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Palestinian boy, 12, describes how Israeli forces killed his family in car

(www.bbc.com)

I am German. My government does not acknowledge the tragedy that has been unfolding in Gaza since the Hamas attack in October 2023. It’s absurd. Since then, Jewish people in Berlin who were demonstrating alongside Palestinians against the war in Gaza have been beaten down by the German police. In 2021, Esther Bejarano, the last survivor of the Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra, passed away in Hamburg. Whenever she commented on the culture of remembrance, the media was eager to report on it. Whenever she commented on the situation of the Palestinians, it was not reported in the media. People sometimes ask how it was possible that the vast majority of so-called ordinary people in this country back then could simply tolerate these crimes against Jews and look the other way. Now that should be clear to everyone. The Max Planck Institute in Rostock estimates that well over 100,000 people have been killed in Gaza. But nobody here gives a damn (at least not publicly). We’re even supplying weapons there. Everyone acts as if they’ve forgotten what was written in German newspapers about the current Israeli government when it took office, and as if there were no connection to what’s happening in Gaza right now. I am deeply and profoundly disappointed in the elected officials and public servants of my country. They have learned nothing from the atrocities committed by their grandfathers.
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I live in DE too, it's terrifying. I didn't realize the extent of the armaments shipped to Israel from Germany until recently.

The Israeli navy ships were built in German shipyards and subsidized 30%...

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It's even more insidious, I know activists in your country and they not only abhor the current support for Israel's genocide but they are terrified of their activism being criminalized under anti-nazi laws. How ironic.
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There is a difference between war and extermination.
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For those wondering, it is verifiable story, it is covered as fact in Israeli newspapers:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-forces-kill-west-bank-...

https://www.ynetnews.com/article/p7mq5k5bs

The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.

The New York Times describes it as such:

"Ali Bani Odeh’s wife and four young boys hadn’t seen him in a month and a half when he came home to Tammun, in the West Bank, from his construction job in Israel late on Friday to spend the last few days of Ramadan with his family.

On Saturday night, the boys persuaded him to take them out for a drive. Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, was coming, so there were new clothes to buy. The day’s fast had been broken, so there were sweets to be had, too.

They picked up fried doughnut holes in Tubas, saving them for later, but the clothing shop they went to in Nablus was closed. It was already past midnight, so they headed back to Tammun: Khaled, 11, the oldest, in the back with Mustafa, 8, and Muhammad, 5. Othman, 6, blind and incapable of walking or feeding himself, was in his mother’s lap in front.

As they rounded a corner slowly, a few minutes from home, young Khaled and Mustafa recounted on Sunday, their mother, Waad, 35, asked her husband to pull over and take Othman from her so she could get something from her bag on the floor. Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/world/middleeast/palestin...

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A certain amount of politics should/must be tolerated on HN, because you cannot compartmentalize technology, politics and morality.

No-one, not even people who say they like technology but do not care about politics, should be able to live their life wihtout knowing that we live in a world where six-year old blind children are murdered with automatic assault rifles.

(For the same reason that no-one should be able to live not knowing that jewish once were murdered in the millions in gas chambers.)

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I don't see anything shocking just extremely sad, this is war 101, every day. Anybody who cares to follow whats happening will find these stories from each conflict. Ie same stories could be found on Ukraine (especially first months, sometimes with video), I personally recall few heartbreaking ones. Its civilians who suffer the worst fate in every war, innocent, small, defenseless.

Given the uncritical support israel is getting from the political elites, plan will go on and the plan is nothing else than destruction of whole gaza, razing it down and building... whatever, I presume more settlers or maybe even a golf course with hotels on the beach. IDF will launch 'an investigation', that will drag for 2 years and nothing will be done at the end, like always.

And the worst thing - people will forget about all this rather quickly, and much more. Maybe its coping mechanism to stay sane, but stellar behavior it isn't.

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> this is war 101

The west bank isn't at war with Israel. There wasn't some conflict or event that has justified these actions.

I wish people understood this better. Even if you could manage to justify what's happening in gaza as "this is war", Gaza and the west bank are separate entities with separate governments. The west bank, in particular, is more like an Indian reservation in the US, with the Israeli government effectively exercising supremacy over all aspects of the government.

