily something like this goes from "Here's a tool you can use as an information input when deciding who to target" to "I dunno, computer says these are the people we need to kill, let's get to it".
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.
I read that article and feel your interpretation is very misleading/wrong.
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%.
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 median age in Gaza in 2014 was 18. According to researchers in the US, 50%-61% of buildings have been damaged or destroyed. If Israel didn't kill tens of thousands of children it would be a statistical miracle.
Not sure how we got to "tens of thousands of children" when even the Hamas reports don't claim that. I think 12,300 is the last claim I saw a little bit back which is not "tens of thousands" but I agree is a large number.
You're assuming the children are evenly distributed and buildings are attacked randomly and evenly. None of which is true.
Many buildings have been demolished with explosives or bulldozers while empty. Many buildings were damaged during combat with walls being breached to provide access.
In many cases buildings were attacked in areas that have been ordered to evacuate. (yes not all cases).
There's no doubt many children have been killed. We've all seen terrible photos of individual children dead. I don't think it's "tens of thousands" and I'm not sure we'll have accurate numbers. Other than that as you note there's a large number of children and so they've definitely and unfortunately impacted.
The article under discussion says that even by internal Israeli calculations in the early days of the war on a typical day “another thousand Gazans have died, most of them civilians.” Given the population demographics of Gaza, I do not think it’s a stretch you might get to 20,000 minors killed.
The article also questions your claim that the IDF was careful to protect civilians by eg destroying empty building. On the contrary, the IDF accepted extremely high civilian deaths to kill even one suspected minor militant.
I didn't claim that the "the IDF was careful to protect civilians by eg destroying empty building". I made no particular observation about the IDFs efforts or lack thereof to protect civilians.
I'm claiming many of the destroyed buildings have been empty. This really has nothing to do with the article. I'm addressing the parent's logic/argument. There have been many examples of buildings destroyed while empty, for example to make up the new boundary area Israel has created from the border. The attempt to calculate casualties via the number of destroyed buildings is a very poor methodology. Your statement and mine are not mutually exclusive- it's possible the IDF targeted buildings that had many civilians in them to get at one target. I don't know the demographics of those civilians. I don't know whether what happened in the early days of the war continued throughout the war. I would agree that early in the war Israel very likely accepted a larger number of civilian casualties to get at Hamas targets. I think the new thing potentially in this article is questioning the degree to which the targets were valid military targets.
What do you possibly get about trying to hairsplit the number OF DEAD CHILDREN. Oh, yes, you’re right. It wasn’t 20,000 so we shouldn’t say “tens of thousand” it was just twelve thousand three hundred children.
“Impacted” is definitely one word for it. Murdered another.
Hopefully I get you to be more accurate and specific when discussing this loaded emotional topic. Words literally kill. I think using defusing language is conductive to de-escalation.
Words are important. And you're right those are different words. The word murdered has a specific meaning, e.g. "to kill (a person) unlawfully and unjustifiably with premeditated malice". The word impacted means: "strongly or directly affected by something especially in a negative way." The word "child" also has a definition. In this context it usually refers to people under the age of 18.
I'll turn the question back at you, what are you trying to get out of claiming "tens of thousands" or "murdered"?
I think the word murdered is IMO more appropriate to the children Hamas killed in Israel on Oct 7th and civilians it has killed in Israel over the years and less appropriate for the children killed in Gaza by IDF action during a war. That said my heart breaks for every single child, whoever they are, that lost their lives. It's not their fault. This war didn't need to happen. We should try our best to protect children, here and everywhere, and I do recognize that at some level you're trying to do so, thanks for that.
I'm just really annoyed with the use of language that is meant to evoke emotions and leaves incorrect impressions. This is all bad enough without riling people up to make it worse. There's little doubt what images someone seeks to invoke by saying "10's of thousands" and "murder". Even if I interpret it as people genuinely wanting to minimize human suffering I think it ends up with the opposite result and is really not how anyone involved here makes progress. Also I know we live in a post-truth reality but I for all of us to have debates based on facts is still important. For me as someone who is generally pro-Israeli I have no problem with fact based criticism of Israel. What I have a problem with is that the anti-Israeli side is basically making stuff up. If something is factual then it is. If there are unknowns then we should openly say they're unknowns. And no, if you're pointing out something is a lie, you're not "justifying the killings of children". If you point out certain information is still not clear or comes from questionable sources you're not either.
The US and even Israeli governments consider these numbers as accurate. The Health Ministry provides the social ID numbers of every death so the deaths would be impossible to fake.
I don't think the US or Israel made any statements regarding the accuracy of the composition of the numbers. Only that the total ballpark numbers are more or less accurate. If you have a link to the US government statement about the breakdown accuracy of the numbers I'd be interested to look at that. Also this is extrapolating from previous rounds of violence and this one is very different.
Do you have a link to the officially published name, sex, age, ID, of all the victims so far, by date, in the conflict?
When large buildings are demolished by bombs and can't be excavated because of active violence what's the process for figuring out who potentially was or wasn't in that building? with all the refugees moving around the chaos how do you know if someone who used to live there is dead or sheltering somewhere else out of contact?
Hamas reports everyone as civilians (or doesn't make a distinction).
"Of the 21,703 identified fatalities whose details have been shared by the Hamas-run health ministry, 13,207 were women, children or elderly (61%)."
"Until recently, however, the ministry had been reporting a figure of 72%."
"Mr al Wahaidi told Sky News that this was a "media estimate". He was not able to explain the basis for this estimate or who had produced it."
"Since speaking to Sky News, he has stopped using this figure in his reports for the health ministry. It continues to be used by the government media office, a separate branch of Gaza's government."
...
"media estimate". Another by the way is that I think we should assume that given the significant bombing campaigns are more or less over the more recent casualties likely include less randomness and more targeted. I would guess that the ratio of women/children/elderly is much lower in more recent stages of the war.
There’s a simple explanation about why the numbers are now a “media estimate”. The health ministry used hospital figures, which are now unable to obtain because they have no health infrastructure anymore. I’m sure Israel would love for the health ministry to stop counting deaths since they don’t have the tools to accurately do so, but it’s absurd to assume that would be more truthful than media estimates.
I'd like to look at it. I just don't want to download Telegram's app. I haven't given up yet. The article was just a by the way while Googling and had this nugget of the made up 72% number in it.
They have released those at points in the past; I'm not sure if they're doing it on an ongoing basis, and their numbers include a large number of unidentified casualties. I think those usually make up about a third or so if I remember correctly.
Not included are a large number of missing people, and all the people who die of secondary causes like maltutrition, disease outbreaks, and poor access to proper medical care.
Nobody really knows what the real casualty figures are, but I'm inclined to take the Gaza Health Ministry's numbers seriously -- as do Israel and the US, as you already mentioned.
Because you can cross reference these with the Israeli controlled population registry and make sure e.g. the same person isn’t listed twice under a different name, that they are actually dead, that they are actually from Gaza, etc.
This link again. People keep posting it and it keeps—rightly—getting flagged. This source is a schoolbook example of lying with statistics, and so far HN seems prerry aware of that.
Wouldn't it be better to discuss it and for you to take it down point by point and show everyone why it is "lying with statistics"? I only have a B.Sc. and my only observation was the sample size seemed to small and there might have been some cherry picking of the date ranges. You might be correct but we're not getting to discuss that and what are the proper statistical methods one can apply here if we had the data (and I don't think we have data).
This link being wrong however doesn't negate the fact that the only numbers we have come from Hamas that is 1) in most western countries is considered a terrorist organization 2) is one of the sides in this war 3) clearly benefits from distorting the numbers 4) shouldn't be considered a reliable source for anything.
The numbers discussion seems to always come back to in previous rounds of violence those same numbers seemed more or less in the ballpark though there have been major revisions in the past re: the ratio of combatants. (I don't have the link handy but I can find it if you dispute this last bit).
When this latest series of attacks started there was still some room to charitably interpret what the IDF had to deal with, but we've had months of constant action and very obvious suffering and death that the IDF has been imposing upon Gaza, either intentionally or through sheer apathy. They've long since lost the "oh but think critically" excuse. The amount of suffering they are inflicting is not at all justified, it has gone far beyond just a tit-for-tat retaliation.
Since when has war ever been tit-for-tat. Since the beginning of time, if a nation where to attack and make war with another nation, they had to measure carefully the consequences if they were to lose... because losing meant losing everything. This is no different. Russia attacking Ukraine is no different. No one is tracing and counting every bullet Russia fires and certainly no world court is saying anything at all to Russia… or to Turkey, or Iran, or Syria, or anyone else… except for Israel. Gaza attacked Israel and like any nation that goes to war, they will either win or lose. Consider carefully before declaring war against your enemy…. Everything is at stake.
You're right that the violence and devastation Israel has laid upon Gaza has historic precedence. Genghis Khan completely destroyed cities that he considered cultural enemies, to give one example. You'll find many instances of genocide in the history books, even post WW2. Israel is not unique in that regard either.
But why does it matter? Does historical barbarity justify present day barbarity? It doesn't, and we all know it doesn't.
It's not the case that Israel is held to a higher standard. Russia has been widely condemned, blocked from international finance, and faces severe sanctions. On top of that, western countries have given substantial military and intelligence aid to Ukraine. Russia had reasons for their invasion of Ukraine (just like Israel has its reasons), but so what? Russia being angry at Ukraine is not a justification for destroying the country.
I also take issue with your characterization that Gaza "started it". This is a 70+ year conflict with many chapters of violence in it, and innocent Palestinians make up the bulk of the casualties. Israel is not the victim here.
Finally, it's not accurate to talk about Israel/Gaza as two nations at war. Israel controls everything coming in and going out of Gaza, electricity, water, etc. Palestine is not an independent country or a state, it's part of Israel except its citizens have no rights.
>When people say you’re not “thinking critically”, they’re saying you’re trying to portray one of the modern conflicts with the lowest civilian deaths (versus combatants) as a crime against humanity while ignoring numerous others — eg, genocides in Niger or Myanmar, and forced expulsions in Armenia/Azerbaijan.
Why is it that this is always mentioned? As if ignorance of one crime against humanity makes us incapable of criticizing the other? And where exactly are the public spokespeople from our governments talking about how any of these genocides are justified as the killers have a "right to defend themselves"? Not to talk about how an attack that killed 4000 people justifies killing 25000 non-combatants.
> They’re not interested in a tit-for-tat retaliation: they’re intending to destroy the political and military structures that made the attack possible. A smaller country can’t cry “that isn’t fair!” when they start a fight and get beaten — this isn’t a scuffle between kids at school.
This is not even comparable to what is occurring when the world is condemning Israel's actions. If Israel was interested in removing the political structures that made Hamas's attack supported by Gaza then they could've stopped the settlement of the west bank, supported the stability of the Palestinian state, and countless of other actions which would have lowered the risk of creating terrorists in Gaza.
If you followed the conflict you’d have seen that Israeli concessions (especially the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza) have only made the Palestinians more radical.
The overwhelming states goal of Palestinians is the destruction of Israel and any Israeli concession leads towards that.
Israel doesn't want peace because they're winning. Every year Palestinians lose territory, and the land that remains becomes more and more uninhabitable.
Israelis don’t want peace because every time it was attempted, it only led to more violence and misery. The suicide bombings around Oslo accords in the 90’s, the second intifada of 2000, the terror enclave that became of Gaza after the disengagement in 2005; peace is a dangerous pipe dream.
The last time Israel “attempted” peace was before the majority of Palestinians were even born. The only peace talks that had any chance of working were held by Rabin who got promptly murdered. Israel also never stopped killing Palestinians and refuses to return the land they have unlawfully occupied.
It was never theirs to begin with and they turned it into a prison. They destroyed the Gaza airport and harbor. Build a fence around it so nobody could enter or leave. Refused to negotiate with the elected officials of Gaza.
Israel still has settlements in the west bank and has annexed the Golan heights. No matter which border agreement you believe is the lawful one, Isreal hasn't honored any of them.
You’re just moving the goalposts. Israel did withdraw from Gaza and let them run it on their own. The Palestinians had full sovereignty and could have made the place into a Singapore. They built the world’s largest terror base instead. Do you know what an insane undertaking is building the amount of underground infrastructure they did? Could have built factories instead.
You know perfectly well that they are not allowed to build factories because, guess what, factories can also be used to make weapons. Gaza is not even allowed to import basic medical equipment like X-Ray machines. So much for "full sovereignty".
People have repeatedly pointed out how your facts have no bearing on reality.
Israel never prohibited any factories. They have cars, computers, and a powerful army with ballistic munition know-how that’s rare. They could have smuggled in anything. Who said there are no X-ray machines in Gaza? Gaza had many hospitals before October 7th, ironically probably more than Israel itself.
So what Gazans did after the disengagement:
1. Electing Hamas into power
2. Ceasing having elections, instead opting for a Taliban style religious Islamist rule
3. Arming themselves to the teeth
4. Routinely shooting missiles, mortars and RPGs into Israeli civilians
Cars, computers and everything else is imported. There is no manufacturing to speak of.
> Small-scale industries in Gaza City include the production of plastics, construction materials, textiles, furniture, pottery, tiles, copperware, and carpets.
Your claim that Gaza had more hospitals than Israel is absurd. Israel has 5x the population, for starters. A cursory Google search indicates Israel has 10x the number of hospitals.
I recognize your arguments because I've heard them all before. Repeated ad nauseam by people who grew up in Zionist households and got all their news from comically partisan sources. They sincerely believe what they say and fact checking their claims is completely pointless because evidence means nothing in face of a lifetime of indoctrination.
Like ultimately if there's no two state solution, then it's either a genocide or expulsion of the Palestinians or a one state solution. If it's one state it can either be Jewish or democratic, but almost certainly not both.
> We all should have worked harder at solving the problem, but a genocidal militant group
Yes, 'we all' should have worked harder when Benjamin Netanyahu actively funded Hamas and expended all possible efforts to prevent a viable Palestinian state. Genius thinking right there.
"We all should have worked harder" is such an absurd thing to be saying alongside that sorry excuse you've presented.
The entire point of human rights and rules of war is that there are certain rights the people of even small countries that started the fight are entitled to. You don't just get to excuse relentlessly bombing hospitals and aid workers. "We thought it was a military target, but we will not disclose why, nor will we disclose what we're doing to not make this mistake in the future" is not a get out of jail free card for genocides, especially when it never seems to come with any actual signs of improvement.
Campaigns to stop genocides in other places having been unsuccessful does not justify smaller genocides taking place elsewhere. That's not critical thinking, that's whataboutism.
Particularly considering that not only is America's supposedly democratic leadership not condemning the atrocities, they're actively offering the aid to continue it while claiming to want peace.
Being from India, I can relate to the troubles with islamic terrorism that Israel has faced, which is why I mentioned having initially been sympathetic. But if India engaged in this large scale indiscriminate slaughter of muslims, it'd have been rendered a pariah on a similar tier as Russia. As it stands it's already constantly accused of being undemocratic and violating the rights of Muslims, despite never having undertaken deliberate, remorseless government sanctioned slaughter of this scale.
It took far less for the current Indian prime minister to be banned from Western nations when he was chief minister of a state. All he had to do was fail to stop a much less deadly riot and get repeatedly exonerated from accusations of wrongdoing by several courts.
I've pointed out two things, bombing hospitals and bombing aid workers.
There's also targeting children, having no qualms about the collateral damage when they bomb houses to get at single targets and so on. Using systems like the one described in the article to offload further responsibility, such that if by some miracle Western nations do try to introduce the IDF to the concept of accountability, they can just blame the computer and promise to do better.
I'm using emotionally charged language because these are supposed to be emotional topics. "Critical thinking" on its own is just a pathway to justifying extreme inhumane cruelty.
I was watching one of those ww2 movies with typical evil Germans (Nazis) in it and there was this scene where the SS officer dude is about to burn down a hamlet or something because of "partisans" hiding in there.
We, Americans, are being forced to change our morality and humanity to suite an "indispensable ally". (Both of which are definitely open to question).
That said, how cute that they are blaming both the 10/7 event ("intelligence failure") and their daily killing (for our viewing pleasure) of civilians, on AI.
I think "intelligence failure" is accurate but not in the sense that was offered. It is an intelligence failure of a people to recognize that they are on the wrong side of humanity and history. You can't blame that on AI. I think it a cultural failing - an overly inflated and exaggerated sense of historic grievances, a conceit regarding God Almighty's affections, and a misread of the Global Room, and clear contempt for the "nations" watching.
> there was this scene where the SS officer dude is about to burn down a hamlet or something because of "partisans" hiding in there
And we fire bombed multiple German cities, the British with an explicit policy of killing German civilians who lived near factories. Many things are horrible and either permitted explicitly by international law or, by convention and precedent, technically illegal but widely tolerated.
Nazi Germany is nothing like Occupied Palestine. Nazi Germany had millions of people's blood on its hand at that point. That is why it was "widely tolerated".
And your bring this up is a case in point of intelligence failure I alluded to. People may seem to "tolerate" mandated group think but we're still mostly Human beings and have empathy and can tell the difference between Nazi Germany and Palestine. At some point the silent consensus will be quite vocal.
Germans are still paying for their crimes in WW2 ... Something to keep in mind.
> Nazi Germany had millions of people's blood on its hand at that point. That is why it was "widely tolerated"
This is a myth. We didn’t fight Germany to stop the Holocaust. (That said, I agree on the moral unequivalence. Hamas aren’t the Nazis. But not every German was a Nazi, either. We ultimately draw lines on even collective punishment.)
If we don’t want to use Dresden, take Vietnam. Or Cambodia. Or Afghanistan or Ukraine or the Uyghurs or Kashmir. (Or Sudan, right now. Or Eritrea in ten minutes.) It sucks. But the international laws with relevance are the ones that aren’t being systematically violated by every regional power. We aren’t changing our standards to suite Israel, this is just the first conflict in a generation we’ve bothered to pay attention to.
> what specific rules of war do you believe have been broken?
Basically every single one. We will end much faster if you just read the laws.
And this is not "a belief" or a "lets debate for a year more if this is or not a genocide while sipping tea and killing faster". The ship of good faith has parted many months ago.
Your comment is a stellar example of the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle in action. You'd have us wade through untold reams of international law for specific references, a task that would likely take hours, just to rebut your glib denial of the current state of play. Oh well, I've got some time to kill...
Shit That Should Land Israel's Government and Military Apparatus In The Hague, Abridged:
- (i) Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities;
- (ii) Intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects which are not military objectives;
- (iv) Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated;
- (v) Attacking or bombarding, by whatever means, towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended and which are not military objectives;
- (iii) Intentionally directing attacks against personnel, installations, material, units or vehicles involved in a humanitarian assistance or peacekeeping mission in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, as long as they are entitled to the protection given to civilians or civilian objects under the international law of armed conflict;
The Israeli army has a storied history of bombing the shit out of aid workers that goes back decades, everything from shelling UN aid warehouses with white phosphorous munitions to calling in artillery strikes on aid convoys. This behavior is well-documented and certainly not limited to the current conflict.
- (xxv) Intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions;
Do we really need to review the current state of play with relief aid in Gaza given it hasn't been 5 days since an Israeli patrol greased a convoy of aid workers? Shit's gotten so bad foreign governments have taken to air dropping aid.
