11 ms·

I remember when folks here were shilling the "Israel promises they'd never bomb a hospital" and "Hamas is lying about the death toll" lines. All the hospitals

I remember when folks here were shilling the "Israel promises they'd never bomb a hospital" and "Hamas is lying about the death toll" lines. All the hospitals are now rubble, and the IDF quietly let it slip that the death toll is legit recently. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-01-29/ty-article/.premium/idf-accepts-gaza-health-ministry-estimate-of-over-70-000-palestinians-killed-in-the-war/0000019c-0918-dec4-adfd-fd5dde830000 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-01-29/ty-article/.p... There's damning video of this specific incident, recovered from the dead. I suspect subsequent massacres made a policy of finding and destroying all the phones. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-israel-aid-workers-deaths-video.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...

ignoramous 9mo ago
> All the hospitals are now rubble Hospitals may have been used for retaliation [0], but it is unclear how many & in what capacity (according to accepted conventions, using a hospital to treat wounded combatants wouldn't make it a valid military target, for example; but hiding weapons or personnel would). [0] One such recent report: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/msf-suspends-some-gaza-hospital-work-over-presence-gunmen-suspected-weapons-2026-02-14/ https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
- weird_tentacles 9mo ago
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  - ceejayoz 9mo ago
    It's not at all an uncommon scenario to have to deal with in war, especially asymmetrical conflicts. IMO, Israel stepped very clearly over the line, repeatedly, in how they handled it, but the parent post is a pretty reasonable summary of the considerations.
    - weird_tentacles 9mo ago
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      - ceejayoz 9mo ago
        The rules aren't written by plucky revolutionaries, but the big powers. They, thus, fairly often favor people who fight like the big powers. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/17/can-hospitals-be-military-targets-international-law-israel-gaza-al-shifa https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/17/can-hospitals-... > Article 8 of the Rome statute, which established the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague, defines a long list of war crimes including “intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected”. > But it makes an exception if the targets are “military objectives”. Philip-Gay said that “if a civilian hospital is used for acts harmful to the enemy, that is the legal term used”, the hospital can lose its protected status under international law and be considered a legitimate target. Nevertheless, if there is doubt as to whether a hospital is a military objective or being used for acts harmful to the enemy, the presumption, under international humanitarian law, is that it is not. Again, I think Israel committed war crimes here and throughout Gaza. But the parent poster has a point that using a hospital for combat purposes risks its status. (There are still rules to follow in that case, that weren't followed. Again, war crimes.) > Truth: Mass-destroying a country's hospitals, murdering the doctors, nurses, workers & patients, mass-executing aid workers ... is Israeli. And only Israeli. This is the same mistake many made about Nazi Germany; convincing themselves that the Germans were uniquely evil. It stops people from having to examine themselves.
        wk_end 9mo ago
        > The rules aren't written by plucky revolutionaries, but the big powers. They, thus, fairly often favor people who fight like the big powers. I think this is one of the ugliest things about this particular war. While the IDF unquestionably committed various war crimes over the course of the conflict anyway, the bulk of what people found objectionable very well might have been done in total accordance with international law. Despite many failures and excesses, the IDF at least paid lip service to trying to do that, as a policy. It's just that, the reality is, the rules are based on entirely different assumptions about how war is carried out. If they might lead to something resembling a "humane" war (hah!) when fought between, say, a relatively evenly matched France and Germany, they're quite ineffective at preventing a humanitarian catastrophe when you have a modern force attempting to siege an ultra-dense, militarized enclave run by an organization with no real hope of a conventional victory or interest in the well-being of its civilians. And so you end up with this absurd situation where the world witnessed, over and over again, unimaginably horrible things being inflicted on the population of Gaza, and the Israelis responding - if we're being charitable, not entirely unreasonably - "Why are you getting mad at us? We're following the rules!" It's just that, clearly, the rules are insufficient to match people's moral sentiments.
  - ebbi 9mo ago
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- glenstein 9mo ago
  Not sure I understand the mass downvotes on this one. I didn't take it as endorsing the action but summarizing the rationale.
  - mikkupikku 9mo ago
    People have had good reasons for downvoting the above, but it's unclear how many and what those reasons might be.
    - richardfeynman 9mo ago
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  - baq 9mo ago
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  - dathinab 9mo ago
    many somewhat intellectual(1), but evil(2), people love to play make pretend of just "summarizing the rational", "playing devil advocate", "just pointing out facts" to endorse their word view while having "plausible deniability" if caught (as they tend to know many people think their ideas are evil). Idk. if this is happening here but given how some threads devolved and other patterns common for such people emerged (red hearing arguments, false conclusions etc.) it looks quite a bit like it. This kind people (the also tend to argue endlessly not based on common sense, understanding of the real world and empathy (in questions of ethic/moral) but based on nit picking stuff like as if the word ist just a game you find holes in the rules with to "cleverly win". Because for them the world often is just that. But a lot of people find such behavior deeply deplorable. hence why if something looks like that it will get a lot of down votes even if it wasn't meant that way. --- (1): Non intellectual people try that too. But they tend to lack the skill to pull it off. Hence why it tends to be pretty obvious why they are down voted or similar. (2): Non evil people do that too, they just normally have the decency not to do so with topics like genocide. I also use evil here as a over-generalization but I have mostly seen that behavior with neo-nazis and other groups which are least fascist adjacent (and most times outright fascist).
- themafia 9mo ago