Theoretically, the IDF is supposed to be the police force for the west bank. That's why they occupy it.

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> this is war 101, every day.

Except this situation has been going on like this for 60 years - with Israel, or the other western states having absolutely no plans to change anything about it (except making it even worse).

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I have followed this conflict since Operation Cast Lead and the beginnings of the siege on Gaza.

Israel has been using enormous amounts of force against the Palestinian people since then, with death tolls of _at least_ 100 dead Palestinians for every dead Israeli.

For a very good account of life in Israel around the time of Cast Lead I recommend Guy Delisle, brilliant diary in comic form.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem:_Chronicles_from_the...

His partner was working for Doctors Without Borders, the Israeli Army refused to let them enter Gaza to help the people suffering under their bombardments.

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An eyewitness account from the article:

(The eyewitness) told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account. I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired. "No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."

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Why is this on HN?
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Because someone posted, and others upvoted.

The same reason your inane question is on HN.

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I honestly think the gaza war was largely continued as a distraction from the true atrocities Israel has been committing in the west bank. By getting all the news to focus on Gaza Israel could trot out reasoning that many people accept, but the state sponsored terrorism they are undertaking in the west bank is the kind of stuff that is truly hard for even ardent Israel supporters to overlook.
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Unfortunately, even in this comment section, you see people conflating the two. People don't realize that Palestinians live in both the west bank and gaza or that there are 2 different government for the west bank and gaza.
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If anything, it's refreshing to see something that isn't about the latest apple / llm / current techbro trend bullshit
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I can go to Reddit for that.
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I see people saying this story doesn't belong on HN. genuine question, if this story were about a german national would it be considered as political? is palestinian existence inherently more political than other peoples' existence?
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I'm saying this as someone who doesn't really care about this certain topic:

Either we allow _all_ political content or nothing.

The HN guidelines are incredibly grey and handwave-y

>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

To me HN became to big for its own good since the Covid days. It's like the reddit front page except there are no subs with mods but one big flood (basically /r/all).

If I got to /r/linux, /r/selfhosted/, /r/networking/ or other tech subs I'll probably find what I saw on HN 15 years ago. But less and less here.

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From the guidelines:

What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

If the story was about a German national then yes, I would still say this is political and doesn't gratify my intellectual curiosity.

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> is palestinian existence inherently more political than other peoples' existence?

Since they are at the core of this conflict and germans aren't, obviously yes?

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I'll bite: If for any reason, probably because it's neither technically interesting nor entrepreneurial in nature.

US Politics seems to get more of a pass, probably due to Silicon Valley being there (and nearly all the major tech outlets), similarly some China news gets a pass, also largely when it relates to supply chain and Taiwan.

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> US Politics seems to get more of a pass,

This goes beyond US politics. The US and Israel do not exist in a bubble. This conflict can and will have big repercussions which will impact our technical and entrepreneurial institutions.

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All events in the universe are connected to all others. If the rule is that anything that could affect anyone is fair game, then there simply are no rules, to subject guidelines, no filter whatsoever. It's hackernews.com without the "hacker"
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Nothing exists in total isolation, you have to draw lines anyway.
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Every time these sorts of articles get posted people that express a differing opinion from the standard get flagged (making it so you can't read their post at all) pretty quickly making it seem more like the intention isn't to start discussion. It seems like it's gotten to the point that the people that just get flagged into oblivion stopped trying to post.
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FWIW, you can read flagged posts and comments by turning on showdead in your profile.
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this article is about the west bank
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There's no mention of any particular company, tech or otherwise, here. Yes, you can probably connect your work in some way to something that affects the military if you live in the US or Israel (and even many places outside of it - we're not restricting to direct connections), but, after all, "there is no ethical consumerism under capitalism".
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If I worked at [supposedly evil company], I doubt this largely unverifiable story would cause much turmoil. I'm sure at work I'd be hearing about much worse and more concrete stuff already.
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It is a verifiable story, it is covered as fact in Israeli newspapers and it includes verification by the IDF:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-forces-kill-west-bank-...

https://www.ynetnews.com/article/p7mq5k5bs

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Seen this on repeat lately - there will be some war crime that the IDF commits, soldiers or Israeli citizens celebrate it themselves in a TikTok or in Israeli media, then the US media will argue that it didn’t happen or “there’s some information missing”. It’s actually kind of nuts.

