6 ms·

Targeting of IT Experts in Gaza

68 points by pbiggar 3y ago

gloyoyo 3y ago
Sad.
smashah 3y ago
[flagged]
- tptacek 3y ago
  This is an overtly anti-semitic comment.
  - smashah 3y ago
    [flagged]
hshar 3y ago
They do this constantly even in other countries. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231122-turkiye-intelligence-agency-protects-palestinian-hacker-from-israels-mossad/ https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231122-turkiye-intellige...
Qem 3y ago
Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20240317222546/https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6228 https://web.archive.org/web/20240317222546/https://euromedmo...
runarberg 3y ago
Moderators. This needs to be unflagged. It is highly relevant to HN. This is a list of people within our industry who have now been martyred in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. There are dozens of names on this list, some of these martyrs may even leave behind accounts here on HN.
- Qem 3y ago
  > There are dozens of names on this list, some of these martyrs may even leave behind accounts here on HN. Early in the current Gaza siege, a few months ago, IIRC, there was a Palestinian programmer taking part on the discussions here on HN. I don't see her posting here anymore. Hope she is still alive.
smashah 3y ago
@dang, please unflag this.
- morninglight 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - smashah 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - runarberg 3y ago
    I wouldn’t necessarily say there is a bias, or at least not a bias which favors Israel directly, as submissions which favors Israel’s narrative gets flagged as quickly (probably even quicker). However I think the bias here is over sensitivity (as in signal theory) or an over abundance of caution. This is not good when the subject matter is an ongoing genocide and targeting of our comrades in tech. As tech workers it is heart breaking to see our community staying silent when some of us are being targeted and martyred in a genocide. HN needs to do better.
wackysid 3y ago
They have targeted academics and medical professionals so it’s not surprising if they’ve been targeting IT professionals as well. Their main aim is to make sure that Gaza is not able to get back in its feet when the military onslaught is over.
Protostome 3y ago
[flagged]
dunekid 3y ago
Another flagging to silence, as it was with many other news. Why not this one too? It was not looking like the community was particularly concerned about those. Now the jobs these people did might be similar to what this community does, but if you are not willing to see the despair of children with no family, or of people who are starving while food rots across border, how could we expect us to understand this; because one person was using vim as much you were using? I hope none of us are targeted by our resume. Meanwhile we can just ignore this, just as we were ignoring it in the past.
- pvg 3y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39728343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39728343
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    So the development that the IDF is targeting non-combatant tech workers is flagged because, per your link, "The issue is how often to have a thread about it". Tech workers being targeted is not considered a new topic because there was already enough talk about Gaza before this news. The news that civilian tech workers (including YC members) are now targeted is not distinct - it's all "Israel attacks Gaza" and that's already been covered to exhaustion, is how I interpret your link.
    - pvg 3y ago
      I don't think that's a sensible reading of the (voluminous) moderator explanations on how such stories are handled. You can make an argument for the importance of any story - some people would like to read a story on HN about some other important conflict or the gut biome or async Rust every single day but clearly a messageboard with 30 front page slots can't accommodate all those needs at once nor would it be an interesting place. So there has to be some sort of way to balance these things. The link explains (again, at about as much length as you have patience for - these discussions have been going on for years) how this works on HN - you have to take at least some of that stuff in and engage with it, if you want to advocate for some sort of change. Being offhandedly reductive about it or explaining how this one thing is actually really important is not that.
ukuuru 3y ago
A pretty effective genocide and cleansing campaign. Bomb crowded camps, target valuable people who glues the people together, doctors, academicians, engineers. Watch the society disintegrates.
tachyons 3y ago
Flagged again, as expected ¯\_ (ツ) _/¯ . HN moderators are complicit in the genocide!
salah7252 3y ago
Feels like a continued smoke signal for people in tech to get loud and involved. From using drones with mounted guns to this, technology is being abused to carry out this vicious moment in history that tech has ignored LOUDLY.
- smashah 3y ago
  [flagged]
- Qem 3y ago
  > From using drones with mounted guns to this, technology is being abused to carry out this vicious moment in history that tech has ignored LOUDLY. The silence, when not outright complicity in the tech sector reminds me of this holocaust quote: First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. —Martin Niemöller (source: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-niemoeller-first-they-came-for-the-socialists ) As Aaron Bushnell said, many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?” The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now. Anyone who shrugs to what is happening in Gaza ghetto now also would shrug witnessing what happened in Warsaw ghetto.
  - runarberg 3y ago
    In this case they came for technology experts, we are technology experts, and yet, we don’t say anything.
  - jjgreen 3y ago
    The "socialists" is from the 1950s US poetic version of Niemöller's confession of 1946: ... the people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians—"should I be my brother's keeper?" So most other countries have the poetic version as "First they came for the communists ..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wahnfrieden 3y ago