  > according to accepted conventions Who accepted those? And did they have a right to do so on behalf of _all_ of humanity? The conventions are a guideline. To use them as a blanket moral justification for your actions after the fact is extremely disingenuous.
- cholantesh 9mo ago
  A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Israel did not have a habit of drastically overstating their case and quietly walking it back after they end up killing more journalists and toddlers than active combatants in hospital bombings. Also if reports didn't deliberately conflate 'armed man' with 'Hamas militant' and euphemize about the 'Hamas-run Interior Ministry' like that one does.
  - HappyPanacea 9mo ago
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    - ceejayoz 9mo ago
      > Israeli forces dressed in doctors’ scrubs and women’s clothes have killed three Palestinian militants in an undercover operation in a hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/30/israel-forces-disguised-women-medics-storm-hospital-jenin-west-bank https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/30/israel-forces-... Hmm.
      - HappyPanacea 9mo ago
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        ceejayoz 9mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidy > It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy… The following acts are examples of perfidy… The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status... (Assassinating a paralyzed patient in a hospital is also not typically - ahem - kosher. Even if you're in uniform!)
        HappyPanacea 9mo ago
        Why was it decided that feigning of civilian, non-combatant status is bad? because it led to death of civilians who had no part in the fight; pretending to be your enemy's civilians bring no such issue. Although assassinating a patient is also not kosher it less relevant to the discussion about use of uniforms.
MagicMoonlight 9mo ago
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- ceejayoz 9mo ago
  Yes. You can't blow up entire hospitals and kill patients just because someone's storing stuff in the basement.
  - JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
    > You can't blow up entire hospitals and kill patients just because someone's storing stuff in the basement I believe hospitals lose much of their protection under international law when they’re dual used like this. (There is still proportionality and morality.)
    - ceejayoz 9mo ago
      "Much of" and "all of" are very different things.
    - thrance 9mo ago
      I don't know how much weight the legalist argument holds here, seeing how the IDF has been acting extra-legally for a long while now, but anyway, I seriously doubt that each destroyed hospital and each destroyed school held terrorists. We've seen the IDF target civilians, aid workers and journalists too many times to believe them so easily.
  - vibeprofessor 9mo ago
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  - bamboozled 9mo ago
    I don’t like it but it was a war. October 7 was a declaration of war. I heard almost no one complain about the “war on terror” and I’m sure similar collateral occurred. For some reason people forget the pearl harbour event that happened before it all kicked off ? Not trying to say it’s fine to bomb a hospital, but it doesn’t seem fair to single out the IDF. Do you whine about Hiroshima ?
thrance 9mo ago
I don't know why you're using the past tense here, I was still trying to talk some sense into these people barely two days ago. It's hopeless at this point.
- vibeprofessor 9mo ago
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  - ceejayoz 9mo ago
    I linked to an article from an Israeli news outlet citing the IDF considering that death toll to be accurate.
    - vibeprofessor 9mo ago
      haaretz is a left wing rag, they are just as trustworthy as hamas health ministry
      - ceejayoz 9mo ago
        And the IDF? They're hardly the only ones reporting this. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/30/middleeast/israeli-military-gaza-killed-numbers-intl https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/30/middleeast/israeli-military-g... > Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth quoted military officials Thursday as saying, “We estimate that about 70,000 Gazans were killed in the war, not including the missing.” Kan 11, the country’s public broadcaster, attributed the information to the Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT) and said there is now an effort to analyze how many of those killed were civilian or militant. And the IDF ain't contesting it: > “The IDF clarifies that the details published do not reflect official IDF data,” the spokesperson said. “Any publication or report on this matter will be released through official and orderly channels.” The spokesperson did not answer if the IDF held data about the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza or if such information would ever be released.
        9mo ago
expedition32 9mo ago
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- mhb 9mo ago
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- Muromec 9mo ago
  Serbia wasn’t on a good terms with Big Genocide lobby
  - baq 9mo ago
    I can’t believe I’m actually writing this: parent is an underrated comment.
  - pjc50 9mo ago
    Even so, there have been all sorts of contrarians trying to defend them. Usually for weird anti NATO reasons.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
- baq 9mo ago
  It should be reminding you of something which happened a few decades earlier and was much, much worse than Serbia.
  - scarecrowbob 9mo ago
    As a person living on the border between New Mexico and Colorado on land that borders reservations and who drives past the site of a residential school pretty regularly, I completely agree.
  - Betelbuddy 9mo ago
    It could not be more clear - https://youtu.be/ZH142nb6Joo?t=144 https://youtu.be/ZH142nb6Joo?t=144
troupo 9mo ago
Two things are valid at once: - Hamas is a terrorist organization that planned and executed a mass terror campaign, fully knowing and hoping for the reaction. And boasting about it continuously and repeatedly. - Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.
- ceejayoz 9mo ago
  I am entirely behind this take.
- guerrilla 9mo ago
  You didn't actually address the actual point. Israel and it's defenders have been lying about the death toll this entire time and Hamas was not. > - Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks. This is also an extreme understatement. It's literally a genocide.
  - troupo 9mo ago
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    - guerrilla 9mo ago
      The evidence that their numbers were accurate was just presented to you in this very thread.
    - cholantesh 9mo ago
      I take it that literally every NGO in this space and genocide scholars are all in on the lie?
    - yosamino 9mo ago