Yes driving fast means - execution.

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Verification _of what_ though? The OP article makes a lot of claims. Your own link says the car was a legit target for 'speeding at' troops, which completely opposes much of the BBC article.
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Just because the IDF issued its "justification" doesn't mean it is. As we know from Gaza, there is always a justification.

Here is a good description from the New York Times:

"Ali Bani Odeh’s wife and four young boys hadn’t seen him in a month and a half when he came home to Tammun, in the West Bank, from his construction job in Israel late on Friday to spend the last few days of Ramadan with his family.

On Saturday night, the boys persuaded him to take them out for a drive. Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, was coming, so there were new clothes to buy. The day’s fast had been broken, so there were sweets to be had, too.

They picked up fried doughnut holes in Tubas, saving them for later, but the clothing shop they went to in Nablus was closed. It was already past midnight, so they headed back to Tammun: Khaled, 11, the oldest, in the back with Mustafa, 8, and Muhammad, 5. Othman, 6, blind and incapable of walking or feeding himself, was in his mother’s lap in front.

As they rounded a corner slowly, a few minutes from home, young Khaled and Mustafa recounted on Sunday, their mother, Waad, 35, asked her husband to pull over and take Othman from her so she could get something from her bag on the floor. Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire."

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/world/middleeast/palestin...

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I haven't sided with the IDF account, I've said you're overstating the number of facts that "both sides agree on" as a proxy for what's verifiable.
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DIfferent people have different levels of empathy. If you can live with these things happening in the world, let along being involved even in an extremely minor way then fine, but don't try and downplay it.
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I think it's naive to think that things aren't overplayed or dramatized whenever I read such an article, from whatever PoV. So it can only ever be _at most_ as bad as the article claims. Then it's only natural to downplay.
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What's naive is to think that this is overplayed when the same events are happening day and day out after Israeli settles continue campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. This is just _one_ representative story of dozens that happen every day as reported by many NGOs. This one was merely made viral.
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Sorry, I just don't buy the coached words of a 12 year old as categorically truthful. If anything, ethnic cleansing would be a more statistical and thus verifiable claim than the literal anecdote of a child.
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Really interesting that out of all the testimonials coming out from Gaza and the West Bank that repeat observable, recorded events over and over again, by people in all sides of the conflict, that you selective choose skepticism about this one as if Hind Rajab didn´t happen.
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We (and I) have become desensitized. When I saw one of these for the first time about 25 years ago, I was thinking about it for a week. Maybe longer. Because it was new, internet was new, and the video (not the same but it really does not matter) was the first time I saw it for ... real, felt it for real.

But after seeing a 100 of these, after knowing some of these are AI, after seeing news of a 1000 more ... I mean how is columbine or sandy hook different ... you see these but you eventually scroll up, sometimes immediately sometimes after a few seconds.

I am not making light of it just saying ... a lot of people at evil companies are also tuned out.

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Well, it's also compartmentalized isn't it. It's happening remotely, even if you're buliding the targetting systems or something like that. It's still all abstracted.

And as sympathetic as I might be otherwise, everyone is prone to dramatization and histrionics, which has a numbing tendency too. On both sides.

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> largely unverifiable story

there’s literally pictures in the article of the bodies

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Merely that someone died seems to be a tiny fraction of the claims here.
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The claim is that the IDF shot his family. Even the IDF does not dispute this. What are you thinking this article is saying?
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A photo of some people being buried doesn't confirm or deny the validity of the claim as to how they were killed.

I have no dog in this fight, but sources actually provide evidence.

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This is a journalistic article that does provide multiple sources of evidence - including multiple sources of eyewitness testimony, the facts of what happened to the car/damage to the bodies, what the IDF says happened, and the non-response by the IDF to the evidence presented here - what other evidence could possibly meet your bar here?