Additionally as I'm sitting here combing through the Geneva Conventions there are a few things that stand out:
- Part I, Article 3, 2) seems to be in olay between shelling the fuck out of aid workers, bombing hospitals out of existence, and the several documented attacks on emergency response vehicles.
I'm certain there's more here but you aren't getting more of my time than the initial hour I budgeted to the task of putting together this reply. Have fun with the supplemental reading...
It's because actions speak louder than words. The bombings Gaza has suffered is worse than Dresden during WWII. There is a famine in north Gaza. 30 000+ Palestinians have been killed. There is live footage of Palestinians waving white flags but still getting sniped by Israeli soldiers. The same soldiers that laugh while blowing up mosques and running over corpses with their bulldozers. When someone show you who they really are you should believe them.
Dresden wasn't full of guerilla army disguised as civilians, and there weren't even the tools to target specifics as we have today. Any civilian was evacuated from north Gaza 5 months ago, secured by IDF under Hamas attacks. Those who stayed there insist on sticking to a war zone and risk to be labeled as terrorists. blowing up mosques and houses is nothing compared to raping innocents with no one to defend them miles away. And while they hold hundreds of the same innocents underground and keep provoking Israel's destruction, I see no reason to care about their precious houses. Israel is judged by Western morals in a barbaric medieval war that it was dragged into.
Some have. Most of the IDFs current critics haven't. They get the news and conclude reasonably that the IDF deserves criticism over how it's conducting itself.
For example: "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"
When a computer generates a target list of thousands, that's how tens of thousands of innocent people die.
By the standards discussed in the article, anyone with a beef with Israel could justify targeting possible a majority of buildings in Israel. After all, most of the population is required to serve in the IDF.
Are they trying to legally or morally justify those attacks?
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.
Nothing, they are unguided and not targetable. They have almost 0 military value as far as targeting goes. They're "lucky" if they hit something outside of Gaza. You can see them being used for distraction/confusion (like on the morning of oct 7 in a mass firing), or as reprisals for IDF massacres (for deterrence, not working very well at that either), or for "we targeted grouping of soldiers" in Gaza envelope (usually unsuccessfully). Only thing they ever target successfully is the hearts and minds of Palestinians horrendously victimized by Israel, some of whom can feel that something is being done, I guess.
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.
> That is, only members of the armed wing of Hamas (not recruiters, weapon manufacturers,..
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.
But presumably if you can target the building e.g. at night when nobody is there, that's preferable to targeting it during the day when there may be more civilian workers.
Exactly! The key difference is that the worker still count as civilians in the calculus that considers whether an attack is proportional (anticipated military advantage vs expected civilian effects) and whether the attacker took all feasible precautions to avoid and minimize civilian loss, including attacking at night, using tailored weaponry, giving a warning, …
Practical AI did a podcast episode about the dangers of using AI models as a shield to hide behind in justifying your decisions. The episode was titled "Suspicion Machines" and based on the libked article [1], and I think it's worth a read/listen.
That is, only members of the armed wing of Hamas (not recruiters, weapon manufacturers, propagandists, financiers, …) can be targeted for attack
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.
You can target the manufacturing plants since they are military objectives but you cannot target the workers. If any war-sustaining activity would make you, as a person, a target, pretty much anyone could be bombed: farmers, bankers, power plant engineers, truck drivers, ...
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.
It is not the primary source of their weapons, nor is it the primary source of their explosives. It might be "a primary source" now as your linked article mentions, but certainly not THE primary source. Hamas is primarily given weapons by Iran.
They claim to be producing a lot of them locally in the Gaza strip, based on russian or iranian design. They've proudly showed videos of factories producing al-Ghoul rifles, Tandem anti-tank grenades, light artillery grenades, rifle ammunition.
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.
This is a very 'anti-war' opinion by a lawyer affiliated with the Red Cross, not some sort of treaty or other convention. As an example, the Geneva Convention's scope of protection is much narrower.
While the DPH Guidance has it's controversial parts (Rec IX), the guidance on interpreting "directly participating in hostilities" is quite authoritative.
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.
I did not assert that it would be legally binding. However, it is considered to be quite authoritative by lawyers, including military lawyers. The two most controversial parts concern the idea of "continuous combatant function" to define members of an armed group, which some want to see defined more narrowly or more broadly (latter: US), and recommendation IX. However, the criteria for direct participation on hostilities are widely accepted as the authoritative interpretation by States and scholars of that term in the Geneva Conventions.
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.
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.
That's not exactly a prediction. It was was standard operating procedure for Warsaw Pact nations. They used human intel which was possibly even worse because it could manipulated out of malice.
> Only those who have the "continuous function" to "directly participate in hostilities"[1] may be targeted for attack at any time.
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.
Oh yes they can, that question has been settled in the aftermath of the Yugoslavian Wars [1, page 148]:
> 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
That has nothing to do with your original statement. Yes, hospital can lose their special protection but must then be given a warning that gives them enough time to evacuate and only if that warning is unheeded, it loses special protection. But all the other rules protecting civilians still apply (distinction, proportionality, precautions, …). In any case, this has nothing to do with the whole civilian population being stripped of their protections. They still have their human rights and cannot be targeted.
So pretty much every hospital, school, and over 60% (nearly 300,000) residences have been destroyed in Gaza, leaving well over a million displaced. You are a genocide supporter.
An entire civilian population cannot be stripped of its protections of international law. This type of dehumanising rhetoric is the exact filth that leads to genocide and other atrocities (as we can see happening live in recent months).
> 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.
In theory, yes. In practice--in which make believe world is this true?
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.
I am okay with the notion that war is dirty and that Hamas will try to pretend to be civilians or whatever. I have some questions:
- if the weapons always wait for them at target locations, who is transporting the weapons at any given target location and why is that not the focus?
- if we know they try to use infrastructure like hospitals, the IDF clearly knows where Hamas is aiming to shelter in, why not militarily occupy hospitals but then otherwise allow them to run without delay vs sniping anyone who shows up in a window?
- how is it possible the IDF allowed premature babies to die in their incubators once medical staff left a hospital in Gaza (aka unoccupied facility for IDF to sweep through), such that once medical staff returned they were presented with their rotting bodies left untouched in the incubators?
- how were Israeli unarmed civilians waving white t-shirts get mistaken for armed Hamas combatants and shot dead when trying to escape from their capture?
- how did the World Kitchen convoy, which had provided the IDF their route and time and coordinates with clearly labeled trucks, get shot with targeted missiles from above?
> It is very convenient to criticize it when you're not in it
Israel 'criticised' Hamas for their monstrous attack six months ago, started a war over it. Perhaps you're saying Israel should have just accepted it?
You know, perhaps this whole mess Israel is now involved in is a product of its own behaviour, and killing of loads more Palestinians is not likely to bring peace but further hate and evil.
I found that putting solid facts in front of Israeli supporters just got me downvotes.
Anyway
>> It is very convenient to criticize it when you're not in it
> Israel 'criticised' Hamas for their monstrous attack six months ago, started a war over it. Perhaps you're saying Israel should have just accepted it?
That is not rhetoric but a straightforward question.
That's totes rhetoric: what you wrote there is a sarcastic false dichotomy to make a point seem obvious — a leading question.
Ironically, given I now know which side you think you're taking, that bit you're proud enough of to quote, defends Israel's behaviour by suggesting the only possible alternative to their current actions was to simply accept Hamas' previous attack.
I was pointing out the hypocrisy of telling the world they should look away from what's being done in Palestine because war is dirty, but should sympathise with Israel after Hamas's awful attack, because war is dirty.
You don't care about Palestinians but you expect the world to care about Israel, despite committing obvious warcrimes.
I very much want peace for both sides, a stable society and good life for everyone, Arab and Israeli. You clearly don't share that wish. You have no morals, no moral authority, and what you are doing is putting Israel's future at greater risk than Hamas could, but you're so shortsighted and self-centred you're blinded to that.
Again with the arguing against a totemic representation in your own head, rather than reality.
My position[0] is: When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.
[0] which may or may not have anything to do with the down-voters you complain about: I didn't vote, I don't know who did or what they think and; as I said earlier, what you wrote initially looks like something each of the big groups on this topic can find something disagreeable with.
I have, in all sincerity, been misunderstood less by GPT-2 than you display with that.
You wrote:
> You don't care about Palestinians but you expect the world to care about Israel, despite committing obvious warcrimes.
False. I thought this was clear from the metaphor I chose to use (which is, of course, why I chose to use it). Hint: who might be the elephants who are fighting, and who might be the grass who is getting trodden on?
(Answer: civilians are the grass, combatants are the elephants — and it case even that was not clear, note that I did not say whose civilians and whose combatants, this is deliberated because the answer to that is simply "yes").
> I very much want peace for both sides, a stable society and good life for everyone, Arab and Israeli. You clearly don't share that wish. You have no morals, no moral authority, and what you are doing is putting Israel's future at greater risk than Hamas could, but you're so shortsighted and self-centred you're blinded to that.
False. That first sentence, before you threw insults at me due to you painting a picture of me in your mind and arguing with that without testing it against reality, is in fact a wish that I share.
But unlike you demonstrate here, I am not — or try not to be — so hubristic to think I can read the inner state of others' minds, especially not those who disagree with me. I suggest reasons that can be investigated, tested, and allow for them to be refuted if false. I will prefer to say "it sounds like you think ${foo}?" rather than a blunt "you think ${foo}". Note the second part of my original response, where I showed you I was unclear which side you were trying to support: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920847
Furthermore, I know that I know nothing about international geopolitics — an easy thing to determine as I have literally zero political or military education — and thus the free version of ChatGPT is genuinely going to less wrong than me about any possible way to improve this situation. So while I want peace and liberty, I do not presume (any longer) to suggest a way forward:
> So ignore what other people think - make your own point based on facts.
If I ignored what other people think, I would be like you: confused by downvotes, and substituting my own imagination for genuine curiosity as to why.
And that, right there, that is my point. (I wonder if you will read it and gain insight into my mind, or reply in further confusion? Your mind is clearly alien to me, so I do not know).
> Try answering: is Israel's response proportionate and acceptable or not?
I believe not.
You'd already know that if you'd bothered to read what I wrote instead of whinging about it.
I don't know that my beliefs are correct, 'cause I'm not trained in law, politics, or warfare, and the whole thing is surrounded by propaganda. If you call my self-awareness "a lack of clarity", you're hubristic.
Your turn. Answer me this: Who did I call the elephants, and who did I call the grass?
> You'd already know that if you'd bothered to read what I wrote instead of whinging about it.
I'll openly admit that I often don't read things carefully but in this case I don't believe you were making things clear at all. Quoting stuff in Greek to me doesn't actually help comprehension.
> Your turn. Answer me this: Who did I call the elephants, and who did I call the grass?
You said "My position[0] is: When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers" which you then said of "(Answer: civilians are the grass, combatants are the elephants — and it case even that was not clear, note that I did not say whose civilians and whose combatants, this is deliberated because the answer to that is simply "yes")."
And this is a relevant because you are trying to spread the blame among civilians, instead of clearly saying which civilians.
As of yesterday, over 33,000 Palestinians had been killed and 75,000 injured. There is deliberate starvation brewing over there and the hospitals had been mostly or entirely smashed. Israel has committed war crimes. The IDF are turning a blind eye or even helping illegal settlers on Palestinian land. There's more.
Just because there is blame on both sides doesn't mean the blame is equal on both sides.
Debating is difficult enough with the ambiguity in natural languages. If you don't even try and be plain what you're trying to say, difficulty will be compounded. If you were agreeing, why not say "I agree" or "I agree but what about..."? I don't know what a totemic representation is, elephant metaphors were ambiguous (obviously the civilians suffer most, I know it, you know that I know it, so what point are you trying to make?), Quoting stuff in Greek and then telling me to google it instead of saying it plainly – not wise.
You made a simple thing difficult (and yes, doubtless I'm partly to blame as well).
There seems to be little evidence to your statement “Israel seems to trying much harder to avoid civilian casualties than […]”. All estimates I have seen seem to indicate astonishing rates of civilian casualties, hence why Israel is getting so much criticism of basically indiscriminate killing in Gaza…
Even though you may not be necessarily wrong on how little regard those armies in those previous wars (and indeed all warring parties in those wars to some extent) had for the civilian population, the situation is Gaza is made so much more drastic because there’s already nowhere for the (already displaced for decades) population to go amid all this assault and bombing (not to mention the widespread starving and all those other factors, which combined led to the “genocide” claim levied by some). That’s also a reason why all western countries are trying to dissuade Israel from the Rafat assault.
Also, we have the idea that human beings are supposed to learn from those previous tragedies and do better, and that we’re in a much more civilized, peaceful and prosperous place than before, so it’s likely a disillusion and horror for a lot of people to see such a nightmarish scenario unfolding again in 2023. Some intrinsic parts about human nature and human societies will never change unfortunately.
20 seconds "to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male". And then "for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians".
For as much as the IOF likes to market this expression, I only ever see them do it in the actual sense, like chaining literal 12 year-olds to the front of armored vehicles
also I am fed up with this tendentious 'discussion' that only allows you to hear one side of the story and where everyone else is just flagged off. I should rather stay away from HN (anyway it is no longer what it used to be) Sayonara.
I didn't flag you, but I did think your comment felt like whataboutism. That's an accusation I've had leveled at me in the past, so I know how it feels and don't say it lightly, and I don't mean it in an accusing way.
At the end of the day, most arguments are not about factual disagreements. They are about, what is the most important consideration right now? And I would posit that the most important consideration right now is that we have automated killing that may rise to the level of what will someday be categorized as a war crime.
There are other tremendously important topics, like how have both Israelis and Palestinians suffered since the formation of the country, should there's be a ceasefire and/or a hostage release on both/either side, and many more incredibly important things.
We can't discuss them all at once, and I believe considering the impact of AI on warfare at scale needs a place to be discussed with as little distraction as possible.
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.
I don't understand your point here. They are targeting militants with the system:
> 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.
Never thought I'd even consider this, but is this a case where those involved, producing and developing, this software should be tried for murder/crimes against humanity?
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.
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.
Depends on what "AI" means here. There is a spectrum of "we have a bunch of data in a database and some folks hand tuning queries" to "we built a deep learning network to predict XYZ." In the middle of that spectrum lie things like decision trees which provide explainable results.
It's the former, but from what I read in the article, a shady version of that is my take.
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.
It is not a naive take. Not by a long shot. Knowingly working on the development or upkeep of such a system, full well knowing it's limitations, and knowing of it's aftermath obliterates any level of clean hands in my eyes.
It’s amply clear from reporting that the IDF has no formal RoE on the ground - low level commanders have full autonomy to kill whomever, whenever, with zero oversight.
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.
Sorry. Guns do kill people. That's their whole point.
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 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.
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.
I primarily work with people who have an issue with killing other people.
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.
I am agreeing that guns enable killing and make it more easy and more available. I also agree that most everyone I know have an issue will killing.
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.
It does nothing to those barriers. They are still absolutely the same. Unless you're trying to argue that somehow guns magically imbue in people the intent to kill.
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.
we agree that guns are equalizers - it allows a small woman to fend off a large man. That is the point. They make it physically easier to kill. Like, that is their entire point outside of sport.
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.
You dramatically underestimate the physical capability of the people you know. Humans are strong and humans are fragile. Every single one of them could kill another human in a pre-technological society.
Apologies for my earlier reply, it's been pointed out to me it was rude. It was and I'd like to apologise.
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%
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.
Exactly - the safest thing to do with the AI gun is not point it anybody and destroy it. Perhaps the AI gun shooting somebody wouldn't be an intentional murder but it's certainly manslaughter since you know that it could shoot whoever it's pointing at so simply pointing it at anybody is the active decision that frames the crime.
Said people are trusting the intel from the AI. Those who provide that intel possible should shoulder responsibility for its effects, or at least its efficacy.
this is such BS argument, before guns you could still kill people but it'd take a lot more effort & organization to kill en-masse. same deal if you apply this logic to nukes or missiles. yes those people should be held responsible but there should be a systematic regulation of AI-robot killing machines just like we have geneva accords for cluster munitions or unusually cruel weapons. this is just common sense 101.
Sorry but from an AI system that targets individuals to a system that kills them (they already have autonomous drones with computer vision) there is max 1-2 web services path. So AI kills people
> 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.
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.
As bad as this story makes the Israelis sound, it still reads like ass-covering to make it sound like they were at least trying to kill militants. It's been clear from the start that they've been targeting journalists, medical staff and anyone involved in aid distribution, with the goal of rendering life in Gaza impossible.
> It's been clear from the start that they've been targeting journalists, medical staff and anyone involved in aid distribution
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.
“…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”
That's not really a rebuttal - the entire convoy was (incorrectly) identified as a target. If they were actually military it certainly would make sense to kill the targets one by one as it's hard to target simultaneously.
> I really doubt that's the case, seems more like a "fire first if any suspicion at all and ask questions later" policy.
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.
I think you're proving the opposite - like you said they have all the information so if they really wanted to kill all aid workers they could easily do that, so the fact that they haven't makes it pretty clear that isn't their goal.
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.
Well, they had assassinated yet "a few" (hundreds of) physicians, and nurses, and ambulance drivers in the area, so maybe are getting more bold about it.
> 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.
The WCK withdrew from Gaza after being killed by Israel.
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.
So again, why not make it look like it was Hamas who killed the aid workers? I mean if it was all planned ahead seems like an obvious thing to do given that it wouldn't taint the "good behaviour" while also stopping aid.
1) Israel doesn't have to - they can do essentially anything, and their US/GB/DE/FR backers will continue to support and enable their genocidal behaviour
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
1) I don't agree since international pressure is escalating, but regardless it would be a win-win for Israel to blame it on Hamas so I just don't buy it.
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.
And what consequences did Israel face after destroying almost all of Gaza and killing over 32000 humans, mostly women and children, and blocking aid and starving the rest of the population, and killing aid workers, journalists, and doctors?
Nothing. Literally zero consequences. Yet someone like you is not convinced.
1) Thanks largely to social media, you have a point. However, it's still abundantly clear that Israeli can act how it wants. At best, western politicians (many of whom are bought and paid for by Israel!) will make platitudes and try to distance themselves while the latest US-back Israeli attrocity/massacre "blows over"
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"
Yea this really seems like more of a weapon of propaganda directed at Israelis. If they didn't want people to know about it, we probably wouldn't know about it. The fact that we're talking about it is probably not an accident, and I guess the play here would be to convince Israelis that the army is technologically advanced and they know what they're doing, so don't question it. But AI or not they were going to commit genocide and violate every international humanitarian law on the book. But for the people that still believe the genocide is justified I think this probably improves the optics.
I don't know if this was really planned. With my best will, I cannot imagine the Israeli military & Netanyahu's government releasing this to cover their ass. This could be potentially something which worsens their actions and not lessen them.
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.
Remember the first hospital Israel bombed and then claimed it wasn't them? Since that didn't result in any consequences, now Israel bombs hospitals nearly every day. Same story with the flour massacre.
That one actually legitimately may not have been them. Which then creates a smokescreen of plausible deniability for atrocities which they are the clear authors of.
The reason we all rushed to point fingers at them for that one is... they'd done it before.
Geez. Simply the trajectory changing twice in flight rules out rockets and makes is pretty clear it was a directed Interceptor. But the fog of war is thick so we'll probably never really know. So sad.