      here you go: > The Israel Defense Forces believes that the Hamas-run health ministry’s death toll from the war in the Gaza Strip has been largely accurate, a senior Israeli military official acknowledged on Thursday. https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-killed-in-war-as-claimed-by-hamas/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-kill... IDF claims 2/3 to 3/4 of killed are civilians. Now add in that around half of the population of Gaza is under 18 and also that half the population is female. I know that I will not convince you, you are a person who thinks "lol" is adequate terminology when discussing the killing of humans, but you also don't get to lie about things on the internet that even the party you support does not lie about. Please try and adhere to the standard of conversation that all of us on HN are trying have to elevate our discussion. Read it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
general_reveal 9mo ago
There is an alternate World Peace Force that just got started recently because I believe, as regimes change, the UN will audit what happened. The issue is there will now be another international body that will argue the other way. It’s not exactly 3d chess, but, it is chess. Purchase of US TikTok (chess moves).
- mschuster91 9mo ago
  Never heard (and couldn't find anything) about it. That "Board of Peace" you're most likely referring to is nothing more than your usual Trump grift - each country willing to join has to pay 1 billion $, and there have been 25 countries declaring their intent to join. Make up the math yourself, even if there will be legitimate expenses for PMCs, reconstruction and god knows what else, even skimming off 5% of that sum will still be a lot of money for Trump. And it would not be the first time he launches a multi-billion grift / money laundering scheme, remember $TRUMP and $MELANIA and I've probably forgotten about the other coins?
  - SiempreViernes 9mo ago
    It's a bit more complicated: the peace deal Trump got passed through the Security Council did create a board in charge of monitoring some aspects of the Gaza process (I'm not sure on the exact details) so there is a real UN body in the mix. Then trump seems to have bolted on two or three entirely new and unrelated organisational levels "over" the UN affiliated board and declared himself king of all peacemaking. There is much that is unclear about how things will work in practice, but the reality is there's a potentially important part of the Gaza deal being held hostage by this board of peace, and that's why the Arabs joined.
LorenPechtel 9mo ago
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- ceejayoz 9mo ago
  > All the hospitals are rubble? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_during_the_Gaza_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_d... "By February 2024, it was reported that "every hospital in Gaza is either damaged, destroyed, or out of service due to lack of fuel."" > And it's irrelevant anyway as hospitals lose their protected status when used for military purposes. A lie. https://www.icrc.org/en/document/protection-hospitals-during-armed-conflicts-what-law-says https://www.icrc.org/en/document/protection-hospitals-during... "Even then, humanitarian considerations relating to the welfare of the wounded and sick being cared for in the facility may not be disregarded. They must be spared and, as far as possible, active measures for their safety taken." "Notably, an attacking party remains bound by the principle of proportionality. The military advantage likely to be gained from attacking medical establishments or units that have lost their protected status should be carefully weighed against the humanitarian consequences likely to result from the damage or destruction caused to those facilities: such an attack may have significant incidental second- and third-order effects on the delivery of health care in the short, middle and long-term." > All the Geneva protections apply only to truly civilian things, not to things pretending to be civilian. This is an outright lie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions "The First Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded field soldiers, the Second Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded sailors, the Third Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of prisoners of war, and the Fourth Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of civilians during armed conflict" > Your video is paywalled but also irrelevant as it shows emergency symbols That is precisely why it is relevant. Israel's initial claim was that they didn't have any. From the article we're discussing: "After footage from Radwan’s phone was first published by the New York Times a few days later, the Israeli military backtracked on its claims that the vehicles did not have emergency signals on when Israeli troops opened fire, saying the statement was inaccurate." "The Israeli military then announced on April 20 that an internal inquiry into the incident had found the killings were caused by “several professional failures, breaches of orders, and a failure to fully report the incident.”"
nailer 9mo ago
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- ceejayoz 9mo ago
  > There was a seperate hospital that the IDF did bomb… There was more than "a" hospital. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_during_the_Gaza_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_d... "By February 2024, it was reported that "every hospital in Gaza is either damaged, destroyed, or out of service due to lack of fuel."" Are the satellites lying, too? https://www.nbcnews.com/world/gaza/satellite-images-destruction-gaza-strip-rcna236089 https://www.nbcnews.com/world/gaza/satellite-images-destruct...
  - magic_hamster 9mo ago
    Lack of fuel doesn't mean it was bombed or destroyed.
  - nailer 9mo ago
    See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47144722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47144722
grumple 9mo ago
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joyeuse6701 9mo ago
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- ceejayoz 9mo ago
  > I’m not sure why the Palestinians… > That’s Hezbollah, Hamas… Sleight of hand happening here.
  - richardfeynman 9mo ago
    There's no sleight of hand, just a horrifying reality. It's not just Hamas and Hezbollah. Civilians from Gaza participated in October 7 and poll after poll shows broad palestinian support for the destruction of Israel. Support for Hamas itself is waning in Gaza due to their brutality, but Hamas began the war with broad support for their genocidal aims.
    - ceejayoz 9mo ago
      And would Israeli polling about Palestinians justify their deaths, too?
      - richardfeynman 9mo ago
        Nobody is justifying Palestinian deaths, whatever that means. You don't know my position on the war, since I haven't articulated it here. I'm simply refuting your earlier claim that only Hamas and Hezbollah is dedicated to the destruction of Israel, while regular Palestinians are fine with it. Hopefully you have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge your earlier claim was wrong, and there was and is indeed broad support for destroying Israel and its civilian population among Palestinian civilians. And not just intellectual support, but concrete actions. Are you familiar with the "pay for slay" program?