This doesn't seem like a good faith discussion by people that informed themselves on what this piece is saying, so I'm bowing out. Have a good one.

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I'm a hacker. I find cooking interesting. Stories about cooking belong on HN.

Do you now see that it doesn't work like this?

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I mean, a simple search reveals hundreds of stories posted about cooking on HN.
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> it is very unfortunate and we as a society feel bad for this

> Sick pro palys...

Lol. And you as a society don't feel bad for illegally occupying and colonising other people's territory? Why don't you withdraw within your borders?

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> Why don't you withdraw within your borders?

They already did that multiple times with no positive outcomes whatsoever, go learn some history

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No that actually never happened. The very day Israel declared its independence its army was already outside the territory proposed for it by the UN's partition plan. Israel itself never declared what its borders were.
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Effective border control would be much easier to implement than the settlement program. In fact it largely has been working since the second intifada when they reinforced it. The west bank settlements make israel less safe, not more.
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At least it's more interesting than all those AI stuff.
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It’s an interesting look into HN.

Charitably, this is an astroturf that accumulated 200+ upvotes in about 20 minutes, which I suspect is highly irregular for HN. Along, with a very clear concerted effort to quickly downvote anyone pointing out this is isn’t HN. If this is the case, what is HN admin doing about it?

Less charitably, HN is not where hackers hang out anymore. The hackers have moved on and HN is now this.

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You think, charitably, that this is an astroturf, really? What's the distribution of upvotes look like for front-page posts, binned in 20 minute intervals?

Reviewing your post history, it's overwhelmingly in non-tech related threads. This seems like a standard post for your tastes, semantically. Why then the sudden distaste?

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Interesting how this highlights a philosophical conundrum here that I'm not sure I have the answer to that goes beyond just forums. Do people make the community, or do rules make the community? I can envision arguments for both sides.
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Does it matter?

If HN gets invaded by people who want to discuss cooking and start submitting and upvoting cooking articles and HN turns into cooking discussion website? And once they get majority, they'll change the rules to make it exclusively about cooking.

It's still people, just different people. People who like cooking vs. people who like technology and startups.

There's no philosophical conundrum.

Do you want HN to be colonized by cooking people or not? That is the question.

I don't.

We need to stand our ground and repel colonizers who want to change the character of HN. Our unity is our strength.

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People here prefer arguing about the rules (and alleged violations thereof) more than they do making concrete, substantive arguments.
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It’s the interaction of the two.
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It absolutely does. Israel uses an AI system("Lavender") to decide which civilians to kill. I remind myself of this fact every single day when deciding where to apply my work. We(software developers) are more than ever exposed to the reality that our products will kill people in the real world.
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Flag and move on.
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The technical answer is the bots pushed it over 30 points or thereabouts, so it became more difficult to kill with flags.
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Well I guess let people vote and moderators do they work.

Maybe I need to see it at the top and then see it disappear to understand what I am looking at when reading HN first page.

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Don't worry, it will sadly get flagged like they tend to.
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I don't know if HN does, but I very much do. But yes, don't worry - it will get flagged and removed soon, no doubt.
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> the Zios

It's okay to just say you don't like Jews. Just be honest.

_account created 3 days ago_

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Zionism is the idea that the Jewish people deserve a national state. Being anti-Zionist is equivalent to wanting Israel to not exist as a national state.
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Zionism is currently realized as an apartheid system because there are too many non-Jews within the borders of Israel. The solution should have been two-states, but it seems that current Israeli leadership doesn't want that. So what is left? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/11/israels-netanyahu-s...
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> The solution should have been two-states,

Perhaps. But at a lower level the solution is justice

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Zionism is just another flavour of fascism. Fascism comes in many flavours, and Zionism is one of them. And it's just as ugly as all the other flavours.
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Reminder that whatever you think, war, terrorism, questions of "the right/wrong target," etc are all insperable from AI and technology these days. These soldiers were where they were for concrete reasons dictated across vast automated networks; their choices of engagement are insperable from the tools either side (army and occupied population to be clear) here has or is perceived to have. War is simply many different "user stories," to put it coldly, and there is ethical and/or practical reasons, as technologists/scientists/academics, to see it that way (even if the goal is to just know thy enemy).