I'm disturbed by the idea that an AI could be used to make decisions that could proactively kill someone. (Presumably computer already make decisions that passively kill people by, for example, navigating a self-driving car.) Though there was a human sign-off in this case, it seems one step away from people being killed by robots with zero human intervention which is about one step away from the plot of Terminator.
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.
> B., a senior officer who used Lavender, echoed to +972 and Local Call that in the current war, officers were not required to independently review the AI system’s assessments, in order to save time and enable the mass production of human targets without hindrances.
> “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"
Hm OK, I read this a bit differently. I read these sections:
> 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.
> What is the "zero-error" alternative approach for dropping bombs in a war, or firing rockets for that matter?
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.
Since you went off topic. If Palestinians only wanted dignity and self-determination this conflict would have been resolved a long time ago. Palestinians, broadly speaking, want Israel removed from the map. This is why they're chanting "from the river to the sea" which happens to include the area Israel is situated in.
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:
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).
"From the river to the sea" comes from the Likud policy program, which says there will be an israeli jewish state in that area. The palestinian slogan finishes with "Palestine will be free", without stating that it would cover the entire area.
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.
"Israel’s Supreme Court on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected a 2017 law that would have allowed for the retroactive legalization of thousands of Jewish homes built on occupied West Bank land privately owned by Palestinians, a law so provocative that few believed when it was passed that it would survive judicial review."
"Those homes — already viewed as illegal by most of the world under international law, for having been built in occupied territory — will now remain illegal under Israeli law as well, and Palestinian landowners will be able to proceed with lawsuits seeking to evict the people living in them and recover their property."
> The original Hamas charter (that was never revoked) calls for the murder of Jews.
And the original charter of Netanyahu's political party says "between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty".
> And the original charter of Netanyahu's political party says "between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty".
Yes. Arabs got all of Jordan. That you see Likud’s charter stating Jews want a smaller version of their historical homeland as being comparable to Hamas charter calling for the murder of all Jews says more about you than it does about Likud.
You're doing a lot of conflating Jews with Israel/Zionism/Netanyahu, and Arabs/Muslims/Palestinians with Hamas. There's a reason no one reputable is calling this the "Arab-Jewish War".
The only reason Israel exists is because of U.S. If we were to withdraw support Israel would be gone within months. This goes against the central part of your argument that "Israel won wars of ..." and gets to keep lands, legal or illegal. There is no in-between, US wants/needs Israel in the region and here we are.
OK, so you also disagree with the Fourth Geneva Convention, then? You'd be fine with Syria joining forces with Hezbollah and iraqi militias to take Golan and north of Israel by force and expelling or subduing through apartheid whatever population they come across? I have a feeling that e.g. the small groups of circassians that still exist and live in northern Israel might disagree with you and prefer another international legal order.
I don't think it's made to appease "Western Hamas supporters". They've clarified that the enemy is zionists, which is a much larger group than "the Jews", as the previous charter put it. Some, like you, seem to interpret "the Jews" in the old text as 'all the jews in the world', while Hamas leaders have said that they meant the jews of Israel. Ahmed Yassin has said, on camera, that his movement doesn't have a problem with jews, but with occupiers, and that if a muslim stole his land he would resist that too.
A problem with your interpretation is that many palestinians aren't aware that there are jews elsewhere in the world, or that zionism is a predominantly christian project rather than a jewish one, so when they are refering to 'the jews' one needs to figure out whether they mean israeli jews or jews in general.
Has the UN demanded that Poland and France do so? Are Poland and France states imposing apartheid on germans, or have they ethnically cleansed these areas?
Kinda weird racist remark about arabs being inherently genocidal at the end there. Maybe edit it and make it less weird?
Terrorists will terrorize, especially when they feel justified by their homes being stolen from them by foreigners and inept leaders as happened with the formation of Israel. They should be caught, punished, even killed, since what they are doing is destructive and morally wrong.
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.
> their homes being stolen from them by foreigners and inept leaders as happened with the formation of Israel.
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.
Not sure what those percentages are supposed to show. Most of the ethnic Arabs were living in all of the cities of Mandatory Palestine (as it was called at the time), and around half of them fled those cities after the war started and Zionist forces established the state of Israel. They were encouraged to flee both by the Zionist militias and by their own leaders, as civilians do in most wars. But, since the war was lost, the vast majority never got to return to the homes they abandoned in the new state of Israel. Some of them still live in Gaza and the West Bank, as do the children and grandchildren of the others.
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.
> Not sure what those percentages are supposed to show.
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.
While Hertzl may have believed so, I don't think Ben-Gurion would have agreed. If the Palestinian Arabs had not fled, they would have been driven away in time. The Jewish character of Israel was immediately enshrined into their constitution: an Israel with a majority Arab population was never a possibility. A minority of Arabs can easily be tolerated, and represents a nice defence against accusations of racism or ethno-nationalism.
> 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.
> The Jewish character of Israel was immediately enshrined into their constitution: an Israel with a majority Arab population was never a possibility
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.
> That doesn’t prove that the arabs were driven away by Jews though.
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).
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The proximal cause of Gazans' poverty is Israeli oppression. The fact that this oppression comes in retaliation for old wars doesn't change the fact that it's not Jordan or Syria or Qatar not allowing anything in and out of Gaza.
> 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.
Now we need our central overlords to shut one side down so we don't hear inconvenient truth. You don't get to suppress the truth because it is inconvenient. HN is consistently flagging and removing articles about Israel and Palestine which doesn't fit the "approved truth". You and people like you need to hear "the other side" and not just keep repeating convenient lies. Israel is perpetuating a genocide against unarmed civilians under the guise of "war" and the people supporting the genocide don't want to hear it. Does it upset you that you support all out genocide and want the other side to shut up? That's the truth, killing 30,000+ Palestinians, and now aid workers, is not a war it's a genocidal slaughter.
>It isn't necessary to destroy Hamas with violence
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.
A gross projection, and you're out of your mind if you think peace is what follows that act.
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.
Eh, some people actually have different visions for the world. They'll elect people who are abhorrent to western liberal values over and over again. I don't know what a new election in Gaza would yield, but I don't think it can be a given that giving X group dignity and self-determination will necessarily tilt them toward western liberal outcomes.
I don’t think israeli policy is or has been particularly effective in expanding western liberal values to palestinians. I’d argue putting people under such pressure provides the exact opposite incentives.
> The AANES [Rojava] has widespread support for its universal democratic, sustainable, autonomous pluralist, equal, and feminist policies in dialogues with other parties and organizations. Northeastern Syria is polyethnic and home to sizeable ethnic Kurdish, Arab, and Assyrian populations, with smaller communities of ethnic Turkmen, Armenians, Circassians, and Yazidis.
> 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
Oh, you meant human rights and all that? Having ideals and ethics? Yes, that would be my hope. I thought you were referring to the neoliberal hegemony of wealthy Western nations.
Yes, correct. Human rights is a liberal concept. Pluralism is a liberal concept. Secularism is a liberal concept. There are in fact lots of people who actually literally disagree with these ideals. Lots of ‘em in the Middle East, in fact, which is why you cannot assume that merely lifting the oppressor’s thumb would yield the outcome that’s so intrinsically appealing to your sensibilities that you’re struggling to even identify it as an opinion that you hold and that others may not.
No, I was referring to western liberalism that’s why I used the term western liberalism not “neoliberal hegemony of wealthy Western nations.”
> 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.
Palestinians were given opportunities for self-determination in 1948, 2000 (Camp David), 2008, and 2006 in Gaza (blockaded by Egypt because of Hamas elected to run Gaza). In 1948, they along with 5 invading Arab countries tried to destroy Israel, resulting in their own destruction of their Arab state. In 2000, Arafat turned down a peace agreement with Bill Clinton starting terrorism that resulted in 3000 Palestinian and 1000 Jewish and Israeli Arab deaths, in 2008 Abbas turned down a peace agreement.
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.
> Of the 32,000 Hamas stated deaths, 13,000 are terrorists
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.
"according to the Gaza Health Ministry" i.e. according to Hamas. The actual truth is nobody knows. There are a lot of children in Gaza.
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
>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 bring out a statistic of 9 children carrying out suicide attacks in 4 years when a 1,000 times that were deliberately killed by Israel in 4 months?
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.
This isn't about statistics. This is simple fact that Hamas has used children, including young children. It definitely uses 17yo and 16yo. If they used 9 (out of?) back then this simply means they don't care about using children in war.
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?
Until you understand that for a very large number of Israelis Palestinians are sub-human you will waste your efforts trying to argue with Israelis based on rationality or ethics. They are racists full stop.
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.
This is nonsense. Palestinians live in Israel too. There is less racism in Israel towards Palestinians than racism towards minorities or blacks in the US.
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.
Really? Less racism than towards blacks? You must never have heard Israelis speak about Palestinians.
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.
"There are a lot of children in Gaza" tickles the Bayesian probabilities that Israel is mostly killing children in Gaza.
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.
No, Israel has never seriously been open to palestinian self-determination. Netanyahu brags about it, because he knows that it has been the mainstream position among israeli politicians so he has to project an image of being especially valuable in that regard.
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.
Thought experiment: Let's assume the vast majority of Palestinians genuinely despise Israel and would be willing to sacrifice their own community's existence to exterminate Israel.
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).
I agree but I'm sure this comment will be met by backlash from the anti-Israeli crowd. Nobody actually knows for sure how many are dead, how many are combatants, or anything else about the casualties.
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.
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).
Is Israel moving right meaningful? Before moving right, israeli's as a voting block weren't particularly worried about how colonization of the west bank was going, and wasn't going to prioritize decolonizing the west bank over other local needs.
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
I think it's extremely significant. There was a majority of Israelis around the time of the Oslo accords that would have supported dismantling all the settlements (+/- or land exchange in some specific cases) and handing over the entirety of the west bank to Palestinians. This was a given, had major support, and the only reason that flipped was Hamas' campaign of suicide bombings, which also led to Rabin's assaination. I lived there at the time and I think I have the right perspective here.
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.
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)
>> Comparing against some imaginary scenario where cars have no collisions and cause no deaths doesn't make sense.
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.
Also, in case of top tier of biological weapon, even a single strike - or a single accident - has potentially unlimited area of effect, up to and including the entire planet.
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.
Better bioweapons would potentially be more targeted, and/or have reproductive clocks that disable them after a certain number of generations. But you absolutely run the risk of them evolving away from such restrictions.
Genetic kill timers are production technology that has already been deployed. There are genetically engineered mosquitoes for example that become unviable after a certain number of generations. The idea being that you mix them into the population, they cross breed and spread their genes, then 10 or 50 generations later, they suddenly are infertile en masse and the whole species dies out.
Very big conventional bombs also have similar effects and yet they are not banned, so that's not the difference. The difference is in the way people are killed.
The difference is between inaccuracy of a weapon hitting a target and inaccuracy of target selection in the first place.
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.
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.
The entire segment this is part of makes it very clear they're looking for out-of-the-box thinking and a unique approach to problem solving in situations that might not be what they seem at first glance.
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!)
I watched the movie 2 times in past. I think Smith killing a child just because she is carrying science books (Oh she must be up to something) was sure out of the box and completely ridiculous as well. Also, how is Smith's characters action not "Shoot first"? please.
"Just following orders" huh?
I can't believe I'm being offered Will Smith analogies as apologia for an actual genocide. This is one of the most of awful (in all senses quality, content, intention, execution) posts I've ever read in my entire life.
I think 90 percent accuracy in this case means 10 percent of "suggested terrorists" were overturned with detailed human review. There's no way the Israelis were actually able to reliably question the Gazans about whether they really were terrorists.
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.
> > “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.
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.
We also have to be open to the possibility that Israel is committing a genocide and the goal is to kill as many Palestinians as possible and terrorize the rest. That the AI system’s main purpose isn’t to be accurate in selecting target, but rather to manufacture a reason to kill more Palestinians than a human ever could. Another function could be to remove accountability from a targeting officer. Zero-error is never really a desired feature, in fact zero-error would be a bug, as it would prevent the genocide being conducted efficiently.
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.
And incredibly inefficient genocide. Why is it that modern discourse has become so polarized that criticism has to make the worst possible accusations?
These are the same accusations made among world leaders, human rights organizations, the UN, and the World Court. We should be free to make these accusations here on HN too.
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.
I'm aware of all that, but I don't trust those organizations to be objective as there's a lot of geopolitics at play. South Africa's ruling party is friendly with Russia, for one thing. Then you have Iran's influence, and most of the Arab world has always been against Israel as a nation. Plus all the opposition to the west's influence in the region. There's a lot of proxy stuff going on.
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.
Later in the article they talk about how they specifically approved up to 15-20 civilians to die with those marked individuals and would bomb their homes as a first option.
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.
Israeli officials are constantly being asked "how many dead palestinians is too many" in this conflict, and the answer has explicitly been "there is no such thing" way too many times. There is no upper limit on how many people can be killed to further their goals.
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.
Cognitive dissonance? Those children are just cockroaches to a large portion of the Israeli population
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!
If you multiply out the number of targets that Lavender generated by the number of acceptable civilian deaths per target, you get a number that is ~40% of all Gazans.
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].
>>It's rather unfashionable these days to bring up the fact that Hamas purposely disguises themselves as civilians and operates almost exclusively from civlian buildings, and makes sure their compounds aren't separated from civilian infrastructure.
And yet, somehow I still feel like the answer to this problem still isn't "authorizing up to 15-20 civilian deaths for every enemy militant killed" as mentioned in the article.
I guess they are actually just people who live at home with their families. Aren’t most resistance fighters exactly that: civilians who are willing to fight to enable their families to live in freedom?
I mean, honestly I don’t really think anyone cares about international law when decide to murder a bunch of people (any conflict, not just this one). That’s the problem really, you can shout as much as you want that they don’t have uniforms etc, but this is not some battle field with the solders lining up on each side. The article also explicitly states that they have a program called: “where is daddy” that targets males when they are home with their families.
>And yet, somehow I still feel like the answer to this problem still isn't "authorizing up to 15-20 civilian deaths for every enemy militant killed" as mentioned in the article.
See, that's how you feel, because you aren't thinking or looking at data. And perhaps because you interpret "up to" as the actual ratio.
According to the UN, civilians make up about 90% of casualties during a war[1].
Meanwhile, the estimates for Israel operation in Gaza is ~9000 militants killed out of ~25000 total[2].
The entire problem in discussing the issue is that the way people feel isn't driven by reality on the ground, but on what sounds nice.
> According to the UN, civilians make up about 90% of casualties during a war[1]
That's not exactly what it says:
"Conflict continued to cause widespread civilian death last year, notably in densely populated areas, where civilians accounted for 90 per cent of the casualties when explosive weapons were used, compared to 10 per cent in other areas."
If that's the only case where this is true, then both the headline and the first sentence of this article are misleading or incorrect. The headline states "Ninety Per Cent of War-Time Casualties Are Civilians" with no qualifiers. The first sentence starts "With civilians accounting for nearly 90 per cent of war-time casualties..." with no qualifiers.
It's disappointing that this UN report is so poorly written as to seem to contradict itself. Do you think ultimately the 90% refers exclusively to explosive use in urban areas, or all war casualties? I'm frankly not sure which thing the article is claiming.
I imagine you get to tune the probability window of "person is >90% likely a Hamas terrorist" and choose how many innocent people you kill. Who set the window?
"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.
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.
That's not true. The UN themselves state that their numbers for Ukraine are likely severely undercounting the total casualties simply because they don't have any insight into what is going on in occupied territory. They do not give "estimates" for Ukraine, the numbers are what they have been able to confirm. So for you to call that very specific number an "estimate" is incorrect - which should probably have been self-evident.
>> 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.
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.
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.
That's not a source, it's a link back to the very same UN figures I just explained the problem with. Literally if you follow the citation on that page for that section, it goes straight back to the UN report, which explains how each casualty was corroborated (NOT estimated. independently verified.)
>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.
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.
Sure, fine, maybe the UN report is all wrong -- even though everybody seems to use it.
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.
There were actually some unfortunate people who fled Ukraine for Gaza - families who had Palestinian-Ukrainian marriages back in Soviet times, and more recently, that are now in an out of the frying pan into the fire situation
> Sure, fine, maybe the UN report is all wrong -- even though everybody seems to use it.
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.
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
> Everything the Israelis have ever been accused of doing, the Russians have done in Ukraine.
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.
No, they were often NOT allowed to flee. Sometimes they fired on the humanitarian corridors travelling back to Ukraine, sometimes they forced people in occupied territory into "filtration camps" and took their passports to give them new Russian passports. People with Ukrainian passports weren't allowed through border checkpoints.
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
But this is hardly an apples-to-apples comparison: we happen to use the word "war" to describe both what's occurring in Ukraine and what's occurring in Gaza, just as we use the word "surgery" to describe both the removal of birdshot following a hunting accident and the removal of a brain tumor, since, after all, the two phenomena we call war share many characteristics (violence, mutual non-recognition of legal authority, etc.), just as the two kinds of surgery do (anesthesia, scalpels, etc.). But it would be an obtuse medical review board that faulted the tumor surgeon for damaging a higher percentage of healthy tissue, or for causing a greater loss of post-operative function, or for having a higher number of her patients die on the operating table, than the gunshot surgeon. After all, the pellets will be close to the surface, easy to distinguish from benign human cells, and unlikely to be hiding behind anything as delicate and vital as the blood vessels of the cerebellum. Of course, if you weren't such a review board member making careful medical-ethical judgments but instead a malpractice lawyer trying to convince a jury of ordinary citizens of the ineptitude and even malice of some neurosurgeon, you might not be quite as scrupulous about pushing an emotive analogy too far.
For every militant they correctly identify (90% of the time, they'd have us believe) and kill, they also kill dozens of innocents. This doesn't give them pause; on the contrary the Israeli public revels in the carnage and bring out lawn chairs to watch. It's genocide.
Many people in the west enjoy it too. Lots of Europeans and Americans don't like Muslims (or even Jews or just people who don't look 'white'), and they like turning on the news to find out how many have been killed each day because it wouldn't be acceptable to carry out in their own countries, especially in the era of DEI.
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.
>Basically take out a generation of Palestinian men and you're all set.
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).
But you see, if you kill just them, then their family would very likely get radicalized because of that, and then you'd have to kill them too, only some time later so it's just more efficient to do it in one fell swoop while you have the chance.
I don’t like Lavender. I think humans should always be in the loop. I’d like to see more care by analysts for kill orders.
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.
It is very clear to me that that is a sentence reflecting the editorial interpretation of the paper rather than a direct quote. You might agree with the interpretation - I think I might - but that is very different from this specific sentiment being something Israeli leadership are openly saying.
90% is a BS number . Computed basis what ? What is the baseline how did they benchmark . Is there any data whatsoever to back this claim ?
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.
> I wonder what the alternative is in a case like this.
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.
Or alternatively pressure from the top down on targeting specialists to get more and more targets selected resulting in less quality and effort spent on selecting targets and maybe leading to rubber-stamping proposed targets without adequate consideration. Which isn't to suggest that that would definitely make the AI better per se
It's an army too cowardly to have dismounted infantry protecting their tanks, so instead their conscripts burn alive in there when they get in contact with actual militants.
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.
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.