    - prmoustache 9mo ago
      That is kind of a dishonnest take. You make sure to avoid mentionning that hamas is not only a terrorist organization. It is also an administrative body which has been bringing employment and services to a significant portion of the palestinian population while they have been constantly under strict embargoes, restriction and aggressions for decades. You can't really criticize people to support the only org that pretend to care about them while the whole world seem to be against their own existence. Most palestinians would just want to live a peaceful normal life but have been expropriated and forced to live in a ghetto. How convenient to feign surprise and indignation that same people would have resentment against those that have been making their life difficult and at risk. Israel created Hamas. You can draw a parallel to say, part of the colombian population that was supporting Pablo Escobar when the Medellin cartel was providing services that the government was failing to provide to the poorest classes.
richardfeynman 9mo ago
Hamas has weaponized every hospital in Gaza. By contrast, Israel has not dropped an aerial bomb on any hospital building in Gaza. What has happened is Israel has attacked hospitals with Hamas presence using ground forces, and they have dropped bombs on hospital grounds, but not in hospitals themselves.
- ceejayoz 9mo ago
  > By contrast, Israel has not dropped an aerial bomb on any hospital building in Gaza. An oddly specific claim. Hamas hasn't killed any Israeli with a turtle, either. I'm not sure why destroying hospitals with tanks, missiles, and sappers is better than "aerial bombs". Could you elaborate?
  - richardfeynman 9mo ago
    Yes, it's specific. It's also a fact that is in direct contradistinction to the OP's claim. Israel has also not fired any missiles at hospitals, with one exception (a small diameter bomb aimed specifically at Hamas that caused minimal damage).
    - ceejayoz 9mo ago
      Again: > I'm not sure why destroying hospitals with tanks, missiles, and sappers is better than "aerial bombs". Could you elaborate?
      - richardfeynman 9mo ago
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        osmsucks 9mo ago
        ...What an odd and dishonest framing of the problem. Do you define "hospital not destroyed" as "some walls are still standing"? Because an easy counterpoint to your claim is the Al-Shifa Hospital, which you will certainly agree cannot be operational in this state and thus can be defined as "destroyed": https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/%D9%85%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%B4%D9%81%D9%89_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B4%D9%81%D8%A7%D8%A1_%D9%81%D9%8A_%D8%BA%D8%B2%D8%A9_%D8%A8%D8%B9%D8%AF_%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%B5%D9%81%D8%8C_2025%D8%8C_DJI_20241221140139_0094_D.MP4.01_59_07_49.Still002.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/%D9%85%D... And this is one example out of the many: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_during_the_Gaza_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_d...
george916a 9mo ago
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- ceejayoz 9mo ago
  > Haaretz is not an official Israeli newspaper, certainly not an IDF one. No such claim was made. Other papers back up the statement. https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-killed-in-war-as-claimed-by-hamas/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-kill... > Deliberately hiding in buildings and institutions that are supposed to be strictly civilian. Yes, this is not allowed. The rules of law still say you can’t do whatever you like as a result.
an0malous 9mo ago
Don’t forget the “all they have to do is return the hostages” line
- TacticalCoder 9mo ago
  > Don’t forget the “all they have to do is return the hostages” line So there's zero link whatsoever between Hamas executing 1200 civilians on Oct 7th, taking 200 hostages, and the following war (and war crimes) of Israel? Israel literally unilaterally began a war and committed war crimes without any act of aggression? And from the moment 200 hostages had been taken, many of whom died in captivity, everything was carved in stone and no matter what Hamas did, Israel was going anyway to war and to commit war crimes? Or did something happen on Oct 7th that triggered all this?
  - harimau777 9mo ago
    The issue isn't whether or not Israel started it. It's the genocide they did once it started.
    - TurdF3rguson 9mo ago
      It's really about motive and targeting. Were they trying to get the hostages back or just kill people randomly? Were they targeting Hamas or aid workers?
  - xg15 9mo ago
    If they wanted to go after Hamas, why did they employ methods of combat that were guaranteed to affect civilians, like cutting off the entire strip from food supply? Or the massacre that this thread is about for that matter?
    - BurningFrog 9mo ago
      [flagged]
  - austin-cheney 9mo ago
YZF 9mo ago
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- awakeasleep 9mo ago
  You should try to find a spelling or grammar error in his post, too.
- ceejayoz 9mo ago
  > So "all hospitals are now rubble" is a incorrect Sorry, you're right. Some have partially resumed operations with the (sorta) ceasefire. My bad.
- tbugrara 9mo ago
  You're absolutely right, only 95% of health services were crippled. Thanks, that changes the meaning of GP entirely.
  - YZF 9mo ago
    This is an important distinction. Anti-Israeli propaganda keeps echoing the false narrative of all hospitals having been totally destroyed. The truth is that out of the 36 hospitals operating before the conflict 19 are still operational. That's a pretty far cry from 95%. There used to be 3000 hospital beds available and now there are 2000. There are also an additional 13 field hospitals. That's a very different story (keeping in mind that Israel has taken control of large areas and any hospital that used to be there wouldn't be in use either). Given the scale of the war and the documented use of hospitals for military purposes we have to expect there will be some impact: - https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields.pdf https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields.... - https://ngo-monitor.org/reports/hamas-misuse-hospitals-docs/ https://ngo-monitor.org/reports/hamas-misuse-hospitals-docs/ - https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/02/17/doctors-without-borders-admits-terrorists-are-using-gazas-nasser-hospital/ https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/02/17/doctors-without-bord...
rngfnby 9mo ago
It's important to note that the official death toll, acknowledged by the IDF, are of those whose bodies have been recovered. Nor has the genocide stopped.
- Nexxxeh 9mo ago
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BurningFrog 9mo ago
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ignoramous 9mo ago