This is all why Anthropic is now a "supply-chain risk", why Thiel and Musk are particularly powerful persons-qua-tech-CEOs, why embedded microcontrollers getting so cheap (or whatever) enables drones instead of suicide bombs.

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My understanding if you read the Israeli news articles is that the justification is that the car was going fast:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-forces-kill-west-bank-...

Given that the IDF involved were undercover agents (according to the reports), it seems unlikely that this family knew that driving fast would get them killed.

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From the article, an eyewitness account:

> He told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account. I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired. "No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."

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Indeed. Often one of the key details omitted is that Israel has been illegally occupying the west bank since 1967 as part of an apartheid regime.
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The BBC had a literal Israeli officer as the head of their Middle East department. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/high-court-rules-favour-j...
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It’s hard not to wonder whether better technology could someday help stop tragedies like this.
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No. Better technology is only making it more efficient. We need better humanity, better morals, better policing of criminals in power.
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The israeli army are famous for their tech?
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Well, right now the "better technology" is Israel's use of the "Lavender" AI to designate people to kill because they are "likely" to be hamas supporters.

And yes, probably they could have used better technology to realize that people in the car are not a danger to them. But that would immply they actually want to avoid killing civilians instead of looking for any excuse to shoot them.

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The Holocaust was built on IBM, the genocide in Gaza is built on Azure. Technology won't be on the side of stopping these tragedies.
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"I don't give a shit about dead Palestinian kids" is... quite a flex. Just chipping more pieces from a damaged soul.
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Collateral damage is inevitable in any war. We don't need a HN post every time an innocent person dies in one of the wars in the middle east.
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This is not a war.

This is a genocide conducted by a government of an apartheid state against a group of people it considers to be subhuman.

Not the first time it happened, that's why we have actual words for what is happening there.

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Which war? This happened in the West Bank!
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It's not collateral damage in the gaza war. This was a family in the west bank, where there is no hamas and no "war", that was gunned down in cold blood for no reason. Not even presenting a threat. I hope one day you are able to find compassion.
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This isn't a war, though. This is an extermination. This is an army with effectively limitless power against unarmed civilians.
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To add something other than the totally predictable on this thread.

- Surprising (if you didn't know any better) how light-skinned all the Palestinians are in this article. I bet the average soldier in the involved IDF unit was darker. Only relevant because the conflict is often portrayed in terms of European Colonialism or US race dynamics.

- Good that Israel is investigating this, seems like it's a thing they don't want (though perhaps are less eager to prevent this sort of incident at additional risk to themselves now vs years earlier.) Hard to imagine that any loss of innocent Israeli life would be investigated rather than celebrated from the other side.

- If I were Israeli, I would be bemused and flattered by the attention and relevance the country seems to have from random people on the internet with no skin in the game. It would be wild to find random stories about an incident involving New Zealanders and Maoris (or whatever) on the front page, yet here we are.

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> Only relevant because the conflict is often portrayed in terms of European Colonialism or US race dynamics.

What do you want to tell with this? That there are no race dynamics because some people have a lighter skin color?

No "Judeo-Christian civilization", no "Villa in the Jungle", no "Light unto the nations", nope...

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> about an incident involving New Zealanders and Maoris

Really?

Aotearoan here. Our racist history is shameful. Many massacres, both sides but mostly one way traffic.

Our history of "othering" indigenous people here in law was shameful too.

But seriously, and with all due respect, fuck you!!

We are facing up to our racist past, present and (Dog help us) future.

Tikanga Māori is joining our legal system.

Being openly racist to Māori is politically suicidal (some right wing politicians are giving it a go, and getting burnt for it)

Māori institutions are integrating themselves into all levels of our culture and society

And on and on. New Zealand is a Māori country, I am Pākehā, I have no problem with that, I belong here too. We (white people) are learning to share, learning there are more ways than our ways. Israel could learn from us, but...

The Isralies are utterly different. The violent homicidal, nay genocidal, racism of Israel is institutional.

Fuck you. For all we have our problems with racism, we are not genocidal racist violent thugs, as are the IDF representing the Israli state

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