I'm reminded of My Lai > Captain Ernest Medina told his men that nearly all the civilian residents of the hamlets in Sơn Mỹ village would have left for the market by 07:00, and that any who remained would most likely be VC or VC sympathizers. He was asked whether the order included the killing of women and children. Those present later gave differing accounts of Medina's response. Some, including platoon leaders, testified that the orders, as they understood them, were to kill all VC and North Vietnamese combatants and "suspects" (including women and children, as well as all animals), to burn the village, and pollute the wells.[23] He was quoted as saying, "They're all VC, now go and get them", and was heard to reply to the question "Who is my enemy?", by saying, "Anybody that was running from us, hiding from us, or appeared to be the enemy. If a man was running, shoot him, sometimes even if a woman with a rifle was running, shoot her." > "A sweep operation was conducted recently… Crazy American enemy used light machine guns and all kinds of weapons to kill our innocent civilian people in [My Lai]. Most of them were women, kids, just born babies and pregnant women. They shot everything they saw. They killed all domestic animals. They burned all people’s houses. There were 26 families killed completely – no survivors… The American wolf forgot its good sheep’s appearance." > "The only crime I have committed is in judgement of my values. Apparently, I valued my troops’ lives more than I did the lives of the enemy." -- William Calley, ‘C’ Company lieutenant Even though innocent brothers and sisters in tech are being slaughtered now, I expect this thread to be flagged and locked within minutes... It is already flagged off the front page.
cornholio 3y ago
It seems highly unlikely IDF would waste resources target individual civilians, follow them around Gaza and eliminate them to prevent their skills being used by Hamas, when the same techniques (say, cell phone tracking drones) can be used directly against high value targets in the Hamas leadership, or at the very least the foot soldiers who are likely to be around such targets.
- smashah 3y ago
  [flagged]
- Qem 3y ago
  > It seems highly unlikely IDF would waste resources target individual civilians, follow them around Gaza and eliminate them to prevent their skills being used by Hamas This has nothing to do with optimizing resources to defeat Hamas. If Tel Aviv regime really wanted that, they should just stop allowing Netanyahu to fund Hamas[1] in his effort to undermine Palestine Authority (the Palestinian group that actually gave up on armed resistance), as the later can't be presented as a proper boogeyman to keep the public scared dumb. It's all about sabotaging the two-state solution, maintaining the apartheid and enforcing a media blackout, not allowing the Palestinians to document the genocide and ethnic cleansing being perpetrated against them. First IDF targeted and killed journalists in droves, as previously discussed here[2]. But the images from the daily massacres, filmed by victims, still circled the world. Targeting IT staff is a criminal decision to make more difficult for the war crimes to be properly documented and known. [1]. https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-funded-hamas-claims-eu-top-diplomat-josep-borrell/ https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-funded-hamas-claims-e... [2]. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39603299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39603299
- CyberDildonics 3y ago
  There have been 29,000 deaths and all aid has been cut off along with cement poured in their plumbing so they have no fresh water. https://time.com/6696507/palestinian-death-toll-gaza-israel-hamas/ https://time.com/6696507/palestinian-death-toll-gaza-israel-... 1 in 100 people have been killed in gaza since october 7th. Entire neighborhoods have been leveled by bombs and bulldozed. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/07/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-maps.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/07/world/middlee...
underdeserver 3y ago
Yep, definitely an unbiased source, sure.
- runarberg 3y ago
  I’m not sure what you mean. They compiled a list of technology specialists and concluded that there was enough evidence there to claim that IT experts are being targeted. The list includes names such as Haitham Muhammad Al-Nabahin. If you want an independent verification that he was indeed killed, and a prominent programmer, here is a news link[1] published the day before this report. You can do the same for e.g. Tariq Thabet[2]. The people on the list compiled by Euro-med HRM were all killed by the Israeli army in its ongoing genocide in Gaza. It doesn’t matter how biased the source is, the list is still there full of martyrs, each one of them experts in the IT industry, and no doubt some of them even with accounts here on HN which they leave behind. 1: https://countylocalnews.com/2024/03/15/gaza-family-killed-in-airstrikes-palestinian-programmer-and-family-killed-in-israeli-airstrikes/ https://countylocalnews.com/2024/03/15/gaza-family-killed-in... 2: https://www.wkar.org/wkar-news/2023-11-07/tariq-thabet-remembered-by-his-warmth-and-smile https://www.wkar.org/wkar-news/2023-11-07/tariq-thabet-remem...
  - Gibbon1 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - orwin 3y ago
      > It's exactly the sort of thing countries at war do It's not, usually armies do not target civilians, and especially not civilians upper class (which devs are in Gaza). For multiple reasons, but one of those was very clear in Ukraine: if they killed Chernobyl's keepers, or Zaporiga's engineers, this would have led to troubles.
      - Gibbon1 3y ago
        Civilians can absolutely be targeted if it fills a legitimate military objective. And Hamas doesn't follow the rules of war and doesn't distinguish between civilians and military objectives either. It's like how Hamas and Hezbollah both use journalists as spotters and then complain when they get killed. Communications networks are 100% legitimate targets and so are the people maintaining them.