> All the hospitals are now rubble Hospitals may have been used for retaliation [0], but it is unclear how many & in what capacity (according to accepted conventions, using a hospital to treat wounded combatants wouldn't make it a valid military target, for example; but hiding weapons or personnel would). [0] One such recent report: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/msf-suspends-some-gaza-hospital-work-over-presence-gunmen-suspected-weapons-2026-02-14/ https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

weird_tentacles 9mo ago
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- ceejayoz 9mo ago
  It's not at all an uncommon scenario to have to deal with in war, especially asymmetrical conflicts. IMO, Israel stepped very clearly over the line, repeatedly, in how they handled it, but the parent post is a pretty reasonable summary of the considerations.
  - weird_tentacles 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - ceejayoz 9mo ago
      The rules aren't written by plucky revolutionaries, but the big powers. They, thus, fairly often favor people who fight like the big powers. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/17/can-hospitals-be-military-targets-international-law-israel-gaza-al-shifa https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/17/can-hospitals-... > Article 8 of the Rome statute, which established the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague, defines a long list of war crimes including “intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected”. > But it makes an exception if the targets are “military objectives”. Philip-Gay said that “if a civilian hospital is used for acts harmful to the enemy, that is the legal term used”, the hospital can lose its protected status under international law and be considered a legitimate target. Nevertheless, if there is doubt as to whether a hospital is a military objective or being used for acts harmful to the enemy, the presumption, under international humanitarian law, is that it is not. Again, I think Israel committed war crimes here and throughout Gaza. But the parent poster has a point that using a hospital for combat purposes risks its status. (There are still rules to follow in that case, that weren't followed. Again, war crimes.) > Truth: Mass-destroying a country's hospitals, murdering the doctors, nurses, workers & patients, mass-executing aid workers ... is Israeli. And only Israeli. This is the same mistake many made about Nazi Germany; convincing themselves that the Germans were uniquely evil. It stops people from having to examine themselves.
      - wk_end 9mo ago
        > The rules aren't written by plucky revolutionaries, but the big powers. They, thus, fairly often favor people who fight like the big powers. I think this is one of the ugliest things about this particular war. While the IDF unquestionably committed various war crimes over the course of the conflict anyway, the bulk of what people found objectionable very well might have been done in total accordance with international law. Despite many failures and excesses, the IDF at least paid lip service to trying to do that, as a policy. It's just that, the reality is, the rules are based on entirely different assumptions about how war is carried out. If they might lead to something resembling a "humane" war (hah!) when fought between, say, a relatively evenly matched France and Germany, they're quite ineffective at preventing a humanitarian catastrophe when you have a modern force attempting to siege an ultra-dense, militarized enclave run by an organization with no real hope of a conventional victory or interest in the well-being of its civilians. And so you end up with this absurd situation where the world witnessed, over and over again, unimaginably horrible things being inflicted on the population of Gaza, and the Israelis responding - if we're being charitable, not entirely unreasonably - "Why are you getting mad at us? We're following the rules!" It's just that, clearly, the rules are insufficient to match people's moral sentiments.
- ebbi 9mo ago
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glenstein 9mo ago
Not sure I understand the mass downvotes on this one. I didn't take it as endorsing the action but summarizing the rationale.
- mikkupikku 9mo ago
  People have had good reasons for downvoting the above, but it's unclear how many and what those reasons might be.
  - richardfeynman 9mo ago
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- baq 9mo ago
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- dathinab 9mo ago
  many somewhat intellectual(1), but evil(2), people love to play make pretend of just "summarizing the rational", "playing devil advocate", "just pointing out facts" to endorse their word view while having "plausible deniability" if caught (as they tend to know many people think their ideas are evil). Idk. if this is happening here but given how some threads devolved and other patterns common for such people emerged (red hearing arguments, false conclusions etc.) it looks quite a bit like it. This kind people (the also tend to argue endlessly not based on common sense, understanding of the real world and empathy (in questions of ethic/moral) but based on nit picking stuff like as if the word ist just a game you find holes in the rules with to "cleverly win". Because for them the world often is just that. But a lot of people find such behavior deeply deplorable. hence why if something looks like that it will get a lot of down votes even if it wasn't meant that way. --- (1): Non intellectual people try that too. But they tend to lack the skill to pull it off. Hence why it tends to be pretty obvious why they are down voted or similar. (2): Non evil people do that too, they just normally have the decency not to do so with topics like genocide. I also use evil here as a over-generalization but I have mostly seen that behavior with neo-nazis and other groups which are least fascist adjacent (and most times outright fascist).
themafia 9mo ago
> according to accepted conventions Who accepted those? And did they have a right to do so on behalf of _all_ of humanity? The conventions are a guideline. To use them as a blanket moral justification for your actions after the fact is extremely disingenuous.
cholantesh 9mo ago
A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Israel did not have a habit of drastically overstating their case and quietly walking it back after they end up killing more journalists and toddlers than active combatants in hospital bombings. Also if reports didn't deliberately conflate 'armed man' with 'Hamas militant' and euphemize about the 'Hamas-run Interior Ministry' like that one does.
- HappyPanacea 9mo ago
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  - ceejayoz 9mo ago
    > Israeli forces dressed in doctors’ scrubs and women’s clothes have killed three Palestinian militants in an undercover operation in a hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/30/israel-forces-disguised-women-medics-storm-hospital-jenin-west-bank https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/30/israel-forces-... Hmm.
    - HappyPanacea 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      - ceejayoz 9mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfidy > It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy… The following acts are examples of perfidy… The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status... (Assassinating a paralyzed patient in a hospital is also not typically - ahem - kosher. Even if you're in uniform!)
        HappyPanacea 9mo ago
        Why was it decided that feigning of civilian, non-combatant status is bad? because it led to death of civilians who had no part in the fight; pretending to be your enemy's civilians bring no such issue. Although assassinating a patient is also not kosher it less relevant to the discussion about use of uniforms.