Look I know this is gonna sound cliche but the thing they should do is not engage in an offensive asymmetrical war and bomb a dense urban area full of innocents for basically no reason. Then they wouldn’t need the little ai.
This is obviously veering way off course of the topic of AI at this point, 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." I'm interested in analysis and criticism of Israel's use of AI in this case but suggesting Israel has no causus belli is absurd.
I never understood why the argument that only war can bring hostages back, or that it is the most reliable way, was allowed to be propagated in public for so long.
> 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 argument that only war can bring hostages back
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.
I, at least, had sources. I tried looking evidence of this new fact about Yugoslavia you presented but could not find any.
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].
It sounds like you are unaware on the attack on Israel in October that intentionally killed about 1.5k civilians of which the current action is the consequence.
It's hard to speculate on the circumstances of their deaths given there is no reliable independent reporting on it, but I'll give it a go as you asked.
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.
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.
OP didn't say Israel is fighting for basically no reason.
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.
There is a great reason for doing it: nothing else has worked.
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.
There has been no period in the past nearly 100 years[0] when these two groups have not been fighting. I'm not assigning anyone "victim" status. I'm saying Israel is trying to end the conflict, and has run out of other options.
What happened to trigger the events of last October which in turn triggered this.
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.
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.
All that is just an internet search away, and provides an endless list. Let us ignore the major bombings of Gaza in 2006, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021, 2022. How about the following few:
You mix Gaza and West Bank and conveniently ignore the fact that each of those bombings in Gaza came after indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilians.
Disturbing indeed. I've been worried a push back in AI is coming and this sort of story could be a tipping point and certainly would justify a period of reflection.
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.
there should be a moral impetus to always have a human in the loop regardless
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.
There's an old IBM presentation going around, from 1979, that says "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a Management Decision." We know that humans make monstrous decisions in war; many of us remember seeing the Collateral Murder video, and everyone has at least heard of the Nuremberg trials. When humans make monstrous decisions, at least some of them, sometimes, hang for it. The computer here serves mainly to diffuse responsibility for decisions that would be made in any case. Who will hang?
It's a good question. I also immediately found myself asking the same one of myself after posting that comment. I guess part of me just wants as many possible breakpoints along the process as possible.
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.
I would strongly argue that even being able to prove that a human might perform worse is not an acceptable excuse for the reasons I will outline. The bar for a computer needs to be significally higher than that of a human.
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.
Pushback on AI will of course have a “National security” exception. If the industrial level facial recognition tech in Xinjiang was forgotten I doubt this will make a difference
>I wonder what the alternative is in a case like this.
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.
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.
We crossed the line of machines that automatically kill a long time ago. A heat seeking missile, or a shell that detects and target tanks [1] are effectively doing that. Software selects the target. The soldier only points in the general direction. AI is only a small technical increment.
It's never really that clear-cut, though. Human drone operators, pilots, etc. routinely send missiles into cars, buildings, weddings, etc. that cause collateral damage, killing or maiming innocents and passers-by. Sometimes it's an accident, but not always.
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 =/
This system bassicaly just gave everyone a score from 1 to 100 of how luckely they are part the military wing of hamas.
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.
Is having a human make those decisions really better? It was humans who ordered the Holocaust, My Lai, Wounded Knee, Rwanda, Tiananmen, etc.
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.
I think people are worried no one really understands how AI picks the target.
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.
An eternal story; I heard the same thing at university 22 years ago, except then it was NATO taking nice crisp in-focus photos of their own tanks from close up, while the images of Soviet tanks were all blurry and grainy because they came from high-altitude spy planes.
(This kind of human model hallucination is how and why I think Genesis got written and taken seriously).
> I think people are worried no one really understands how AI picks the target.
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...
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.
I'm having to take a few deep breaths before responding to some of these comments. The difference is Accountability. A computer can't be held accountable and a person can. Full stop. It makes all the difference.
You could get a bystander effect kind of dilution of responsibility, even if unintentionally. Everyone points to someone else which is a system of incentives that enables bad things to happen. The buck always stops with the leadership, but you still want well-defined blame at the decision maker level that's transparent to everyone while decisions are being made.
Yes, and that's not happening right now, and it's a Big Fucking Problem. I am pretty sure this will someday be a prime case study in AI ethics courses. A Waco type of "how could this happen" moment.
when a computer program designed by a human "makes" the decision, humans can claim that it was "a funny mistake", it was not their fault and pretend to be very sad for it.
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
I know many people won't read past the headline, but please try to.
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."
in the article they say it's explicit and it's 20 to 1 and goes to 100 to 1 for some targets. which makes it obvious it's not a rule but an order of magnitude to estimate the importance of a target. you know like when we use the Fibonacci suite as a measure for the difficulty of a backlog item during the planning game
I think the implication is that Gaza does have semi-autonomy (it is a complicated situation - there's a blockade, but it has security autonomy within its region. Or did before October 7th).
And Gaza was pushed towards democratic elections, which they held, elected Hamas, and Hamas hasn't permitted a democracy since then.
Let's not forget that Likud and Netanyahu were instrumental in funding and arming Hamas. The PLO and Arafat were becoming increasing moderate and willing to sit down and work out a peaceful two state solution. But the ultra right wing of Israel didn't want that, and didn't want awkward questions like "If they're willing to negotiate and work through diplomacy, why isn't Israel?" so they thought it'd be better to fund the rise of the extremist Hamas.
"From the River to the Sea" (Jordan River to the Red Sea) was not just a comment by Palestinian extremists, but was Likud's actual election campaign and slogan throughout the 1970s.
And it's hard, as a Gazan, to argue with Hamas, considering Hamas are about the only ones armed, thanks to Israel's ongoing air blockade (Arafat International Airport bombed in early 2000s), and the Israeli navy blockading Port of Gaza since 2007.
> The PLO and Arafat were becoming increasing moderate and willing to sit down and work out a peaceful two state solution.
You said this in another comment. While I agree that Netanyahu has done a lot of harm over the last 15 years, specifically by on-purpose shooting down chances for peace, I think you are giving the PA and Arafat too much credit. They were offered multiple deals that they turned down, walking away from negotiations without offering alternatives.
It's totally possible that with leadership towards peace on the Israeli side, that might've changed and we would've eventually seen a true peace deal signed. And for sure Netanyahu put effort into quashing that, one of his many sins. But we don't need to pretend that the PA was better than it was. It's not at all clear that, absent Netanyahu, a deal coudl've been agreed on.
You do make a good point with this. Certainly the PLO and Arafat were responsible for many heinous acts, and I didn't mean to downplay that or unduly make them out as harbingers of peace who were just being derailed by Israel.
I don't pretend to understand their motivations for moderation - maybe it was the feeling that their "way" was never going to out stubborn Israel, maybe Arafat grew tired in his old age of the conflict. There were many failed attempts, some briefly successful, others not at all, much like the Troubles. And Arafat and the PLO should shoulder a large chunk of that responsibility.
But like you say, it's entirely possible that an accord could have been reached, and also entirely possible that it would have tripped over 1,000 other hurdles and not happened.
I just feel way too much is going into overlooking not just the early tolerance of Hamas because it was politically expedient to the Israeli right wing, but the active enablement and fostering.
> I just feel way too much is going into overlooking not just the early tolerance of Hamas because it was politically expedient to the Israeli right wing, but the active enablement and fostering.
I mean, that's true, and I think Israel has done immoral things for at least 15 years, mostly by not strongly pursuing peace, with or without a partner.
Still, I think you might be over-indexing on the idea of "Israel propped up Hamas". What would the alternative have looked like exactly? Israel fighting more wars against Hamas? Israel not letting Qatar money in (which is one of the big claims against Netanyahu)? I'm sure that had that happened, the world would've condemned this as "depriving Gazans of aid they desperately need".
After Hamas was elected in 2006, in elections deemed democratic and fair by international observers (Jimmy Carter's organisation, The Carter Center) the US government at the time armed and trained a Fatah faction to stage a coup, that backfired, leaving Hamas in control of Gaza.
Ever since that, there has been constant interference with Hamas' government, including multiple military campaigns by Israel - in "Operations" Cast Lead, Pillar of Defense, Swords of Iron and I forget which others, Wikipedia has a timeline [1].
Basically, ever since the election, Gaza has been under attack every few months or years. Hamas probably weren't in a great hurry to have elections, although it should be noted that their ideology is to take power democratically and not through power of arms [2]. In any case, they're in a constant state of war and it's hard to hold democratic elections under the circumstances. Netanyahu has used the same excuse, repeatedly, to avoid being kicked out of government in the current crisis.
Btw, all that about the interference with the democratic process in Gaza after Hamas' election is on wikipedia [3] (meaning it's easy to get a first idea of what happened; then you can check their sources).
> Ever since that, there has been constant interference with Hamas' government, including multiple military campaigns by Israel - in "Operations" Cast Lead, Pillar of Defense, Swords of Iron and I forget which others, Wikipedia has a timeline [1].
Just to state the obvious context you didn't include, these operations were usually the direct result of rocket attacks on Israel. Every time an operation ended in ceasefire, a few years later, Hamas would start up rocket attacks again, and Israel would retaliate.
That was not the case "every time" and I'm not sure it was the case "usually", or in the largest operations. For example, according to Wikipedia, Operation Cast Lead (2008, ~1400 Palestinians dead) started with an Israeli strike:
A six month long ceasefire between Israel and Hamas ended on 4 November, when the IDF made a raid into Deir al-Balah, central Gaza to destroy a tunnel, killing several Hamas militants. Israel said the raid was a preemptive strike and Hamas intended to abduct further Israeli soldiers,[37][38] while Hamas characterized it as a ceasefire violation,[37][39] and responded with rocket fire into Israel.[40][41]
Operation Breaking Dawn (2022) started with pre-emptive assassinations of Palestinian Islamic Jihad leaders:
The initial attack included the targeted killing of Tayseer al-Jabari, a military leader of the group.[21][22][23] On the second day, the PIJ commander of the Southern area of the Strip, Khaled Mansour, was also targeted and killed. Islamic Jihad stated that the Israeli bombardments were a 'declaration of war' and responded with retaliatory rocket fire towards Israel.[24]
Other "operations" and bouts of violence started without any side clearly breaking a ceasefire, but instead with violence that kept escalating during a period of calm.
The 2021 violence (not a named "operation") e.g. started with violence against, and suppression of the religious rights, of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, and subsequent riots:
The crisis was triggered[34] on 6 May, when Palestinians in East Jerusalem began protesting over an anticipated decision of the Supreme Court of Israel on the eviction of six Palestinian families in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.[35] Under international law, the area, effectively annexed by Israel in 1980, is a part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank;[36][37] On 7 May, according to Israel's Channel 12, Palestinians threw stones at Israeli police forces,[38] who then stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound[39] using tear gas, rubber bullets, and stun grenades.[40][39][41] The crisis prompted protests around the world as well as official reactions from world leaders.
But you're right, let's not omit any context. In particular, let's not forget that the Palestinians made several attempts to make progress in the relations with Israel that did not include any rockets whatsoever, after Hamas' election, for example The Great March of Return (2018):
At least 189 Palestinians were killed between 30 March and 31 December 2018.[28]: 6 [29][30] An independent United Nations commission set the number of known militants killed at 29 out of the 189.[5] Other sources claim a higher figure, of at least 40.[31][20][32] Israeli soldiers fired tear gas and live ammunition.[33] According to Robert Mardini, head of Middle East for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), more than 13,000 Palestinians were wounded as of 19 June 2018. The majority were wounded severely, with some 1,400 struck by three to five bullets.[34]
All of which were crushed with overwhelming force by Israel. And of course, let's not forget what happened when Hamas seemed willing to agree to a long-lasting ceasefire (before the elections): its leaders were assassinated.
According to Tristan Dunning, Israel has never responded to repeated offers by Hamas over subsequent years for a quid pro quo moratorium on attacks against civilians.[176] It has engaged in several tadi'a (periods of calm), and proposed a number of ceasefires.[176] In January 2004, Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin, prior to his assassination, said that the group would end armed resistance against Israel for a 10-year hudna[k] in exchange for a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, and that restoring Palestinians' "historical rights" (relating to the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight) "would be left for future generations". His views were quickly echoed by senior Hamas official Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, who added that Hamas envisaged a "phased liberation".[178] Israel's response was to assassinate Yassin in March in a targeted Israeli air strike, and then al-Rantisi in a similar air strike in April.[179]
Stop occupying and brutalizing them, and agree to two states along the 1967 borders, as called for by both international law and every other country in the world.
Please check your facts. Nobody woke up to a Hamas takeover. Quite the opposite: there was a takeover attempt by a Fatah faction (a coup) armed by the US. The coup backfired, there was a civil war, Hamas won and it came to control Gaza.
You can find this on wikipedia, so it's not like it's some conspiracy theory brewing in the dark corners of the internets. Even Vanity Fair has written about it:
In April 2008 Vanity Fair published "The Gaza Bombshell":
There is no one more hated among Hamas members than Muhammad Dahlan, long Fatah's resident strongman in Gaza. Dahlan, who most recently served as Abbas's national-security adviser, has spent more than a decade battling Hamas. ... Bush has met Dahlan on at least three occasions. After talks at the White House in July 2003, Bush publicly praised Dahlan as "a good, solid leader." In private, say multiple Israeli and American officials, the U.S. president described him as "our guy."
Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America's behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)
Some sources call the scheme "Iran-contra 2.0," recalling that Abrams was convicted (and later pardoned) for withholding information from Congress during the original Iran-contra scandal under President Reagan. There are echoes of other past misadventures as well: the C.I.A.'s 1953 ouster of an elected prime minister in Iran, which set the stage for the 1979 Islamic revolution there; the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which gave Fidel Castro an excuse to solidify his hold on Cuba; and the contemporary tragedy in Iraq.[66]
In 2005? Nope. So the point still stand. And in later 2020+, Armed? Nope. only allowing Qatar money to pass was choosing between 2 evils which doesn't mean you support them. I mean, what is the option you try to refer to which would not lead to this point with a Dictatorship Terroristic Religious government of Gaza, which only backed by Iran?
"Democratic" is pushing it a tad too far—none of the Islamic world follows a rule of law that would be something akin to a democracy; they're monarchies, theocracies, or in many cases autocracies. The only actual democracy in the middle east is—well, Israel.
Iran had a democracy, until the CIA toppled it in 1953. In general having oil means foreign powers will keep installing useful puppets as leaders. The middle east having few democracies may have more to do with Western greed than with the preferences of Arabs or Muslims.
Incapable is a strong word—but much (if not most) of the Muslim world advocates for Sharia law which is essentially the opposite of a democracy. When it's practiced in it's truest form it's the most repressive system of laws against women in the modern world.
As the world becomes more modern and democratic principles become more highly prized, I think we see some glimmers of hope in the muslim world as parts of the population begin to value more democratic principles. But they have to do this in the context of the theocratic states in which they live in where these values were never first class citizens—so I think that's why we haven't seen much progress on these fronts in that part of the world.
I agree with you that there's a double standard in regards to the application of the law—I'm not privy on why Palestinians are subject to Israel's laws, and I wouldn't charitably say it's for reasons that are morally sound. I do think that allowing Palestinian's to vote in Israel's parliamentary elections is a non-starter for obvious reasons.
These racist Islamophobic talking points are so grimy to read.
The "modern and democratic" world leaders are currently trying - and failing - to whitewash an undeniable, livestreamed, openly boasted genocide and land-grab.
This is enabled by a variety of full-on unapologetic apocalyptic death-cult religious extremists and a complicit media who happily run fossil fuel greenwashing campaigns and silence anti-war voices.
Compare Muslims killed by Jews and Christians over the last few decades to the reverse. It's hard to argue for any moral high ground whatsoever when you look at the raw numbers.
If the best argument you have is that the West treats women better, maybe look at how many women we've murdered in the middle east, or the 26,000 rape-related pregnancies in Texas, or the Ethopian Jews sterilized without being informed in Israel, etc, etc, etc.
Those vastly wealthy ME leaders repressing women the hardest? They got all that money selling oil to us.
It's a lot of work unpeeling the layers and layers of Western hypocrisy and bullshit, but it has to be done. It has to. We can't keep killing millions of brown people for their natural resources and expect to have a nice society/planet to live on.
There is no material proof that Hamas has put bases in any hospital, and if you think human shields are fair game, then that speaks to your willingness to dehumanize Palestinians.
> We wouldn't tolerate a SWAT team blowing up a hospital if the mafia had taken over the basement, I have no idea why you think this is acceptable.
While I agree with comparing Hamas to the mafia, both are criminal organizations, Hamas is more than that. It has rockets, it mascaraed civilians and holds the ideology of genociding its enemy. None of that is applicable to the mafia. So if its people are hiding in an hospital and refuse to surrender there is no moral objection to blow up the hospital (Also, if you are referring to Shifa Hospital, Israel didn't blow it, they entered with SWAT teams and there were fierce fighting costing also Israeli soldiers lives)
> It is exactly like the carpet bombing used by other nations.
I'll link to Wikipedia to help you spot the differences [0]
I think that no matter your view on the mafia or Hamas, it still doesn't justify the amount of death and destruction that is being done in Gaza. No matter how you spin it or sugar coat itw killing, displacing and starving civilians, killing aid workers and journalists and destroying civilian infrastructure are war crimes. As for the Al-Shifa Hospital, Israel's SWAT is either incompetent or not a SWAT team at all judging by the length of the operation, 2 weeks, and the photos of the Hospital after they left.
But Hamas is a cancer that constantly is trying to metastasize into Israel.
Seriously, what is Israel supposed to do? Anything they label as "Do not attack" just becomes an attack vector for Hamas.
I will try to answer that question. I think it's better to find the actual reason for what's happening rather than focus on the symptoms. Perhaps Israel could stop being an apartheid[0,1] and treat Palestinians equally. It could also stop imposing a blockade on Gaza[2] and allow it to blossom again and remove the need for supporting Hamas. It could as well allow Palestinians to exercise their right to return to where they or their parents lived [3].
It's easy to point the fingers at Hamas for the region's suffering but that is dishonest and completely omits the big role that Israel played in creating this and previous events.
Perhaps you could help me with that? I was trying to reply to the parent's question about what Israel is supposed to do and offered some alternatives to indiscriminate killings. The part about the right of return dates back to around 1948, right around the time the state of Israel was established. How far back in time should we go for it to stop being a symptom and become a cause?
Your argument is just whataboutism and barely worth even engaging with. It is possible that both sides of the military conflict are wrong. Being against Israel’s actions here don’t imply support for Hamas and vice versa. In this case, Israel is the one with most of the power, and they’ve used that power to kill far more people than Hamas. To defend that abuse of power is immoral.
It seems that you learned a new word "whataboutism" and don't really know how to use it.
Hamas is controlling Gaza for 15 years now. Did they care about the population? did they build roads, schools? or dig tunnels and accumulated weapons?
So what ideas do you have? giving them candies? Hamas must be eliminated from position of power, yes it will cost innocent lives, but if you ever wish to move toward peace that is the first step.
And Israel is blameless in all this? They’ve done nothing wrong? Colonizing the West Bank is just fine? You can’t pull the shit they have and not expect splashback. They’ve put the Palestians in a cage, poked them with a stick, and now they act surprised when some of them lash out. I’m not going to defend Hamas’s actions, but what the hell can you expect? Shake a hornets nest and you’re going to get stung.