68 points by pbiggar 3y ago

gloyoyo 3y ago

Sad.

smashah 3y ago

[flagged]

tptacek 3y ago
This is an overtly anti-semitic comment.
- smashah 3y ago
  [flagged]

hshar 3y ago

They do this constantly even in other countries. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231122-turkiye-intelligence-agency-protects-palestinian-hacker-from-israels-mossad/ https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231122-turkiye-intellige...

Qem 3y ago

Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20240317222546/https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6228 https://web.archive.org/web/20240317222546/https://euromedmo...

runarberg 3y ago

Moderators. This needs to be unflagged. It is highly relevant to HN. This is a list of people within our industry who have now been martyred in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. There are dozens of names on this list, some of these martyrs may even leave behind accounts here on HN.

Qem 3y ago
> There are dozens of names on this list, some of these martyrs may even leave behind accounts here on HN. Early in the current Gaza siege, a few months ago, IIRC, there was a Palestinian programmer taking part on the discussions here on HN. I don't see her posting here anymore. Hope she is still alive.

smashah 3y ago

@dang, please unflag this.

morninglight 3y ago
[flagged]
- smashah 3y ago
  [flagged]
- runarberg 3y ago
  I wouldn’t necessarily say there is a bias, or at least not a bias which favors Israel directly, as submissions which favors Israel’s narrative gets flagged as quickly (probably even quicker). However I think the bias here is over sensitivity (as in signal theory) or an over abundance of caution. This is not good when the subject matter is an ongoing genocide and targeting of our comrades in tech. As tech workers it is heart breaking to see our community staying silent when some of us are being targeted and martyred in a genocide. HN needs to do better.

wackysid 3y ago

They have targeted academics and medical professionals so it’s not surprising if they’ve been targeting IT professionals as well. Their main aim is to make sure that Gaza is not able to get back in its feet when the military onslaught is over.