MagicMoonlight 9mo ago

[flagged]

ceejayoz 9mo ago
Yes. You can't blow up entire hospitals and kill patients just because someone's storing stuff in the basement.
- JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
  > You can't blow up entire hospitals and kill patients just because someone's storing stuff in the basement I believe hospitals lose much of their protection under international law when they’re dual used like this. (There is still proportionality and morality.)
  - ceejayoz 9mo ago
    "Much of" and "all of" are very different things.
  - thrance 9mo ago
    I don't know how much weight the legalist argument holds here, seeing how the IDF has been acting extra-legally for a long while now, but anyway, I seriously doubt that each destroyed hospital and each destroyed school held terrorists. We've seen the IDF target civilians, aid workers and journalists too many times to believe them so easily.
- vibeprofessor 9mo ago
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- bamboozled 9mo ago
  I don’t like it but it was a war. October 7 was a declaration of war. I heard almost no one complain about the “war on terror” and I’m sure similar collateral occurred. For some reason people forget the pearl harbour event that happened before it all kicked off ? Not trying to say it’s fine to bomb a hospital, but it doesn’t seem fair to single out the IDF. Do you whine about Hiroshima ?

thrance 9mo ago

I don't know why you're using the past tense here, I was still trying to talk some sense into these people barely two days ago. It's hopeless at this point.

vibeprofessor 9mo ago
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- ceejayoz 9mo ago
  I linked to an article from an Israeli news outlet citing the IDF considering that death toll to be accurate.
  - vibeprofessor 9mo ago
    haaretz is a left wing rag, they are just as trustworthy as hamas health ministry
    - ceejayoz 9mo ago
      And the IDF? They're hardly the only ones reporting this. https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/30/middleeast/israeli-military-gaza-killed-numbers-intl https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/30/middleeast/israeli-military-g... > Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth quoted military officials Thursday as saying, “We estimate that about 70,000 Gazans were killed in the war, not including the missing.” Kan 11, the country’s public broadcaster, attributed the information to the Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT) and said there is now an effort to analyze how many of those killed were civilian or militant. And the IDF ain't contesting it: > “The IDF clarifies that the details published do not reflect official IDF data,” the spokesperson said. “Any publication or report on this matter will be released through official and orderly channels.” The spokesperson did not answer if the IDF held data about the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza or if such information would ever be released.
      - 9mo ago

expedition32 9mo ago

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mhb 9mo ago
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Muromec 9mo ago
Serbia wasn’t on a good terms with Big Genocide lobby
- baq 9mo ago
  I can’t believe I’m actually writing this: parent is an underrated comment.
- pjc50 9mo ago
  Even so, there have been all sorts of contrarians trying to defend them. Usually for weird anti NATO reasons.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
baq 9mo ago
It should be reminding you of something which happened a few decades earlier and was much, much worse than Serbia.
- scarecrowbob 9mo ago
  As a person living on the border between New Mexico and Colorado on land that borders reservations and who drives past the site of a residential school pretty regularly, I completely agree.
- Betelbuddy 9mo ago
  It could not be more clear - https://youtu.be/ZH142nb6Joo?t=144 https://youtu.be/ZH142nb6Joo?t=144

troupo 9mo ago

Two things are valid at once: - Hamas is a terrorist organization that planned and executed a mass terror campaign, fully knowing and hoping for the reaction. And boasting about it continuously and repeatedly. - Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.

ceejayoz 9mo ago
I am entirely behind this take.
guerrilla 9mo ago
You didn't actually address the actual point. Israel and it's defenders have been lying about the death toll this entire time and Hamas was not. > - Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks. This is also an extreme understatement. It's literally a genocide.
- troupo 9mo ago
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  - guerrilla 9mo ago
    The evidence that their numbers were accurate was just presented to you in this very thread.
  - cholantesh 9mo ago
    I take it that literally every NGO in this space and genocide scholars are all in on the lie?
  - yosamino 9mo ago
    here you go: > The Israel Defense Forces believes that the Hamas-run health ministry’s death toll from the war in the Gaza Strip has been largely accurate, a senior Israeli military official acknowledged on Thursday. https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-killed-in-war-as-claimed-by-hamas/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-kill... IDF claims 2/3 to 3/4 of killed are civilians. Now add in that around half of the population of Gaza is under 18 and also that half the population is female. I know that I will not convince you, you are a person who thinks "lol" is adequate terminology when discussing the killing of humans, but you also don't get to lie about things on the internet that even the party you support does not lie about. Please try and adhere to the standard of conversation that all of us on HN are trying have to elevate our discussion. Read it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

general_reveal 9mo ago

There is an alternate World Peace Force that just got started recently because I believe, as regimes change, the UN will audit what happened. The issue is there will now be another international body that will argue the other way. It’s not exactly 3d chess, but, it is chess. Purchase of US TikTok (chess moves).