And if the cost of eliminating Hamas is killing innocent people, don’t you think that might radicalize some of the remaining people? This kind of shit hasn’t worked in the past, so why would it work now? They’re killing innocent people for no good reason.
> They’re killing innocent people for no good reason.
They're killing innocent people as the least-bad option.
Hamas killed a bunch of innocent Israelis. Hamas has stated, clearly and repeatedly, that they intend to continue doing so until they have killed them all. Israel has decided that Hamas has to be destroyed, in order to protect innocent people.
But Hamas surrounds itself with civilians[1]. Faced with the the choice of killing Hamas (and killing innocent Palestinians in the process), or not killing Hamas (and having Hamas kill innocent Israelis), Israel has chosen to kill Hamas. This is not a choice between killing innocents and not killing innocents - that choice is not an option. This is a choice of which innocents die.
[1] Why does Hamas surround itself with civilians? Because it knows that Israel is reluctant to cause civilian casualties. They went far enough this time that Israel has overcome that reluctance.
Sure it has worked in the past, eradicating both Nazi Germany and Empire of Japan during WWII cost many innocent lives. "Few" millions. Now let us count together the wars started by these nations started afterward. I'll start: 0
Of course it will all amount to nothing if Israel will not finish the job.
> And Israel is blameless in all this...
The problem is that you assign 0 responsibility to Hamas. As if they are lesser human as if you consider them as dogs or something. Hamas took full control of Gaza, they could have done whatever they like and the choose to invest everything into attacking Israel. Evidently it wasn't much of a cage as they accumulated enough weapon to engage in 6 months war (and counting...). Fact remains that Israel decolonizied Gaza and in return they got October 7. What lesson should they learn from it?
Because this is war and not a SWAT police operation?
If soldiers in the field have reason to believe the enemy is in a building and call in air support to bomb it, no part of that is a war crime. Even if someone later goes and discovers the people in that building were actually preschoolers; what matters is what the people in the field making the decisions knew at that moment.
You realize you're actively advocating for a lack of critical thinking and investigation, to maintain plausible deniability? What could possibly go wrong?
The whole point of this article (and much of what we've learned in the last few months) is that Israel is clearly not just targeting areas with suspected Hamas activity.
They're using indiscriminate weapons (so not targeting at all!), hitting known UN and humanitarian sites, and killing so ruthlessly that they killed Israeli hostages that made the mistake of being living humans in front of IDF soldiers.
Not only are they indescriminately killing, they are purposefully targeting and murdering aid workers that coordinated WITH THE IDF before entering the area.
"…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"
Neither Isrealis nor Hamas believe it's their duty to prevent civilian Palestinian deaths in this conflict. At this point anyone that can do anything to improve the situation are the civilians themselves by social distancing from Hamas associates by at least the typical blast radius. Athough I don't imagine this would be very effective as well.
They permitted larger numbers of civilians being killed in the pursuit of terrorist barbarics who raped and murdered and dragged babies with their mothers into underground dungeons, and praised themselves for that while hiding between civilians.
Rapes have been officially recognized as having happened by the UN, i don’t see how that is hard to believe given Hamas filmed most of their atrocities on GoPros. Oct 7 was a brutal terror campaign regardless of your position on the conflict, denying that is absurd
> 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
Read the report - there is zero evidence of rape that hasn't been thoroughly debunked. That "reasonable grounds" line was apparently added to placate Israel by the report's author (who has a history with Israel).
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.
I suggest everyone listen to the current season of the Serial podcast.
>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
Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, and Norway were heavily involved in the war on terror. Bombing Afghanistan but also arresting "suspected" people of their own
> “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.”
Watching i24 news is a little unsettling. They run bits with interrogators announcing how productive torture has been, and make jokes about how it would be much easier if lemons just gave up their juice without being squeezed.
I've seen a few clips on Twitter, and it's some of the most disgusting footage I've ever seen in my life - torture, murder and genocide made into light entertainment for Israelis. It's just... unspeakably vile.
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.
The war in Gaza is unlike Ukraine because Hamas does not issue uniforms or clearly demarcate military targets.
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.
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.
They do have uniforms, they just don't use them because it's way more effective to have Schrodinger super-position civilians who are soldiers when a gun is in their hand, and innocent civilians when they drop the gun.
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.
you're misunderstanding. Palestinians fighting in plain clothes are not Hamas. they are ordinary citizens fighting for their lives because they have no choice
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?
Because it's Israel. It's also why no western country has ever really officially condemned Israel no matter what they do. They are on "our side" so it's okay. And those civilians kind of deserved it anyways or something, and we can just trust every single word the IDF says and use them as an actual source to pretend the IDF isn't into mass civilian murder.
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.
This is what I found the most shocking and disheartening in the first days after the October 7th massacre and the start of indiscriminate bombing of Gaza - the reaction and inaction of the West.
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.
The selectivity of Western calls to not commit war crimes predates the response to Oct 7. Two weeks earlier, the Azerbaijani dictatorship ethnically cleansed over 100,000 people from their ancestral land. Not a peep from anyone, in fact Azerbaijan is a "reliable, trustworthy partner" according to von der Leyen: https://neighbourhood-enlargement.ec.europa.eu/news/statemen...
Yeah,true even Russia doesn't openly state that their goal is to level Ukraine to the ground and displace the population one way or the other.
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
Russia entered into an international agreement guaranteeing Ukraine’s territorial integrity (Minsk), and subsequently clearly violated it. Israel and Palestine have no such agreement, though they’ve come relatively close to making one, and both countries have repeatedly violated the other’s territorial sovereignty over the past 80 years. They’re very different cases.
Uh? Colonizing a country and land that isn't theirs inherently violates multiple international laws. A treaty isn't somehow worth more than territorial integrity
> 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.
The example you're citing was actually investigated, and (IIRC) it was found that Hezbollah was firing mortar(s) from a position directly adjacent to the UN post. I believe that it was generally assumed that Hezbollah was using the Canadians as 'human shields'. Culpability in such situations is usually attributed to the shield-users, largely due to the consequences of attributing blame to the retaliators (i.e. encouraging further use of human shields).
Have you looked at the Wikipedia article? According to it, the UN said the Hezbollah position was 150m away from the UNIFIL Khiyam base; the Israelis claim the distance was <40m.
>"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."
So even according to your link, it's either Israel or Hezbollah. In fact, the victims seem to be just as scared by the Hezbollah than by Israel (an ally state). Now, surely you can agree that only one those two is very often condemned in the west, while the other is praised, supported, and granted a free pass for leveling a city to the ground? You're proving my original point, that Israel can act like a criminal state with 0 repercussions.
Isn’t a military person a legitimate target at the time of the war? I think it is, the issue is the collateral damage. But then again this war shows that Hamas is also not following the rules and gets too close to civilians.
I wonder how accurate this technology really is or if they care so little for the results and instead more for the optics of being seen as advanced. On one hand, it’s scary to think this technology exists but on the other, it might just be a pile of junk since the output is so biased. What’s even scarier is that it’s proof that people in power don’t care about “correct”, they care about having a justification to confirm their biases. It’s always been the case but it’s even more damming this extends to AI. Previously, you were limited by how many humans can lie but now you’re limited by how fast your magic black box runs.
It's unconfirmed who authorized it but the recent food charity workers killed by Israeli bombing had a security person (death confirmed by family in UK) who is unarmed but by job description clears the way by telling Israeli authorities where the charity team is going to be so the chain of command knew who they were, so one is naturally lead to ask - who would authorize a targeted killing in this situation? The after photos show the missile went right through the roof of the car, ironically next to the food charity's visible logo on top of the car. Israeli defense minister now claims it was a mistake, although if they had hit a real target it might have been acceptable in terms of their rules of engagement with 15-100 unrelated collateral deaths according to the investigation.
So like ground troops in every war, ever? There’s a whole school of thought around having the boots on the ground make their own in the moment decisions.
> There’s a whole school of thought around having the boots on the ground make their own in the moment decisions.
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
> 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!
War zones aren't as quiet and organized as you would imagine. More so when one side is disguised as regular civilians. All war zones also have people killed by friendly fire. I would assume friendly fire > killing western charity workers > killing civilians in order of importance to the military
Yet still, even that its the most important, friendly fire still happens
I agree with the other commenter that this goes way beyond "friendly fire". According to a Haaretz article, those aid workers were targeted 3 times in a row and I assume someone had to confirm the bombing for all 3 of them. This isn't friendly fire. I would love to see their validation data to check on their claim of 90% accuracy.
It's certainly possible for what you write to be true, and the video we've seen from other targeted killings indicates that even an entire human chain of command could have missed the logos on the car, off the top of my head the USA example is when we attacked a wedding party in Afghanistan because it was close to a combat zone. But it sounds like the rules of engagement give IDF the leeway to kill up to 15 non combatants in any situation for one AI identified male in targeted age group and 100 if the male matches a high value target, which seems incredibly broad. It's all a moot point for the victims, and the IDF killing hostages with their hands in the air sounds like it's kind of out of control but could be sampling bias since reporters are being killed at a pretty high rate as well.
I think optics of being advanced aren't the main goal. Some form of "justification", no matter how flimsy, especially if it's hard to audit how the "AI" came to it's conclusions, is the goal. Now anyone is a target. Similar to cops in the US "smelling weed" or dogs "signaling". It provides the means to justify any search, or in this case, any kill. The machine grinds away..
In 2018, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, SVP Diane Greene, SVP Urs Hölzle, and top engineer Jeff Dean built a system like Lavender for the US military (Project Maven). The US military planned to use it to analyze mass-surveillance drone footage to pick suspects in Pakistan for assassination. They had already dropped bombs on hundreds of houses and vehicles, murdering thousands of suspects and their families and friends [0].
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.
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.
972 this is leftist "blog magazine" with questionably sourced material. while there might be some truth to core claim of automated system (which IDF confirmed that exists), rest of claims probably outcome of "broken phone". But everybody will use it as statement of undeniable fact in order to evolve as usual discussion into "genocidal Israel indiscriminately killing civilians in droves and performs ethnic cleaning and other countless war crimes" and downvote into oblivion everybody who will disagree with it.
Mainstream israeli television pretty much agrees with the description you put in quotes. It's just that they think it's jolly good and something to be proud of, whereas you seem to disagree with that?
It is fairly difficult to be to the right of some of Netanyahu's and Likud's positions, so disdainfully referring to it as some "leftist blog magazine" is more just an attempt to denigrate.
The feeling I got during the last months here when there are articles about this war is, that there are either many Israelis here flagging anything that makes Israel look bad, or many Americans, who somehow feel allegiance to Israel and think that this ever was about a good cause.
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.
The generally accepted terminology here is "pro-Zionist" and "anti-Zionist". There is a concerted effort to conflate "anti-Zionism" and "antisemitism" in public discourse. You're not imaginging things. It's part of an organized campaign generally called hasbara [1]. Articles or videos that don't suit this narrative are brigaded, flagged and reported (as you noted).
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.
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.
The astroturfing from pro-Israel parties on social media is incredible, but nothing beats the Reddit situation.
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.
Reddit is a problem only on the popular frontpage subs for people with just-reading or no accounts. If you make an account and read certain subs their algorithm will recommend you the alternate subs that are less astroturfed and the discussion is free from people telling you that there's evidence and reports that don't exist and insult you if you ask for links, or people that say that something says something and post you a link and then you go and it says something else (usually less favorable to Israel). The main subs have been pretty bad with Israel-related news since forever, it's not a new thing, it's that there's more of those news now.
/r/ukpolitics is not a main sub, yet they operate on there as well. It is not very hard to have an alert any time anyone posts a topic with the word "Israel" in the title, coming to mass downvote anything remotely critical of their employer.
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 is true, but being against flame wars in general means some important topics just don't get discussed, even though they're directly relevant to HN - here there's both a current news angle and a whole bundle of tech questions, from ethics to how one measures the success rate of a new technology.
That's already the case for lots of topics. People flagging this stuff aren't doing it because they think it's not important and they aren't what makes it one of the topics that's difficult to discuss.
The difference between previously revealed 'Gospel' and this 'Lavender' is revealed here:
> "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.
Given the total failure to achieve any of its stated objectives, has this use of AI benefited the IDF at all?
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.
I'm starting to get convinced the stated objective isn't the objective IDF is really after.
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.
> Given the total failure to achieve any of its stated objectives, has this use of AI benefited the IDF at all?
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.
Politically and diplomatically, it could be argued Hamas have been considerably strengthened. They certainly think so.
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.
> Politically and diplomatically, it could be argued Hamas have been considerably strengthened. They certainly think so.
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.
Abraham accords being scuppered, Houthis applying international pressure on their behalf, and most importantly multiple big cases brought against Israel at the ICJ. Not to mention the considerable loss of standing Israel has suffered amongst regular people in just about any country you care to name.
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.
> Houthis applying international pressure on their behalf
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.)
> Winning sympathy while losing ground, infrastructure and fighting forces is a terrible trade.
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.
> 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
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.
We are further from peaceful coexistence and a two-state solution, but Hamas don't want that. They are, in my loosely held opinion, slightly closer to their actual revisionist objective, which is the annihilation of Israel. The sequence of events that causes this outcome are black swans, that have now increased in likelihood. For example, Sisi's regime being toppled in a populist uprising, leading to a situation where you have a Hamas-but-way-bigger regime that didn't have to exist. Or Gen Z and Gen Alpha's political influence in the US removing the diplomatic shield at the UN opening the way for sanctions, which inhibits Israel's ability to import key materials that power their defense industry. The relevant timescale is decades, where broad demographic trends dominate outcomes. Alliances of the moment and economic dominance are both fickle and change with the sands of time.
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.
> hey are, in my loosely held opinion, slightly closer to their actual revisionist objective, which is the annihilation of Israel
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.
I'm not sure Hamas has anything left to win. Gaza is in ruins. If things go on the way they are for very much longer, there won't even be left any Palestinians in Gaza, only Hamas in its tunnels. The lords of the underground... buried under the rubble. That's not a vision of victory.
Just a day or two ago there was another IDF raid on Shifa hospital.
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.
This is just the nature of urban warfare against an terrorist group that is deeply embedded in the civilian population. The tunnels add a huge level of complexity to it.
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.
Hamas and PIJ re-entered the hospital by land. The tunnels in and around the hospital have been destroyed. The IDF was able to kill and arrest the terrorists in the hospital pretty quickly, with no civilian deaths in the process. It was a major success. Sure it would be better if they never re-entered the hospital, but I think pockets of insurgency and re-emergence are probably to be expected.
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.
I think they're real objectives are to murder as many Palestinians as possible, and to occupy the north of the Gaza strip. Why? Two reasons: oil & gas, and beach-front real estate. Israel has already dished out licenses to oil producers for fields in Palestinian waters, and the new "aid" pier the US is building for them is rather suspect.
Two sources said that during the early weeks of the war they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants. Attacks on such targets were typically carried out using unguided munitions known as “dumb bombs”, the sources said, destroying entire homes and killing all their occupants.
They claim the system has 90% accuracy, so they would have to actually kill about 10% more people than these numbers, to offset the 10% error rate. So between 610500 and 814000. The whole Gaza strip had about 2 million people before the current siege.
The law of armed conflict acknowledges that civilian deaths are inevitable, and only prohibits attacks that are directed at civilians; rather than those which are directed at combatants with expected civilian casualties as collateral damage.
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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]
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]
>If you pick up a gun and start shooting the other side, you are not a civilian.
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.
> while there's a degree of subtlety and complexity when considering the legal and moral position of Israel's armed forces
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"
The aid worker one is probably the most undebatable one, but it also just happened. How to judge it depends on what happens next. Part of the assumption of war is that it involves people, some of whom are going to be bad - The expectation isn't that a country is perfect, but that it takes steps to prevent war crimes and punish the perpetrators when it happens. We don't know yet whether or not Israel will charge the people involved in the aid worker bombing.
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.
> We don't know yet whether or not Israel will charge the people involved in the aid worker bombing
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).
> "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"
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.
>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
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 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.
Dropping the gun is not sufficient to claim civilian status. Military bases are full of soldiers that may not be armed, or even awake. That lack of a gun does not suddenly grant them civilian status.
That's not what I said: I said that civilians who engage in fighting lose protection as civilians. Members of armed forces, whether currently armed or not, are legitimate targets (with certain exceptions; like the wounded, those who have surrendered etc).
> By your argument would you say that all of these are legitimate targets?
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.)
Except that Israel has no business engaging in armed conflict or "war" on a territory they occupy and control. That's the only legal issue that matters. Any armed conduct by Israel in Gaza is by international definition deemed ILLEGAL. There's no right of self defense when you're the predator.
do I read your tone right, and you suggest that would be a reason to celebrate for someone? for whom? you believe the aim of the Israeli military action is territory?
Yes, but specifically the Palestinian impact is why it’s such a terrible policy for Israel unless you assume their goal is perpetual war. Most people do not want to kill other people but each innocent killed like this is leaving behind friends, family, and neighbors who will want vengeance and some fraction of them will decide they need to resort to violence because the other mechanisms aren’t being used. Watching this happen has been incredibly depressing as you can pretty much mathematically predict a revenge period measured in decades.
This assumes they're going to leave enough people alive to even enact vengeance. If they murder everyone, than there's no need to worry about any Gazan revenge; there will be no Gazans.
It's very plausible. Keep in mind that from the get-go, the major global powers, (including Russia!) have adopted the mindset of Israel can do no wrong, and we can't criticize them at all
Israel could glass the entire Gaza strip and the reaction would be a slap on the wrist at best.
There's millions of Palestinians living in the West Bank or as refugees abroad, expelled or descended from those expelled in previous rounds of ethnic cleansing. Even if IDF go final solution on the 2 million Palestinians living in Gaza ghetto, this will not be the end of all Palestinians or the Palestinian struggle. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_diaspora
Could you please clarify what you mean by "Hamas wanted in ghe first place"? If I'm not mistaken, you're referring to the attack on the 7th of October, right? May I perhaps add that just on the days preceding that attack, Israelis killed a Palestinian in the West Bank[0]. So it was not really peaceful before that specific date.
I don't see any point in rehashing the I/P infinite regress. You end up trying to figure out where bronze age tribes lived. For the purposes of this conversation I'm going to step away from I/P and look at the strategy that I believe was used in the abstract.
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".
I agree with you. Let's not rehash this finger pointing argument. It doesn't get us anywhere.
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.
> 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.
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.
I wasn't necessarily trying to point fingers at a specific party. I wanted to better understand the parent's comment and while doing I wrote what I assumed was meant by them. I agree that to solve this issue that has been going on for many, many years we will have to go to the root cause and address that.
"Our system is 90% accurate if you don't count the 15-20 innocent people taken out for each hit". I know they're measuring the accuracy of target identification but that's laughable when used in this context.
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.
These kinds of accurate numbers of acceptably killed innocents is really hurting a specific part of my sympathy brain somehow.
"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 "
It doesn't matter if they used dumb or smart bombs to destroy the target. When their selected target entered the building then the whole building became the target by extension. Smart bomb would have equally destroyed the building. Important comparison between dumb and smart bomb is only the probability to hit the target (the building) and IDF used precise diving maneuvers with dumb bombs and avoided hitting high rises with dumb bombs, making the probabilities close. That is not the issue here.