Protostome 3y ago

[flagged]

dunekid 3y ago

Another flagging to silence, as it was with many other news. Why not this one too? It was not looking like the community was particularly concerned about those. Now the jobs these people did might be similar to what this community does, but if you are not willing to see the despair of children with no family, or of people who are starving while food rots across border, how could we expect us to understand this; because one person was using vim as much you were using? I hope none of us are targeted by our resume. Meanwhile we can just ignore this, just as we were ignoring it in the past.

pvg 3y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39728343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39728343
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  So the development that the IDF is targeting non-combatant tech workers is flagged because, per your link, "The issue is how often to have a thread about it". Tech workers being targeted is not considered a new topic because there was already enough talk about Gaza before this news. The news that civilian tech workers (including YC members) are now targeted is not distinct - it's all "Israel attacks Gaza" and that's already been covered to exhaustion, is how I interpret your link.
  - pvg 3y ago
    I don't think that's a sensible reading of the (voluminous) moderator explanations on how such stories are handled. You can make an argument for the importance of any story - some people would like to read a story on HN about some other important conflict or the gut biome or async Rust every single day but clearly a messageboard with 30 front page slots can't accommodate all those needs at once nor would it be an interesting place. So there has to be some sort of way to balance these things. The link explains (again, at about as much length as you have patience for - these discussions have been going on for years) how this works on HN - you have to take at least some of that stuff in and engage with it, if you want to advocate for some sort of change. Being offhandedly reductive about it or explaining how this one thing is actually really important is not that.

ukuuru 3y ago

A pretty effective genocide and cleansing campaign. Bomb crowded camps, target valuable people who glues the people together, doctors, academicians, engineers. Watch the society disintegrates.

tachyons 3y ago

Flagged again, as expected ¯\_ (ツ) _/¯ . HN moderators are complicit in the genocide!

salah7252 3y ago

Feels like a continued smoke signal for people in tech to get loud and involved. From using drones with mounted guns to this, technology is being abused to carry out this vicious moment in history that tech has ignored LOUDLY.

smashah 3y ago
[flagged]
Qem 3y ago
> From using drones with mounted guns to this, technology is being abused to carry out this vicious moment in history that tech has ignored LOUDLY. The silence, when not outright complicity in the tech sector reminds me of this holocaust quote: First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. —Martin Niemöller (source: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-niemoeller-first-they-came-for-the-socialists ) As Aaron Bushnell said, many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?” The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now. Anyone who shrugs to what is happening in Gaza ghetto now also would shrug witnessing what happened in Warsaw ghetto.
- runarberg 3y ago
  In this case they came for technology experts, we are technology experts, and yet, we don’t say anything.
- jjgreen 3y ago
  The "socialists" is from the 1950s US poetic version of Niemöller's confession of 1946: ... the people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians—"should I be my brother's keeper?" So most other countries have the poetic version as "First they came for the communists ..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

wahnfrieden 3y ago

I'm reminded of My Lai > Captain Ernest Medina told his men that nearly all the civilian residents of the hamlets in Sơn Mỹ village would have left for the market by 07:00, and that any who remained would most likely be VC or VC sympathizers. He was asked whether the order included the killing of women and children. Those present later gave differing accounts of Medina's response. Some, including platoon leaders, testified that the orders, as they understood them, were to kill all VC and North Vietnamese combatants and "suspects" (including women and children, as well as all animals), to burn the village, and pollute the wells.[23] He was quoted as saying, "They're all VC, now go and get them", and was heard to reply to the question "Who is my enemy?", by saying, "Anybody that was running from us, hiding from us, or appeared to be the enemy. If a man was running, shoot him, sometimes even if a woman with a rifle was running, shoot her." > "A sweep operation was conducted recently… Crazy American enemy used light machine guns and all kinds of weapons to kill our innocent civilian people in [My Lai]. Most of them were women, kids, just born babies and pregnant women. They shot everything they saw. They killed all domestic animals. They burned all people’s houses. There were 26 families killed completely – no survivors… The American wolf forgot its good sheep’s appearance." > "The only crime I have committed is in judgement of my values. Apparently, I valued my troops’ lives more than I did the lives of the enemy." -- William Calley, ‘C’ Company lieutenant Even though innocent brothers and sisters in tech are being slaughtered now, I expect this thread to be flagged and locked within minutes... It is already flagged off the front page.