mschuster91 9mo ago
Never heard (and couldn't find anything) about it. That "Board of Peace" you're most likely referring to is nothing more than your usual Trump grift - each country willing to join has to pay 1 billion $, and there have been 25 countries declaring their intent to join. Make up the math yourself, even if there will be legitimate expenses for PMCs, reconstruction and god knows what else, even skimming off 5% of that sum will still be a lot of money for Trump. And it would not be the first time he launches a multi-billion grift / money laundering scheme, remember $TRUMP and $MELANIA and I've probably forgotten about the other coins?
- SiempreViernes 9mo ago
  It's a bit more complicated: the peace deal Trump got passed through the Security Council did create a board in charge of monitoring some aspects of the Gaza process (I'm not sure on the exact details) so there is a real UN body in the mix. Then trump seems to have bolted on two or three entirely new and unrelated organisational levels "over" the UN affiliated board and declared himself king of all peacemaking. There is much that is unclear about how things will work in practice, but the reality is there's a potentially important part of the Gaza deal being held hostage by this board of peace, and that's why the Arabs joined.

LorenPechtel 9mo ago

[flagged]

ceejayoz 9mo ago
> All the hospitals are rubble? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_during_the_Gaza_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_d... "By February 2024, it was reported that "every hospital in Gaza is either damaged, destroyed, or out of service due to lack of fuel."" > And it's irrelevant anyway as hospitals lose their protected status when used for military purposes. A lie. https://www.icrc.org/en/document/protection-hospitals-during-armed-conflicts-what-law-says https://www.icrc.org/en/document/protection-hospitals-during... "Even then, humanitarian considerations relating to the welfare of the wounded and sick being cared for in the facility may not be disregarded. They must be spared and, as far as possible, active measures for their safety taken." "Notably, an attacking party remains bound by the principle of proportionality. The military advantage likely to be gained from attacking medical establishments or units that have lost their protected status should be carefully weighed against the humanitarian consequences likely to result from the damage or destruction caused to those facilities: such an attack may have significant incidental second- and third-order effects on the delivery of health care in the short, middle and long-term." > All the Geneva protections apply only to truly civilian things, not to things pretending to be civilian. This is an outright lie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions "The First Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded field soldiers, the Second Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded sailors, the Third Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of prisoners of war, and the Fourth Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of civilians during armed conflict" > Your video is paywalled but also irrelevant as it shows emergency symbols That is precisely why it is relevant. Israel's initial claim was that they didn't have any. From the article we're discussing: "After footage from Radwan’s phone was first published by the New York Times a few days later, the Israeli military backtracked on its claims that the vehicles did not have emergency signals on when Israeli troops opened fire, saying the statement was inaccurate." "The Israeli military then announced on April 20 that an internal inquiry into the incident had found the killings were caused by “several professional failures, breaches of orders, and a failure to fully report the incident.”"

nailer 9mo ago

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ceejayoz 9mo ago
> There was a seperate hospital that the IDF did bomb… There was more than "a" hospital. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_during_the_Gaza_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_d... "By February 2024, it was reported that "every hospital in Gaza is either damaged, destroyed, or out of service due to lack of fuel."" Are the satellites lying, too? https://www.nbcnews.com/world/gaza/satellite-images-destruction-gaza-strip-rcna236089 https://www.nbcnews.com/world/gaza/satellite-images-destruct...
- magic_hamster 9mo ago
  Lack of fuel doesn't mean it was bombed or destroyed.
- nailer 9mo ago
  See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47144722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47144722

grumple 9mo ago

[flagged]

joyeuse6701 9mo ago

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ceejayoz 9mo ago
> I’m not sure why the Palestinians… > That’s Hezbollah, Hamas… Sleight of hand happening here.
- richardfeynman 9mo ago
  There's no sleight of hand, just a horrifying reality. It's not just Hamas and Hezbollah. Civilians from Gaza participated in October 7 and poll after poll shows broad palestinian support for the destruction of Israel. Support for Hamas itself is waning in Gaza due to their brutality, but Hamas began the war with broad support for their genocidal aims.
  - ceejayoz 9mo ago
    And would Israeli polling about Palestinians justify their deaths, too?
    - richardfeynman 9mo ago
      Nobody is justifying Palestinian deaths, whatever that means. You don't know my position on the war, since I haven't articulated it here. I'm simply refuting your earlier claim that only Hamas and Hezbollah is dedicated to the destruction of Israel, while regular Palestinians are fine with it. Hopefully you have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge your earlier claim was wrong, and there was and is indeed broad support for destroying Israel and its civilian population among Palestinian civilians. And not just intellectual support, but concrete actions. Are you familiar with the "pay for slay" program?
  - prmoustache 9mo ago
    That is kind of a dishonnest take. You make sure to avoid mentionning that hamas is not only a terrorist organization. It is also an administrative body which has been bringing employment and services to a significant portion of the palestinian population while they have been constantly under strict embargoes, restriction and aggressions for decades. You can't really criticize people to support the only org that pretend to care about them while the whole world seem to be against their own existence. Most palestinians would just want to live a peaceful normal life but have been expropriated and forced to live in a ghetto. How convenient to feign surprise and indignation that same people would have resentment against those that have been making their life difficult and at risk. Israel created Hamas. You can draw a parallel to say, part of the colombian population that was supporting Pablo Escobar when the Medellin cartel was providing services that the government was failing to provide to the poorest classes.