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.
The West can stop it in a moment by imposing the same sanctions as it imposed on Russia. Or in a day, if it imposes that same sanctions that Iran or North Korea are subject to.
Instead the West keeps supplying Israel with weapons and munitions.
It's funny because your exact logic can be used to justify the attacks you're talking about. Israel has been attacking Gaza and Hamas, and occupied Gaza even pre Hamas (and always controlled Gaza's borders even with Egypt). That means that it was fully ok because it was just Palestinians using what they can for self defense.
See how batshit insane that logic is ? Remember, Israel has never stopped colonizing the west bank even after they stopped the armed struggle. So according to you, Israel deserves everything it gets in self defense.
That type of logic works well when you only apply it to the side you favor but it completely falls apart especially in this mess of a conflict
This is a typical phenomenon when a topic is divisive, and the Israel/Gaza topic is one of the most divisive.
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:
Seeing as these discussions are always insta-flagged and you need to revive them to allow for discussion, have you considered adding 'Israel' and 'Palestine to a set of keywords you need to approve to be set as flagged instead of letting automation take over?
Having a human in the loop prevents bad-faith actors from abusing the system to suppress information and discussions.
I think we probably already see the most important ones, such as the one today. If there's an article that particularly deserves having the flags turned off, people can always bring it to our attention at hn@ycombinator.com.
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.
I don't think this topic is divisive anymore. I used to be on the fence about the whole conflict despite growing up in a Muslim country and being fed propaganda. But nowadays I can't in any shape or form rationalize Israel 's actions.
As someone who sees both sides of this, and as someone who didn't understand this for some time, it's important to understand that one reason a story is likely to get flagged is because users think it's highly unlikely to lead to productive discussion. It doesn't mean it's a bad story, or even unworthy of discussion, but many types of stories seem to, pretty predictably, lead to a cesspool of comments where it's clear most folks have no desire to listen to opposing points of view.
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.
>it's highly unlikely to lead to productive discussion.
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...
flagging is voting to censor a particular view. it could have legit uses like spam or toxic comments but just as easy to censor narratives that isn't aligned or clashes with the voter's
im not sure what other tools exist other than a block button like X
There is a system in place for flagging specific comments by users.
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.
There's always Twitter/X or Reddit if that's your jam. I just think it's hard to disagree that a huge, if not primary, value people feel they get from HN is the discussion, which is probably unmatched compared to any open forum on the net, and a huge part of that is moderation and curation.
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.
If one don't want to engage, the hide button isn't too far from the flag button. It's important that people have the option to speak freely and openly about this topic, since so many places shut down any conversation that shows sympathy for Palestinians and/or doesn't paint Israel as unequivocally morally good. This is one of the reasons Israel has been able to get away with this behavior for so long.
Considering what regularly doesn't get flagged on this site related to AI, conflict, etc., this topic seems to fit in.
Discussions with lots of comments are routinely pushed down the stack. dang has commented on that a few times I think. Anyway it's not the subject, just the raw numbers of the activity.
Yeah, you'd hope that a higher level conversation about the use of technology in war, pros/cons, etc could supersede personal political beliefs about this particular conflict. We don't need people's moral judgements on who is right or wrong in this particular case but it would be neat to hear people's thoughts on utilizing information technology as a weapon of war.
I don't take any issue with people flagging a post, so long as an actual person makes the ultimate decision on whether to keep it up.
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.
Not in this instance, I assume. People flagging too much can result in shadowbanning, but perhaps the mods think that flagging posts that might host heated political-religious discussion is ok (even if they don't have such discussion, and even if they are on-topic for HN).
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.
I have emailed many time over the years. Got a response from dang every single time. Several accounts lost vouching privileges thanks to my emails, among other things — they were vouching clearly guidelines-breaking crap, I drew dang’s attention, and they were penalized. So, if you have a concern, just email.
"zero-error policy" as described here is a remarkable euphemism. You might hope that the policy is not to make any errors. In fact the policy is not to acknowledge that errors can occur!
They're great because the accountability for fuckups goes on the system, not on the people using the system. "Oops, the system had a bug" doesn't kill careers like "Oops, I made a bad call."
Such things have been around for at least a decade. It didn't start with the same kind of AI that's being talked about recently, but there is a large automated scoring component: "Targets are often chosen based on metadata."
I don't know about kill lists, but AI weapons kinda make sense.
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?
This assumes that AI based weaponry provides value. The case in point here is showing that the only value it provides is a flimsy justification for civilian casualties. We... Don't need more of that in the US, nor would it provide a "good guy" any legitimate value.
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)
It seems unlikely based on what has been revealed about the system. It seems like Lavender is a classification AI that plugs static details about a person into a NN of some sort and spits out a score of how likely they're to be involved with Hamas. Score above a certain threshold and your home becomes a target for a dumb bomb.
The World Central Kitchen attack appears to have used smart munitions (missiles from a drone) on a mobile truck.
Morally it doesn't up the ante of course, they are already well into a genocide. But optically killing westerners, especially when they are clearly doing aid and you can't throw "they terrorist" shade on it. The World Central Kitchen incident has increased the strength of the platitudes coming from other countries. But not seeing any arms or trade sanctions yet, and no "pausing of funds while we investigate" type stuff reserved for anyone supporting Gaza people.
May have been involved, but I believe in that case there was an explicit human decision made after referring to a senior. I recall somebody quoting an official to this effect.
Getting all these reports about atrocities, I wonder if the conflict in the area has grown more brutal over the decades or if this is just business as usual. I'm in my late 30s, growing up in the EU, the conflict in the region was always present. I don't remember hearing the kind of stories that come to light these days though, indiscriminate killings, food and water being targeted, aid workers being killed. I get that it's hard to know what's real and what's not and that we live in the age of information, but I'm curious how, on a high level, the conflict is developing. Does anyone got a good source that deals with that?
When the US dropped napalm indecriminately over the vietnamese jungle or absolutely leveled dresden in one bombing run or unleashed nuclear hellfire over japan, they probably killed a lot of journalists and doctors and food workers as well. Interestingly, western media did not beat itself into a frenzy over it at the time. Its easy to get cynical about it all seeing how easily narratives are manufactured and controlled to serve political ends.
> Interestingly, western media did not beat itself into a frenzy over it at the time
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.
to summarize : the level of brutality is on par with vietnam, the media are shying away like in the vietnam era, but this time there is internet that broke the blockade and forced them to report
I believe the bombing of Dresden was controversial and elicited pushback in the media, though it's not surprising that reactions may have been muted given the apocalyptic nature of the war.
The use of napalm in Vietnam triggered widespread protests.
Most of the mainstream media has historically glossed over the atrocities, but it is impossible to ignore them today because of what we see live on the scene thanks to smaller outlets having a broader reach and social media.
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.”
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...
The weaponisation of online media for manipulating the perception of global audiences about the conflict, has definitely ramped up recently. For example, the official Twitter account of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has posted videos of muslim preachers appearing to denounce lgbt culture during public service in Palestinian mosques. Hamas themselves are denying their involvement in the 2023 massacre and accusing Israel of staging the graphic footage that was disseminated. This greatly polarises the debates on social media and it’s much more common now to see people who are deeply invested emotionally in the narrative of either side.
Who was beheaded? The "40 beheaded babies" turned out to be a lie. The people burnt alive on October 7th were likely from the IDF firing tank shells at homes. Many of them turned out to be Palestinian once forensics were done. Not one of the rape claims seems to be substantiated by any physical evidence and when an Israeli journalist called all the hospitals, morgues, and trauma hotlines they found the number of reported rape victims was zero. At least here in the US the media were happy to report these lies (you know, the kind of shocking and dehumanizing lies that are always used to ramp up a genocide) and then very muted in any kind of correction.
I don't have the full context of the thread here, but it sounds to me like you're saying '9/11' was at scale x, and therefore a benchmark is established for acceptable 'repercussion cost.'
If that's what you're saying, I guess I'd flag that the 'repercussion cost' for 9/11 is still very much open to debate, and there is significant data to point towards almost every step the US took as a reaction to 9/11 being problematic, ranging from who was targeted, what the collateral impact was, and whether it actually solved any of the underlying problems.
The civilian count of October 7th was 695 people. Not that that makes it any better, but it's about a 50% increase to push it to 1000. The population of Israel is about 9.5 million. So your actual ratio is closer to 1 in 13500 or so.
If we're keeping the scales, then an October 7 situation happens in the Gaza strip every time about 170 die. I think if you look the numbers of the current and historical conflicts it might help shape perceptions.
Also, I wouldn’t go into such numbers, because if these matter, then actions of Hamas are very easily justifiable. The story is way more complex than these numbers.
They've proven a lack of interest in the hostages. They've actively refused deals that involved the return of the hostages, and repeatedly carried out operations that put the hostages in danger.
Hamas will never return hostages on its own. It needs them to stay in power as insurance against destruction by Israel. Unfortunately, that means an offensive into central Gaza camps where some of the hostages are believed to be held and also Rafah ...
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.
> How far does the AI system go… is it behind the AI decision to starve the population of Gaza?
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.
No, the point of this program seems to be to find targets for assassination, removing the human bottleneck.
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.”
Yeah, I wasn't 100% sure of using the "assassination" wording in my comment, but after thinking about it I felt it most neutral approach is to use the same wording they use in the article itself, in order to not add my own subjective opinion about this whole saga.
> 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...
> 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!”
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.
The use of AI and the authorisation to kill civilians are unrelated parts of this story. Nowhere does it mention that the AI is being used to justify killing of civilians.
Really? I guess they're just "following orders" from the AI then. What a shameful response, if Russia did this or if the roles were reversed you'd be appalled.
There are pretty clearly cases where non-combatant deaths in war are necessary -- for example if you are in a total war situation as in WWII.
People can and do argue about the morality of the Tokyo firebombings and Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki where it was largely purely civilian populations in cities that were attacked, but I think it's _fairly_ non-controversial that in a total war that industrial sites and weapons manufacturing facilities and so on are valid targets in a war situation, and they are generally staffed by non-combatants.
The rule in the geneva conventions is:
"In so far as objects are concerned, military objectives are limited to those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage."
Which encompasses quite a large category of non-combatants that are likely to be in the area of those "objects".
edit: not making any kind of judgement or statement at all about this particular situation -- just clarifying in general the rules of war involving non-combatants.
That's all well and fine, except that is very much not the situation with Israel and Palestine.
Quite the opposite. Israel has the Palestinians entirely cornered and that already for the past 76 years. They have always had the upper hand and could very easily have negotiated a reasonable peace deal. Heck, where they not racist ethnonationalist bigots they would have incorporated the Palestinians in Israel as happens in normal situations when one state decides to land grab another.
If anything it is the Palestinians, you know the victims who are entirely cornered and helpless, who should use your argument to justify civilian causalities, but you would be completely horrified if were to write that.
Yitzhak Rabin did try to negotiate a reasonable peace deal (with Arafat), and was assassinated because of it. Israel left the West Bank [mostly] alone and that's what allowed the territory to get taken over by Hamas (with some degree of popular support).
I think what Israel is doing is bad; I also happen to think that putting the Palestinians in control of Israel+Palestine (which is what integrating them into Israel would do, since they form a numeric majority) would be much worse (because at least Israeli values align closer with western values than the Palestinian ones). So there are no real good options than a tentative ceasefire and everyone on edge again.
It is reminiscent of the war on terror in Afghanistan, and I imagine the outcome will be similarly somber, and likely objectives probably won't be met.
I disagree with you. There is no justification for death.
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).
Presupposing infinite resources, there wouldn't be a justification for death per se - since there would always be a better, more humane option. The world, however, does not have infinite resources, so there is always a question of optimal allocation, which will involve questions of life and death too.
(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.
@dang Please consider that this is an important and well sourced article regarding military use of AI and machine learning and shouldn't disappear because some users find it upsetting.
I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732. If you take a look at that and the links there, and still have a question that isn't answered, I'd be happy to hear it.
There are more comments like this from him, you can find them using Algolia.
HN is not acting in bad faith whatsoever.
This story in particular “qualifies” for what would be interesting to HN readers while taking into account the sensitivity of the subject.
I fully expect the discussion to be allowed and the flag lifted, but HN mod team is very small and it might take a while - it quite literally always does.
Agreed. Also take into account how this and a few mirror discussions are rapidly degrading into “x are bad” political discussions which are just not that intere here.
People believing admins when they claim moderation and censorship is out of their hands and the result of a faulty system they have no control over, has to take the cake for this years distortion of reality.
Fact is very specific topics are routinely being suppressed systematically.
> I know the following question sounds absurd, but they say there’s no such thing as a silly question…
People say a lot of things.
Some questions are ill-posed; some bake-in false assumptions.
What you do _after_ you concoct a question is important. Is it worth our time answering?
> Does the AI use regular power to run, or does it run on the tears and blood of combatant 3 year old children - I mean terrorists?
From where I sit, the question above appears to be driven mostly by rhetoric or confusion. I'm interested in reasoning, evidence, and philosophy. I don't see much of that in the question above. There are better questions, such as:
To what degree does a particular AI system have values? To what degree are these values aligned with people's values? And which people are we talking about? How are the values of many people aggregated? And how do we know with confidence that this is so?
If you believe your question is worth pursuing, then do so. From where I sit, it was ill-posed at best, most likely just heated rhetoric, and maybe even pure confusion. But I was willing to spend some time in the hopes of pointing you in a better* direction.
You can burn tremendous time on poorly-framed questions, but why do that? Perhaps you don't want to answer the question, though, because you didn't ask it. You get to ask questions of us, but don't reply to follow-up questions that push back on your point of view?
* Subjectively better, of course, from my point of view. But not just some wing-nut point of view. What I'm saying is aligned with many (if not most) deep thinkers you'll come across. In short, if you ask poorly-framed questions, you'll get nonsense out the other end.
P.S. Your profile says "I’m too honest. Deal with it." which invites reciprocity.
>The HN crowd is overly enthusiastic to see Jews die, if anything.
I wouldn't be so quick to say that. I would guess that 99.99999% of us at a bare minimum don't want to see any innocent people die, regardless of ethnicity, religious creed, nationality, etc. In fact, I'd wager my life savings and my company on the guess that most rational adults don't want to see innocent people die regardless of where in the world they are. HN is no different.
Israel is not 100% scot-free and innocent here, and that needs to be stressed. I don't condone Hamas's behavior at all (it's abhorrent), nor do I condone bombing a clearly-marked vehicle delivering humanitarian aid (also abhorrent).
Also, Israel =! all jewish people world wide. You'll find some of Israel's largest criticisms come from non-Israeli Jews.
> Well, this post is surely going to get removed because of flaming in comments
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.
It’s the most important thing going on in the world. And geeks shouldn’t be thought of as people who will sit and think how cool the death machine AI that Israel has developed which chooses how and when 30K children die… geeks make this tech, profitise from it, and lurk about HN and when it comes to facing the reality of their creations they want to close the conversation down, flag comments, and evade the hurty real world reality of it. Sad. And pathetic. I’m not saying you are personally.
> They tend to remove posts causing flame in comments
It can be fun to consider the precise and comprehensive truth value of such statements (or, the very nature of "reality" for extra fun) using strict, set theory based non-binary logic.
It can also be not fun. Or sometimes even dangerous.
Civilized conversation is limited by the emotional stability of those having it.
People have it so easy now they've grown up and spent their entire lives in total comfort and without even the slightest hint of adversarial interaction. So when they encounter it, they overreact and panic at the slightest bit of scrutiny rather than behave like reasonable adults.
I agree with you, this conversations should be had. But unfortunately a small, but comitted, minority can (and often will) turn the comments on sensitive topics into a toxic cesspool.
Why not just treat it as a way for undesirable guests to reveal themselves? Sounds like HN never wanted these guests and doesn't have the administrative attention to be watching all the time.
> 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.
In the case of Al Qaeda, that might actually have been true? I don't think you can really compare Hamas to Al Qaeda; almost everything meaningful is different.
That doesn't mention Al Qaeda? It just talks about drone strikes against ISIS, which is yet again quite a different organisation than Al Qaeda and Hamas.
What is your point even? All I said is that you can't compare Al Qaeda and Hamas, and how they operate, and how to combat them. I never said that US drone strikes were/are 100% perfect, or even that I liked the entire programme.
My point is "if they're near a target they're a target" is an insane standard to use for these sorts of strikes, and the article this entire HN discussion is about makes it pretty clear such a standard is in use in Gaza right now.
> 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.”
here's another story today from France24 about the over-reliance on AI driven targetting may have been responsible for the airstrike on April 1st 2024 that killed seven aid workers in Gaza [0]
As someone working in the AI field, I find this use of AI truly terrifying. Today it may be used to target Hamas and accept a relatively large number of civilian deaths as permissible collateral damage, but nothing guarantees that it won't be exported and used somewhere else. On top of that, I don't think anything is done to alleviate biases in the data (if you're used to target people from a certain group then your AI system will still target people from that group) or validate the predictions after a "target" is bombed. I wish there was more regulations for these use cases. Too bad the EU AI Act doesn't address military uses at all.
I think anyone that works in the AI field is going to really need to have their head on straight to even be able to just emotionally deal with things like this and who knows what else to come.
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.
Given we don’t know what it’s using to identify people we don’t really know any biases. “Holding a military weapon” probably doesn’t contain a whole lot of bias (of course there is misidentification).
> 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.
Thank you for repeating what I said. If these features are: “carrying weapon” or “visiting known Hamas military site” - then the risk of unintended bias is lower.
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?
Looking at this from a machine learning perspective, the risk of biases is even higher in these cases because of issues with data drift (Members could change sites, they could start dressing differently, etc.) and imbalances in the dataset (A lot fewer Hamams members than civilians in Gaza).
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.
> 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 [...]
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.
Nothing a few rounds of war crimes trials, complete with gallows, in the Hague won't sort out, especially if the court decided (oh I can dream) that the execs and major investors of the company that implemented the system are culpable.
Given their system is in the decision tree for operations any war crime committed during the course of said operations should apply. Did you want an abridged list of likely candidates? Because I just finished spending an hour poring over ICC Article 8 and the Geneva Conventions and I have copypasta on hand ready to go.
I asked for a single, strongest form of your argument. That means an event and a law. You provided a reference to the law. This sounds like you don’t have an argument, just the most generic of sources.
Really? Because from where I'm sitting it sounds like you're trying to avoid the reading assignment. You don't wanna do your homework that's your business but don't expect me to let you crib my notes. Having directly addressed your nuisance attempt at shifting the focus of conversation, let me bluntly remind you the original point was 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 their product helped enable. If you're looking to pick a fight over whether the Israeli army's evergreen struggle with correctly identifying aid convoys, UN aid warehouses, and bog standard emergency response vehicles (all explicitly protected under international law) constitutes a war crime take that nonsense to Facebook or X.
> where I'm sitting it sounds like you're trying to avoid the reading assignment
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.
Article 8 is about giving the ICC jurisdiction over prosecuting war crimes and then it goes on to provide a list. I'm not filing a brief over here so again dispense with the pedantry. To the best of my knowledge Lavender hasn't been cited in anything yet, that would take a fairly comprehensive investigation, thus the IF featuring very prominently.
> I'm not filing a brief over here so again dispense with the pedantry
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.
I mean at the end of the day an AI being rubber stamped or a human being rubber stamping "minor intel" for a drone strike its still bullshit.