cornholio 3y ago

It seems highly unlikely IDF would waste resources target individual civilians, follow them around Gaza and eliminate them to prevent their skills being used by Hamas, when the same techniques (say, cell phone tracking drones) can be used directly against high value targets in the Hamas leadership, or at the very least the foot soldiers who are likely to be around such targets.

smashah 3y ago
[flagged]
Qem 3y ago
> It seems highly unlikely IDF would waste resources target individual civilians, follow them around Gaza and eliminate them to prevent their skills being used by Hamas This has nothing to do with optimizing resources to defeat Hamas. If Tel Aviv regime really wanted that, they should just stop allowing Netanyahu to fund Hamas[1] in his effort to undermine Palestine Authority (the Palestinian group that actually gave up on armed resistance), as the later can't be presented as a proper boogeyman to keep the public scared dumb. It's all about sabotaging the two-state solution, maintaining the apartheid and enforcing a media blackout, not allowing the Palestinians to document the genocide and ethnic cleansing being perpetrated against them. First IDF targeted and killed journalists in droves, as previously discussed here[2]. But the images from the daily massacres, filmed by victims, still circled the world. Targeting IT staff is a criminal decision to make more difficult for the war crimes to be properly documented and known. [1]. https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-funded-hamas-claims-eu-top-diplomat-josep-borrell/ https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-funded-hamas-claims-e... [2]. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39603299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39603299
CyberDildonics 3y ago
There have been 29,000 deaths and all aid has been cut off along with cement poured in their plumbing so they have no fresh water. https://time.com/6696507/palestinian-death-toll-gaza-israel-hamas/ https://time.com/6696507/palestinian-death-toll-gaza-israel-... 1 in 100 people have been killed in gaza since october 7th. Entire neighborhoods have been leveled by bombs and bulldozed. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/07/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-maps.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/10/07/world/middlee...

underdeserver 3y ago

Yep, definitely an unbiased source, sure.

runarberg 3y ago
I’m not sure what you mean. They compiled a list of technology specialists and concluded that there was enough evidence there to claim that IT experts are being targeted. The list includes names such as Haitham Muhammad Al-Nabahin. If you want an independent verification that he was indeed killed, and a prominent programmer, here is a news link[1] published the day before this report. You can do the same for e.g. Tariq Thabet[2]. The people on the list compiled by Euro-med HRM were all killed by the Israeli army in its ongoing genocide in Gaza. It doesn’t matter how biased the source is, the list is still there full of martyrs, each one of them experts in the IT industry, and no doubt some of them even with accounts here on HN which they leave behind. 1: https://countylocalnews.com/2024/03/15/gaza-family-killed-in-airstrikes-palestinian-programmer-and-family-killed-in-israeli-airstrikes/ https://countylocalnews.com/2024/03/15/gaza-family-killed-in... 2: https://www.wkar.org/wkar-news/2023-11-07/tariq-thabet-remembered-by-his-warmth-and-smile https://www.wkar.org/wkar-news/2023-11-07/tariq-thabet-remem...
- Gibbon1 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - orwin 3y ago
    > It's exactly the sort of thing countries at war do It's not, usually armies do not target civilians, and especially not civilians upper class (which devs are in Gaza). For multiple reasons, but one of those was very clear in Ukraine: if they killed Chernobyl's keepers, or Zaporiga's engineers, this would have led to troubles.
    - Gibbon1 3y ago
      Civilians can absolutely be targeted if it fills a legitimate military objective. And Hamas doesn't follow the rules of war and doesn't distinguish between civilians and military objectives either. It's like how Hamas and Hezbollah both use journalists as spotters and then complain when they get killed. Communications networks are 100% legitimate targets and so are the people maintaining them.