richardfeynman 9mo ago

Hamas has weaponized every hospital in Gaza. By contrast, Israel has not dropped an aerial bomb on any hospital building in Gaza. What has happened is Israel has attacked hospitals with Hamas presence using ground forces, and they have dropped bombs on hospital grounds, but not in hospitals themselves.

ceejayoz 9mo ago
> By contrast, Israel has not dropped an aerial bomb on any hospital building in Gaza. An oddly specific claim. Hamas hasn't killed any Israeli with a turtle, either. I'm not sure why destroying hospitals with tanks, missiles, and sappers is better than "aerial bombs". Could you elaborate?
- richardfeynman 9mo ago
  Yes, it's specific. It's also a fact that is in direct contradistinction to the OP's claim. Israel has also not fired any missiles at hospitals, with one exception (a small diameter bomb aimed specifically at Hamas that caused minimal damage).
  - ceejayoz 9mo ago
    Again: > I'm not sure why destroying hospitals with tanks, missiles, and sappers is better than "aerial bombs". Could you elaborate?
    - richardfeynman 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      - osmsucks 9mo ago
        ...What an odd and dishonest framing of the problem. Do you define "hospital not destroyed" as "some walls are still standing"? Because an easy counterpoint to your claim is the Al-Shifa Hospital, which you will certainly agree cannot be operational in this state and thus can be defined as "destroyed": https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/%D9%85%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%B4%D9%81%D9%89_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B4%D9%81%D8%A7%D8%A1_%D9%81%D9%8A_%D8%BA%D8%B2%D8%A9_%D8%A8%D8%B9%D8%AF_%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%B5%D9%81%D8%8C_2025%D8%8C_DJI_20241221140139_0094_D.MP4.01_59_07_49.Still002.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/%D9%85%D... And this is one example out of the many: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_during_the_Gaza_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_d...

george916a 9mo ago

[flagged]

ceejayoz 9mo ago
> Haaretz is not an official Israeli newspaper, certainly not an IDF one. No such claim was made. Other papers back up the statement. https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-killed-in-war-as-claimed-by-hamas/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-kill... > Deliberately hiding in buildings and institutions that are supposed to be strictly civilian. Yes, this is not allowed. The rules of law still say you can’t do whatever you like as a result.

an0malous 9mo ago

Don’t forget the “all they have to do is return the hostages” line

TacticalCoder 9mo ago
> Don’t forget the “all they have to do is return the hostages” line So there's zero link whatsoever between Hamas executing 1200 civilians on Oct 7th, taking 200 hostages, and the following war (and war crimes) of Israel? Israel literally unilaterally began a war and committed war crimes without any act of aggression? And from the moment 200 hostages had been taken, many of whom died in captivity, everything was carved in stone and no matter what Hamas did, Israel was going anyway to war and to commit war crimes? Or did something happen on Oct 7th that triggered all this?
- harimau777 9mo ago
  The issue isn't whether or not Israel started it. It's the genocide they did once it started.
  - TurdF3rguson 9mo ago
    It's really about motive and targeting. Were they trying to get the hostages back or just kill people randomly? Were they targeting Hamas or aid workers?
- xg15 9mo ago
  If they wanted to go after Hamas, why did they employ methods of combat that were guaranteed to affect civilians, like cutting off the entire strip from food supply? Or the massacre that this thread is about for that matter?
  - BurningFrog 9mo ago
    [flagged]
- austin-cheney 9mo ago

YZF 9mo ago

[flagged]

awakeasleep 9mo ago
You should try to find a spelling or grammar error in his post, too.
ceejayoz 9mo ago
> So "all hospitals are now rubble" is a incorrect Sorry, you're right. Some have partially resumed operations with the (sorta) ceasefire. My bad.
tbugrara 9mo ago
You're absolutely right, only 95% of health services were crippled. Thanks, that changes the meaning of GP entirely.
- YZF 9mo ago
  This is an important distinction. Anti-Israeli propaganda keeps echoing the false narrative of all hospitals having been totally destroyed. The truth is that out of the 36 hospitals operating before the conflict 19 are still operational. That's a pretty far cry from 95%. There used to be 3000 hospital beds available and now there are 2000. There are also an additional 13 field hospitals. That's a very different story (keeping in mind that Israel has taken control of large areas and any hospital that used to be there wouldn't be in use either). Given the scale of the war and the documented use of hospitals for military purposes we have to expect there will be some impact: - https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields.pdf https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields.... - https://ngo-monitor.org/reports/hamas-misuse-hospitals-docs/ https://ngo-monitor.org/reports/hamas-misuse-hospitals-docs/ - https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/02/17/doctors-without-borders-admits-terrorists-are-using-gazas-nasser-hospital/ https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2026/02/17/doctors-without-bord...

rngfnby 9mo ago

It's important to note that the official death toll, acknowledged by the IDF, are of those whose bodies have been recovered. Nor has the genocide stopped.

Nexxxeh 9mo ago
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BurningFrog 9mo ago

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