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.
As a backer on the original Oculus kickstarter, I have such a sinking feeling in my stomach every time this comes up. My money went to enable Luckey to achieve this and I hate myself for it.
Genocide seems like a bit a stretch, but it is hard to tell. I would like to think that Israel is incapable of genocide, but at the very least it's clear they don't mind killing thousands of innocent people. Israel has done some truly inexcusable, horrific things.
I do sympathize with Israel. Israel is surrounded by countries that would like to see it wiped off of the map. Hamas has been attacking Israel from Palestinian territory for two decades. I'm glad that Israel exists and that the Jewish people have a home.
I'm afraid there doesn't seem to be a right answer, but Israel could at least show that it values human life.
> Israel is surrounded by countries that would like to see it wiped off of the map
Israel is occupying territories from 3 countries of those. Killing thousands. Initiated attacks in the past to conquer lands from another one (Egypt Sinai) and still occupying Palestinian lands (even if count 1967 borders) where there are 800k settlers/colonizers in west bank alone. And regularly bomb and kill civilians in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. It has WMD (remember the lie that Iraq get invaded under this claim because that is dangerous for the region)
Painting the problem on the other sides while the aggressor is very obvious is a dishonest take at best.
If you want your neighbors to even recognize and sympathize with your cause then you don't kill their children and take their lands. And then claim self-defense.
Most of isreali society origins are from Europe. They are victims of Europe refusing and kicking them outside. That doesn't make them victims in general.
The argument that the lands can be given back if there is a peace and recognition is bullshit. Israel have clear intend in annexation and the US is fine ans even recognized Golan heights as Israeli land. They settle their people in the occupying land. There is even companies and cabinet members discussing building new settlements in gaza after ethnically cleansing the Palestinians.
> Painting the problem on the other sides while the aggressor is very obvious is a dishonest take at best.
You're right. Israel isn't blameless; I did gloss over history although that wasn't really my intention. It has been the aggressor in the past.
Overall, I feel that Israel has to be aggressive just to survive in the environment. I'm not condoning what's going on today, but it is unfair to act like Israel has some _clearly_ better or "right" choice that they're just ignoring.
> If you want your neighbors to even recognize and sympathize with your cause then you don't kill their children and take their lands. And then claim self-defense.
There is not a world where Israel could rest without fear of being attacked. The entire region would have to change drastically.
> but it is unfair to act like Israel has some _clearly_ better or "right" choice that they're just ignoring
Let me first state I'm confused by that statement. I don't feel safe so that I will not only treat the people I live with them in the same house bad and kill them. I will take lands from my neighbors and kill some of them too. Likewise, I will have a right wing group in my house who want the death of all my neighborhood ethnicity [1]. And that's because of them forcing me to do that because otherwise I don't feel safe. Maybe you can do better.
If you want them to accept you then start by granting indigenous people their own land and don't build new settlements on their lands (800k in west bank alone) and share it with them (1967 international recognized borders) and return the Syrian and Lebanese lands. You try to play nice with them and advocate for your cause, you suffered in Europe, came as refugee and some of us living here with you (indigenous people) for centuries, and we can do it again. You stop bombing your neighbors, for sure. Furthermore, you don't elect right wing government who call for genocide of Palestinians (remember the motto of likud "from the river to the sea" ?)
> There is not a world where Israel could rest without fear of being attacked. The entire region would have to change drastically.
Yes, and of course this change will be sparked by killing tens of thousands and starving millions to death, occupying lands from most of the neighbors and build new settlements on them. Yes, that is very good and efficient way to make peace.
And what about the other side, did you stop to think from their preservice ? Why don't you think that they have the right to their lands and peaceful life without a nuclear-powered army occupying their lands ?
This is not a war. No matter how many times you use the word war it still doesn't make it true. Herding people and indiscriminately killing the same people is not a product of war.
There is also the part about proportional response which is glossed over with "they would do this to us", but forgetting we are doing this to them right now.
If you define genocide as collateral damage every defensive war would be classified as genocide. The Allies killed 65000 French civilians when liberating France from the Nazis. Are Americans guilty of genocide for liberating France?
Continuously throw enough plot twists and general stimulation at people and they'll never have the time to consider whether they're living in a simulation.
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.
Is the same system used to direct bombing in Lebanon against Hezbollah?
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 think Israel has done a much better job over there in terms of minimizing civilian casualties.
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.
Reporting from al-Habbariyeh, Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr said young men were killed in the Israeli strikes that “totally destroyed” the emergency health centre.
...
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.”
The capacity for computers to make errors has now far exceeded that of tequila and handguns.
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.
A much more concise list could be made of members of Congress that don't want to send money towards offensive weapons in Israel.
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.
The name of Lavender makes this so surreal to me for some reason. I'm of the opinion that algorithms shouldn't determine who lives and dies, but it's so common even outside of war.
The code names for secret operations can be dead on or funny at times. I remember a few being emoji’s. It’s only a matter of time until USA or other allied countries secrets are released for using AI enhanced information.
How do you think they process millions of call records, intercepted messages, sim swaps, etc?
I think the algorithm, in this case, makes a suggestion and then a human evaluates it. The article claims they've only looked at the sex of the target (kill if male) but also claims 90% effectiveness. I'm curious if 90% is a good number or not? War will always have collateral damages but if technology can help limit that beyond what only a human could do then I'd say it's a net positive. I think the massive efficiencies the algorithm brings to picking targets is a bit frightening (nowhere to run or hide now) but there's no real turning back.
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.
>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
"A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE
THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION"
it's sort of irrelevant if some shitty computer system is killing people - the people who need to be arrested are the people who allowed the shitty computer system to do that. we obviously cannot allow "oh, not my fault I chose to allow a computer to kill people" to be an excuse or a defence for murder or manslaughter or ... anything.
I don’t want to talk about the war — mostly, I don’t know about the history enough to discuss it. But I want to talk about the use of technology with the intention to exterminate life. AI shows great promises to humanity, but can also extinguish it if misused.
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.
The sad and simple truth (trying to not sound political, but it's pretty damned hard given the context) is that it seems that not so long ago, lists and very flimsy justifications were at the root of a lot of pain and suffering for the very people perpetrating the same.
Apart from all the horribleness and knowingly mudering civilians the idea of a 9to5 soldier that performs military activity then goes home to his family, well within range of weapons and intelligence of the enemy and expecting he and his family will be safe there while he sleeps is a bit insane. I can't imagine any army hellbent on winning fast would pass up on that opportunity.
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.
Yes. That's terrible. It also proves that they are not interested in the accuracy of their precious military software. They can't make it more accurate without feedback. So the accurancy is not the goal. The goal is to have an excuse for the killing.
Monstrous. From some of the quotes alone, let alone the numbers, it's clear that Palestinian lives matter about as much to the Israeli government as they do to the machines. If this is the future of warfare we've taken a dark new path.
Actually, The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots fired its campaign manager Ousman Noor as a result of him advocating against the IDF's killings in Gaza. The Campaign initially denied that it was over his Gaza advocacy, but eventually admitted that it was because of him speaking to diplomats which he met through the Campaign. Many members of the campaign support the IDF's arguable genocide, despite how surprising that might be.
I really want to support this, but the website is pretty bad. Blinding colors, poor and sparse information, and a links to shop/donate without a notion as to what or who the org is.
Given how gang-flagging as a form of censorship became prevalent here on HN I think they should consider removing flagging functionality for submissions entirely.
It should of course stay for comments but posts typically get flagged for political reasons and nothing else.
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.
this means they are actually targeting the children phones at night presupposing their father is in their proximity. they are doing this because Hamas operatives probably don't take their phones to their houses.
It is interesting to see how cell phone data was used as features and inputs to the model (along with other surveilance data). And how the models parameters were adjusted to achieve high leves of correlation. Human behavior regarding sharing cell phones apeared to create a false postive bias. Its too late now but the first thing the entire Palestinian population should have done was to smash all thier phones and go completely dark.
Next step is to automate this entire chain. Not far away from some military deploying fully autonomous identify, target & kill systems now. The pieces are all in place. Human rights and oversight are not the first priority in all militaries.
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.
Accepting technological barbarism is a choice. Among engineers there should be a broad refusal to work on such systems and a blacklist for those who do.
Not trying to be flippant, I'm genuinely curious. If everyone was as honorable as you and decided to stop working for the military industrial complex - do you think China and Russia would just sit back and say "That's cool - we didn't want Americas land/resources/overseas territories anyway" ?
This is like a thief saying that they steal something because otherwise another thief would steal it. What the parent is suggesting is that engineers around the world should agree to not make such systems similar to how doctors have the hippocratic oath. It may seem naive and can probably never prevent such systems from being built but I think it's worth a try. We have to collectively agree on systems we should not build.
If you are going to use a thief analogy at least make it accurate. Having a moral objection to defense is like objecting to doors and locks (defense against thieves) and so not only are you going to not work on anything lock related you are going to openly advocate no one else work on them or manufacture them as well, leaving us all at risk.
It sure would be nice if this industry had the tiniest shred of collective consciousness and realized our capacity to exert some level of control over what gets built and what doesn't.
I took computer ethics 101 about 20 years ago (that was the only ethics class on my math/cs degree plans). I learned that the ethical thing to do when a system kills unintentionally/accidentally, you stop it and redesign from the ground up from first principles evolved beyond the principles used to design the killing version.
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.
No, the "other option" is to realize that keeping people in what is effectively little more than a concentration camp with no hope of perspective or solution can only end in violence. Especially if you also start shooting the peaceful protestors like they did a few years ago. And then the government goes in to bed with the most extreme of extreme religious Zionists who quite literally support ethnic cleansing and murder.
That is not a justification or a moral judgement, it's just a fact that this will happen. This is what has always happened throughout history. To deny it is to deny reality.
Something Oct-7 shaped was bound to happen. You can't kick people in the face for 50 years, give no perspective for improvement, kick them harder in the face when they object, and expect all of them to forever turn the other cheek and have carefully nuanced opinions on the matter. That's just not how people work.
Current actions are not just killing Palestinians, it's also killing (future) Israeli. A new Oct-7 shaped event is bound to happen again if the current course is followed.
None of this is rocket science. None of this is a novel insight. People have been saying this for decades (have we forgotten the previous events like the intifada, the wide-spread protests 5 years ago, etc. etc.)? Some people were seemingly born on the morning of Oct 7 or something.
Egypt and Hamas have a rather adversarial relationship, But let's not pretend Israel and Egypt are anywhere near equivalent.
And Israel controls much of the comings and goings of the Rafah crossing, if that's what you're referring to. Egypt doesn't want any trouble with Israel, doesn't really like Hamas, and is also not really looking forward to a mass exodus of impoverished Palestinians as it's already a poor and extremely densely populated country with its own problems.
Could Egypt do better? I suppose. But it's nowhere near equivalent. Egypt is in a near-impossible position.
That isn't that calculus that a moral people run. We operate in the present, with the tools we have now with compassion. Unless you are the people working on these AI targeting tools, how do you know what they understand.
Not to be combative with the response here, but the density of destruction in Gaza is on par with the likes of Dresden. It's not really exaggeration to say that Gaza is one of the most bombed places since Vietnam, and you don't have to take anyone's word for it. You can go to companies like Maxor and purchase satellite images on the open market and see for yourself.
Hamas’s Oct 7th attack also had a 2:1 civilian to soldier death ratio. Yet the author of that article credits the IDF for setting a new, humane standard.
It’s directly relevant to the linked article in the comment I was responding to, which uses the IDFs reported Palestinian civilian to soldier death ratio to claim that Israel’s military actions are uniquely humane. That conclusion is challenged by a showing that Hamas’s achieved Israeli civilian:soldier death ratio.
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.
Not everyone sees the world as you do. Given this article and other information I know about this system, I would be honoured to work on it and take a significant pay cut, as it actively makes the world a better and safer place.
I don't understand why you consider this trolling. This is my sincere position and the best intellectually honest argument I could use in this argument which I use myself when I put this position to test of doubt.
I am reminded of Poindexter's[1] total information awareness project, which I thought at the time too interesting for it to wholly disappear. I must admit this knowledge influenced one or two of my own blog postings on what I call "Strategic Software"[2].
So much technological power, and still no approach to prevent violence and imprison aggressors and murderers instead of killing them
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
You're right. Hamas and Israel are very similar, and basically at the same level of criminal behavior. But I don't think that was the point you wanted to make. I guess for you it's more humane to just bomb people but it turns out that the people who die in Gaza are just as human as those who died in October 7. It's hard to believe for Israelis since they have been killing thousands of Palestinians for decades now, but their lives aren't inherently worth less than those of Israelis.
I don't like anything about this war, but in a way, I think concerns of AI in warfare are, at this stage, overblown. I'm more concerned about the humans doing the shooting.
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?
I like this point, and I do think you're rightly pointing out that the issue is that selection of targets may be done badly, not that AI specifically is in the loop. With that said, I think an important detail you're overlooking is the frictionless-ness of this process. That quote people are throwing around about something like "efficiently producing the largest volume of human targets" gets to this point pretty directly I think. The problem is not just that the evidence might be flimsy, it's also that it's extremely easy to generate massive lists of targets.
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 agree making something bad easier is bad too. But does AI make the bad thing easier here?
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.
The accuracy point is a provocative and interesting question. I'm used to it in the context of ex. medical imaging or autonomous vehicles. In the context of picking bomb targets (where even a "positive" classification is kind of ambiguous [0]) I think it's probably above my pay-grade, so I'm going to set it aside.
> 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.
How does this system get the input? Are Palestinians using IDF tapped cell towers? Or is it possible to use roaming towers for this? Is e.g. Google or Facebook involved on a mobile OS or app level? Maybe backdoors local to the area?
It seems like the whole cell phone infrastructure need to be torn down.
That does not explain how the IDF know that the victims are at home. You'd more or less need security cameras for that.
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.
Hmm, I wonder if that is related to why the use of 3G barely just rolled out and why they still aren't allowed to have 4G. Maybe that would require an upgrade of Stringray-like equipment?
That is concerning even if you don't have some lunatics trying to kill you right now.
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 ?
> Drones, targeted missiles and now AI allow you to be ruthlessly efficient in killing an enemy
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.
> 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
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.
It's not about the tech, it's about how humans use it. In this case, the IDF seems to be using tech to commit mass murder of civilians. The issue is the mass murder, not the tech.
>While humans select these features at first, the commander continues, over time the machine will come to identify features on its own. This, he says, can enable militaries to create “tens of thousands of targets,”
So overfitting or hallucinations as a feature. Scary.
"This will get flagged to death in minutes as what happens to all mentions of israel atrocities here" (now dead)
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.
One day, totally of my own accord, I added something like 1,200 new targets to the [tracking] system, because the number of attacks [we were conducting] decreased,” the source said.
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
+972 magazine is EXTREMELY anti-Israel and anti-semitic, so this article is written through the lens of despising Israel and Jews. Here are some of their other article titles, which you can find on their home page:
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.
Actually they are. The Jewish people IS Israel and Israel is the Jewish people. To loath Israel is to loath Jews, which is why you see violent pro-Hamas protests at synagogues around the world now. It is understood and ubiquitously accepted that the enemy of "anti-Zionists" are all Jews, and yes, many anti-Zionists are Jews themselves.
Israel is a state and Jewish people are an ethnicity/religion. It is nonsensical to suggest that they are synonymous — what other country in the world can you say that a country is identical to its people? If I criticise the Chinese Communist Party I’m not guilty of Sinophobia, why is Israel any different?
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.
That could not be further from the truth. Israel and the Jewish people are one and the same. Israel is founded on Jewish principles, adheres to Jewish laws, enables the Jewish people to fulfill their national destiny, and represents every Jew on earth. You cannot separate the two.
> 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.
Well you are logically (and biblically) consistent which I appreciate. But I think many if not most Jews today would take a huge issue being tied to Israel’s actions, bad or good. Especially those who don’t live there or are even against the state. Yours is a very religious opinion and I think the large number of atheistic or secular Jews in the West would completely disagree. I completely understand it from a religious perspective though.
Yes. We have very anti-Israel intelligence officers who are politically placed on the far left. Just because you're Israeli doesnt mean that you're pro Israel. Same for the IDF (which Im a soldier in). Just by speaking to a heavily biased paper like 972 they show their own bias against the country. I serve with several soldiers who are more supportive of the Palestinians than their own country.
Interesting. I would imagine it's counter productive to have conscription of left leaning Israelis who don't support the war in Gaza, no? Why would these people have such important jobs within the military if they are so anti-Israel?
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.
Excellent questions. I'm not saying that the story isn't technically true. I'm saying that because of the obvious bias of +972, that their narative is one-sided and dangerous. There are the facts, and then there is the interpretation of the facts, both of which appear in the article. I would prefer to read the story from a more even-handed paper.
> 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.
I appreciate your input, I don't necessarily believe that it's all the fault of a few "left-wing" personnel. I have a lot of Israeli friends who are conservative like me, and I've never heard this. Even from guys who are IDF careerists.
from what i understand, there appears to be little to no oversight on how these models are trained and evaluated.
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.
Unfortunately, Big Tech has been very effective in spreading a message that helps Israel maintain the plausible deniability that comes from a system like Lavender.
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.
“But when it comes to a junior militant, you don’t want to invest manpower and time in it,” he said. “In war, there is no time to incriminate every target. So you’re willing to take the margin of error of using artificial intelligence, risking collateral damage and civilians dying, and risking attacking by mistake, and to live with it.”
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.
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.
> I’m unsure why the UN + Arab Nations don’t take control of the situation, get rid of Hamas
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).
Using the latest advances in technology and computing to plan and execute an ethnic cleansing and genocide? Sounds familiar? If not, check "IBM and the Holocaust".
So an article by an organization that is pro-palestinian (“working to oppose occupation and apartheid”) publishes a story relying on multiple anonymous sources - Is there any reason we shouldn’t consider this propaganda? has this magazine ever published a story that goes against their preferred narrative?
… 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. …
Or to do away with the concept of starting and stopping wars altogether. Just constant AI based justifications for killing.
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.
Had a minor panic; I got to a final stage of an interview for a company called "Lavender AI". They were doing email automation stuff, but seeing the noun "Lavender" and "AI" in combination with "bombing" made me think that they might have been part of something horrible.
ETA:
I wonder if this is going to ruin their SEO...it might be worth a rebrand.
In Portuguese, the word for lavender, "lavanda", shares roots with the verb to wash, "lavar". It comes from Latin, and it's due to the blue lavender flowers being used in clothes washing in the past. So I think naming the system Lavender is a cruel joke, and betrays its true purpose. Laundering or whitewashing the killing of civilians, providing cover by automating plausible excuse-making. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavandula
Sure. They'll do it by using seemingly neutral language to mask reality, like "a world leader in fast delivery uses our software to automate its prospects generation and evaluation".
> The following investigation is organized according to the six chronological stages of the Israeli army’s highly automated target production in the early weeks of the Gaza war. First, we explain the Lavender machine itself, which marked tens of thousands of Palestinians using AI. Second, we reveal the “Where’s Daddy?” system, which tracked these targets and signaled to the army when they entered their family homes. Third, we describe how “dumb” bombs were chosen to strike these homes.
> 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
Probably going to be flame city in this thread, but I think it’s worth asking: is it possible that even with collateral damage (killing women and children because of hallucinations) that AI based killing technology is actually more ethical and safer than warfare that doesn’t use AI. But AI is really just another name for math, so maybe it’s not a useful conversation. Militaries use advanced tech and that’s nothing new.
This is a bizarre take. I've seen it multiple times, in multiple threads now. Somehow your only options are "kill women and children" in large amounts or carpet bomb. I feel like there are dozens, if not hundreds of other options if anyone gave a damn.
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.
In thinking through my response (as rational people do), I think I was a bit too inflammatory. I still agree with myself in principle but it's not quite fair to label people who want to live while doing their job as cowards. It's one of those two wrongs don't make a right. The innocents deserve to live, as do the warfighters. Being a warfighter (conscription aside) is a choice though - being 'collateral' is not. It would be great if those with the power to take a life put even this much thought into it.
> AI based killing technology is actually more ethical and safer than warfare that doesn’t use AI
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.
The people mentioned in the article say that they spent about 20 seconds on each target and basically just rubber stamped them. In that case, I don't think people are ultimately making the decisions in a traditional sense.
Netanyahu has always been saying that they will kill every single last Hamas member, no matter the cost.
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.
I think that depends on what the alternative is. It seems to me that the problem is that there's no way for Israel to wipe out Hamas without massive collateral damage. However, instead of giving up on wiping out Hamas, they just decided that they are OK with the collateral damage.
I think the concern is that the AI is making life or death judgements against people. Some may of course be lawful combatants under the rules that govern such things, but the fact that an AI is drawing these conclusions that humans act on is the shocking part.
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.
We need to consider what are the other options in that situation, my thinking is that due to Hamas being fully embedded in the civilian population, the only other "reasonable" method is to carpet bomb... After reading the article I much prefer the AI method.
Both of these options are war crimes. I think only talking about these two options presents a false dichotomy. There are many more options that could have been considered. For example, Israel could have accepted the hostage swap and then picked Hamas operatives slowly but surely given their superior military and intelligence. Israel however prefered killing lots of civilians as "collateral damage" in order to kill a few Hamas operatives and they didn't even manage to rescue hostages. The crime lies in the blatant disregard for civilian life in Gaza.
No the AI was the scapegoat for IDF deciding to "target" low-level enemies, then bombing them with bunker-buster 2000lb bombs that leveled entire buildings and city blocks around those targets.
The AI did something, but the IDF used it to justify effectively committing a genocide.
Any human being would not accept this. If it is happening to Palestinian people, it will happen to any other country in the world. Israel is committing genocide in front of the world. 50 years from now, some people will be sorry while committing another genocide.
be ready to be targeted by AI, from another state, within another war
what prevents Lavender from being deployed in EU or US for targeting Hamas operatives abroad ? People would get assassinated randomly and nobody would know why
Israel can freely bomb the shit out of Gaza as much as they want because it's "other" people's blocks and homes being destroyed. Pretty sure the US blanket protection of Israeli war crimes would go away if apartment buildings in Philly started to get leveled as well.
What was the code name for the AI that slaughtered 1200 Israelis and took hundreds hostage? What kind of decision making went into Hamas raping dozens of women? What kind of AI chose targets in Israel to rocket? One thing's for certain, humans no matter how "enlightened" can only take so much before they go absolutely postal. "Humanity" and "rules of war" go right out the window when humans are pushed too far. It was going on before this war and will go on afterwards. What, now that we have "precise" weapons, an all-out war of one country vs another will adhear to some kind of code of ethics? Give me a break. Dresdin bombings, Hiroshima, Nanking, etc etc civilians will ALWAYS get slaughtered 1000 to one in an all-out war.
Automation of target selection is dangerous and bring ethical concerns but it isn't inherently worse than conventional methods and the killing of civilians (collateral damage) isn't new. I'd like to see how Israeli-Hamas war compares with other recent wars, specially the Russo-Ukrainian. Is this new process really worse, does it lead to more civilians death per legitimate target?
972mag is a left-wing media and what they say should be viewed with skepticism because they follow a pro-Palestine narrative.
Given israel's well-documented history and proclivity to commit genocides against the innocent (ironic given what happened in ww2), why is this time in particular so egregious? I don't get it. Poor AI accuracy is an accepted reality not just in civilian systems.
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.
It’s slightly more complicated a.) looks like male b.) lives here c.) send unguided munition if less than 15 or 100 other non targets depending upon value of target.
I'm probably pro-isreal because I'm a realpolitik American that wants America's best interest. (But I'm not strong either way)
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 don't get deleted on HN, except on rare occasions when the author asks us to delete something (and usually then only if they didn't get replies).
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.
I'm a realpolitik American that wants America's best interest, which is why I 100% oppose Israel's war. Israel has spent decades playing us for fools, disregarding all our concerns and making the world hate us while taking billions of our money. Here is how Netanyahu talks about us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW8TxOwYte0
In another post, my comment about Act.IL and Hasbara Fellowships were not only mass downvoted, but after being killed the commenter indicated this was their intention and wished me a nice day. Felt creepy. Dang brought it back up, to his great credit.
It is the promised land of the Bible (Torah), where there used to be The Temple to THE God. As for all the details arising from that, that's the realpolitik.
There are two dimensions of horror here: One is that we as a tech community are building systems that are able to automatically kill human beings. It’s not only this system. I‘ve seen images of drones with sniper guns shooting everyone moving: Kids, women, innocent men. Drones flying constantly humming above the heads of Palestinians, always observing them. The feeling that death can come anytime. What a f-ing nightmare. Can we in the west even imagine what life that is?
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?
To answer your question - however you feel about Israel, if you live in the west, it is absolutely not in your best interest to have Russia or China be buddies with Israel, which either would very gladly be.
I am more curious about the “compute” of an AI system like this. It must be extremely complicated to do real-time video feed auditing and classification of targets, etc.
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.
This article tries to hint that Israel is doing a genocide at Gaza, which is not true.
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.
I believe it's more a reference to the allowed civilian casualty rate. If they're allowed to kill 10 or more civilians per bombing of a suspected target, then even if they're 100% accurate in targeting their suspects, 90%+ of the people killed will be civilians.
How do people that work on AI reconcile the fact that the product they're working on is going to be used to kill thousands of people with no recourse?
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?
> “This is unparalleled, in my memory,” said one intelligence officer who used Lavender, adding that they had more faith in a “statistical mechanism” than a grieving soldier. “Everyone there, including me, lost people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”
Red flag for me is the part where they say it was left for human to decide if AI generated correct target or false positive based on voice recognition performed by human:
(...) 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 (...)
...sounds fake as shit. Any dumb system can make male/female decision automatically, no fucking way human needs to verify it by listening to recordings while sohphisticated AI system is involved in filtering.
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.
I can't read the news because it's so upsetting to watch the world allow a naked genocide, or discuss it with my family. The 7 Nov terrorist attack was disgusting, and since then Israel has proved to the entire world, beyond anyone's remaining doubt,that they are a disgusting nation.
So, it's a sociopathic AI, I guess, as it kills predominantely children, women, and elderly. Great job, Israel! The king has no clothes - the whole world now nows that Israel is a terrorist and apartheid state!
The world has been at a perpetual war for forever! That is actually quite interesting in of itself.
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.
Judged by number of war-related deaths per capita, we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. The last major conflict was the Second Congo War in the ‘90s, which killed around 5.4 million people and involved a bunch of African nations. If you want to talk about scary wars, try reading about that one.
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.
I don’t see magnitude of mortality as necessarily a good indicator for the prevalence of violence or “peace”.
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.
Israel's evil keeps taking me by surprise. I guess when people go down the path of dehumanization there are truly no limits to what they are ready to do.
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.
It's been pretty clear to me for a while now that Israel's long term plan for the Palestinians is to expel them all. Starvation isnt a requirement for that, but it is probably the path of least resistance. I will say that its happening a lot faster than I expected though, Israel definitely taking advantage of the situation here.
I'm in the camp that thinks the two-state solution is dead.. which means we are left with an eventual one state solution. Which means they are killing their own future voters.
Im not saying Israel is evil. Id come to the same conclusion in their shoes, absolutely a shitty situation. Theyre probably right that they will never be able to live safely next to palestinians. That doesnt mean I will go along as they oppress the Palestinians though.
Actually they are very happy to live with their Arab neighbors, and even invite them into their homes and lives.
You can find plenty of pro Palestinian speeches and sentiments from those who chose to live in the South, who were then murdered by the people they supported.
Many (most?) of those who committed the attacks on Oct. 7 were working in Israeli houses and factories, and they proceeded to kill their employers and co-workers.
Unfortunately, the news is selectively reported, and nonsense from Hamas is reported as truths, and there is a HEAVY slant against Israel. But no need to parrot stuff like this which is openly against the facts.
> And then you have countries like Germany where you get thrown in jail for being upset at Israel.
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]
[176]: "On Wednesday, Germany's capital Berlin banned a pro-Palestinian rally due to several previous demos spreading antisemitic hatred."
[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.
> But what is even sadder is that the supposedly morally superior western world is entirely bribed and blackmailed to stand behind Israel.
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.
There is something like a generational divide going on here. Much of the older generation remembers the wider Israeli-Arab conflict (ongoing since 1948, and arguably even decades before that) as "Israel's neighbors repeatedly invade it to try to wipe it off the map." But the last such war was 1973; even the Second Intifada ended in 2005. For the younger generation, the conflict is largely "Israel repeatedly invades its neighbors to tamp down on terrorism." In other words, Israel has largely shifted from being the aggressee to the aggressor in the conflict, and sympathy naturally tends to lie with the aggressee.
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.
That’s not true. Within a short time of forming, all the surrounding nations attacked Israel to ensure they wouldn’t exist there. Israel’s opponents regularly targeted civilians with indiscriminate bombings since that’s what their morals produce. They planned to keep doing that over time, too. Keep that in mind when interpreting everything else.
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?
Not sure these three links show that "supposedly morally superior western world is entirely bribed and blackmailed". Especially on the "entirely" and "blackmail" parts.
> hm, and how do you feel about Qatar sponsoring higher education in the US?
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.
Surely if Israel is bribing in one direction and Qatar is bribing in the other direction, someone is not getting their money's worth? That is, the final result is either that the "western world is entirely bribed and blackmailed to stand behind Israel" or that they don't stand behind Israel.
I do not believe that “Jews as a collective” are “bribing and blackmailing the whole Western world.”
I do believe that American lobbying groups—including but not limited to those that support Israel—use money as a tool to influence American politics in a manner akin to bribery, including in the few examples I linked about AIPAC.
Your casual conflation “Israel (Jews)”—as if the two were a single group with congruent interests—is misleading, dangerous, and antisemitic. Not all Jews are Israeli, and not all Jews are pro-Israel.
There are still millions of Palestinians left to kill
After that there will be the surrounding countries to deal with. Who is going to die to fight these? Americans? After Afghanistan you expect them to come to the rescue forever?
I think the entire situation is creating more Hamas.
You think some starving Palestinian kid whose just seen his family (and now, the person supplying aid in the form of food) blown into a thousand pieces is going to just drop all pretenses and love Israel?
Israel has been trying to eradicate Palestinian terror organisations with bullets for about 75 years now. Tell me, does it appear to be working?
I'm not saying Israel needs to lay down its arms and start holding hands with Hamas, but at the very least it needs to offer a path forward. An outline of a path towards resolving this. Instead it has closed all avenues, offers no perspective for improvement. And has never really done so (even the Oslo accords was almost entirely concessions from the Palestinian side). It offers noting more than a life of misery in what is little more than a ghetto, subject some the most banal and arbitrary rules (please, explain to me how banning coriander and chocolates keeps people safe).
This is the entire life for many Palestinians. Many have never known anything other than military occupation and a boot in their face flying a Jewish flag, from a Jewish nation, proudly proclaiming that Judaism demands a boot in their face, and when you complain the boots kick harder. If you complain too loud you risk getting summarily executed with no justice. Your entire life is an exercise in cheek turning.
And then you complain these people don't care much for Jews? Gosh, I wonder why. they must've been born that way or something ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For people who are actually interested in this topic instead of bad-faith race-baiting, there is a ton of investigative journalism and academic analysis of the methods of the actually-existing Israel lobby.
Stephen Walt & John Mearsheimer "The Israel Lobby"
I hope you at least appreciate the irony of citing Qatari propaganda sources (who for example claimed that the torture, rape, mutilation and murder of Israeli women and children was not done by Hamas but by some random unrelated angry Palestinians who breached the security fence during Hamas' honorable attack) as source for Israel's shady dealings.
I'm sure it is only race-baiting to point out that when Jews engage in lobbying it is considered blackmail and bribery, but somehow non-Jews are only capable of the correct form of lobbying, of "exercising soft power" or "using trade to strengthen peaceful relations", arranging peaceful protests that demonstrate the organic will of the people and not evil protests meant to blackmail people in power.
To be extra clear, in the previous comment and in this one, I'm seriously urging you and GP to reexamine yourself and what leads you to believe that somehow country #28 in world GDP with 0.5% of global GDP is somehow able to blackmail and bribe the entire world and if maybe there's something else within you that leads you to seek out, trust and spread the belief in that claim.
I recommend Al Jazeera's "The Lobby" because it contains primary evidence from undercover journalists, notwithstanding any spin put on it by the Qatari government.
> somehow country #28 in world GDP with 0.5% of global GDP is somehow able to blackmail and bribe the entire world
Israel may be top #28 in GDP but they are a lot higher than that in media power, Western political influence, cyberwarfare, etc. -- and AI murderbots, apparently.
> “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’m really not sure why this got flagged. It seemed like a well sourced and technology-focused article. Independent of this particular conflict, such automated decision making has long been viewed as inevitable. If even a small fraction of what is being reported is accurate it is extraordinarily disturbing.
I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732. If you take a look at that and the links there, and still have a question that isn't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
"AI" in this case is probably mostly Oct 6 cell phone locations.
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.
And they are illegal [in many places] because we haven't had the right conversations. We need to codify solutions to the trolley problem so decisions in bad circumstances align with what we expect.
What part of this upsets you vs a baseline understanding of reality?
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?
I know war isn't pretty, but I really didn't expect that openly displayed level of callousness. Saying 'we think these people should be dead, but they are not important enough to warrant our "good" bombs', to me, says a lot about the mentality of the people in charge of that military assault: those aren't human lives, those are items on a 'to kill' list, and they aren't surrounded by civilians, but 'acceptable collateral damage'.
>> “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs]”
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.
"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."
Hamas combatants like fried chicken, beer, and women. I also like these things. I can't possibly see anything wrong with this system...
This literally looks like any aborrhent ai "predicting" system such as the ones we've heard a ton about in the past, with the same mistakes (I wonder if they're really mistakes, bugs, or ahem... Features)
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 wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732. If you take a look at that and the links there, and still have a question that isn't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
HN, both its community and the moderators, flag posts that generate a lot of conflict in the comments. The comments on this are especially bad by HN standards and therefore the flagging is inline with how the site is openly operated.
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.
I disagree with this, in this issue and more broadly. Technology and hacking are inextricably linked to politics, whether we like it or not. We cannot separate the effects technology has on society and the body politic, and politics has an effect on technology through regulatory regimes, policy, and the law. These discussions are important to the development of technology even if it makes people uncomfortable to see views they disagree with, though of course there are discussions that are unproductive and should not be allowed on this specific forum.
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.
HN has a serious problem if factual technology stories cannot exist here because some people don't like the truth.
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.
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.
> 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.
The key word is intentionally, meaning civilians are the intended targets rather than combatants.
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?
> 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. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses.
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.
Which law of war does that violate? They were an enemy combatant, yes?
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.
> 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.
I've written a lot about how we approach this. If you or anyone would like to know more, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732 in this thread and the links back from there.
It's not as much about the comments as it is about Israel. Anything putting them in bad light gets insta-flagged and HN moderation is ok with this. For example, I give my own comment 5 minutes max.
IDF flag everything. You just need to watch the live comments on any YT video about what they are doing in Gaza to see they have a mommoth operation going on of silencing everything and putting up lots of Anti Muslim vile.
Why do you blame Americans? From my personal point of view, we Europeans are much more supportive of Israel. The streets in western Europe are misleading because western Europe is full of Muslim immigrants and champagne socialists.
Killing these civilians is one way to ensure that these people will be reliable Hamas supporters for years to come. Absolutely crooked that Israel is treating Hamas as though it was a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and fully responsible for them. This isn't some kind of democracy we're talking about.
Two can play that game: if the Israeli government didn't want their civilians to be killed, then they wouldn't occupy Palestine. As they don't care for israeli lives, they conscript every adult into their military, making them all valid targets.
The IDF is headquartered in the middle of Tel Aviv. Unlike them, the Palestinian resistance groups in Gaza don't have a lot of options. It's effectively a concentration camp and it's one of the most densely populated areas on earth. So you're effectively saying you don't accept Palestinians have a right to resist their colonization. Just say that, rather than trying to hide behind "human shield" tropes.
The issue as I see it is that the tools available don't just determine how a given war is fought, they also determine whether it is fought at all.
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.
Very doubtful. There is no room for any diplomacy after such an attack. It would be fought with more primitive weapons and the side with more bombs would prevail.
No, probably not. When the topic at hand is the selection criteria used to justify the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, your stance on whether the ones killing tens of thousands of civilians are justified in doing so is rather intrinsic.
I'm not sure that is possible. The nature and limitations of current AI technology means that it is almost impossible to talk about it without coming to certain conclusions about the party using it.
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.
In October 7th, by murdering, raping and abducting 1200 Israel civilians, Hamas - the acting sovereign of Gaza - chose total war. I hope this serves as a lesson to all those in Iran, Iraq, Syria and especially Lebanon who think of about repeating this.
This practice is akin to physically and mentally abusing a puppy, let them grow into a fearful and aggressive dog then say: "what an aggressive dog ! they need to be euthanized"
What does that even mean? 972 is a local Israeli outfit, with contributors from Israel and Palestine. They have sources within the IDF, sources who may be center-left leaning and are "done" with how the far-right coalition is running this war and they are blowing the whistle on this practice.
972 is very far left, at least compared to the standard Israeli position, I believe. I'm happy they're reporting, but they have a very obvious bias, and I'd take anything they say with a huge amount of caution.
> 972 is very far left, at least compared to the standard Israeli position, I believe.
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.
> So I would say that the very vast majority of reporting is probably left to far left of Netanyahu and his party position.
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.
I wonder if the name Israelis gave the system betray their intent. I noticed in Portuguese, our word for Lavender, "lavanda", sounds similar to the verb meaning to wash, "lavar". According to wikipedia[1] it goes back to old latin roots: "The English word lavender came into use in the 13th century, and is generally thought to derive from Old French lavandre, ultimately from Latin lavare from lavo (to wash), referring to the use of blue infusions of the plants." I belive it is the same root behind English words like laundry or laundering. So, naming it 'Lavender' appears to give a clue to its true purpose: Laundering, our whitewashing the mass scale killing of civilians as collateral damage from computer-targeted strikes against militants, automating and streamlining the creation of plausible sounding excuses to provide cover for mass commitment of criminal acts.
I expected more comments on the source’s biases, given the contentious and sensitive topic; journalist Liel Leibovitz writes this about +972 Magazine (1):
> 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.
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...