Hacker News Reader

Comment by ForTheKidz | Hacker News Reader

Israel is using AI to murder people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_G...

It's not clear this is any different from just bombing random locations, but we're certainly already at the bad place. By the numbers Israel certainly seems incredibly bad at precision bombing, possibly the worst state ever to do it, for a state that is allegedly trying to.

View on HN

You mean the best. Hamas have an explicit policy of using human shields. It's damn impressive to get so low number of casualties in such an environment.

One of the recent strikes had a 1:400 ratio it seems. That is impressive, but in a very dark way.

No one has fought a war with the other side explicitly using human shields before, so you have nothing to compare to.

Also: citation needed.

Countercitation: use of humans as literal shields is a fairly old tactic employed e.g. by the Mongol Empire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_the_Mongol_Empire#...

Sorry, I should say no one has used their own people as human shields before. The mongols used captives from the other side.

If there is a 1:400 ratio of IDF soldiers to civilians somewhere, is it a legitimate target?

What do you mean civilians?

"The use of civilians as human shields is not novel.8 Evidence of the practice dates back to the American Civil War9 and the Second World War.10 The practice has also been documented in the Korean Conflict and the Vietnam War. 11 United Nations (U.N.) peacekeeping forces similarly faced attacks from weapon systems placed within civilian areas or hostile forces that used civilians as human shields, for example, in Beirut in the early 1980s and Somalia in the early 1990s.12 The human shields tactic was also employed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in many of its conflicts.13"

https://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/rubinste...

It's more accurate to say that Hamas are members of the population that is being ethnically cleansed.

Saying Hamas uses human shields is like saying that the IDF uses human shields because they embed themselves into the civilian populations of Israel and of Washington, DC.

If an IDF soldier kills a civilian it is investigated by the IDF. If Hamas kills a civilian infant, it is the entire point of their existence.

Not being able to see the difference between trying to avoid civilians and explicitly wanting to kill every single baby... well that's a problem.

Look, I detest Hamas but it’s really hard to look at entire cities’ worth of dead Palestinian civilians and a forced population movement of millions of people and say that “investigated by the IDF” is doing much. This is a long, brutal war and neither side is covering themselves in glory.

I’ve supported Israel’s right to secure itself for decades but this campaign has made me question the moral aspects more than anything else because they’ve been more willing to take the kind of collateral damage Hamas does, not be better, and that seems self-destructive for both the international consequences and the near-certainty that many young Palestinians, who until 2023 did not like Hamas much, have fresh grievances to fuel a desire for revenge.

The only grievance they ever needed was their anger that Islam does not cover the entire Earth. Or their grievance that Hindus or Jews exist.

But yea, I agree that Israel can't win this one. The west are squeamish about civilians and Hamas forces civilians to die. And Israel is placed inside what is a genocidal anti-semitic part of the world. It's just a bad place to place the state. Kinda like trying to start a Jewish state inside 1933 Germany. Even with a strong army, it's a very bad idea.

I can tell youre unbiased.

Did people say the same thing about radar technology 80 years ago, though? a new tech that filters through data to infer a possible combatant location... seems like the same abstraction, to be honest.

80 years ago we were intentionally firebombing European civilian populations. I don't think it's a comparable situation. Israel has no justification for engaging in total war tactics (or rather, the justification is contemptible and holds no water).

> the justification is contemptible and holds no water

id like to see you spell out what you think the justification is. just for clarity's sake.

The system names of “the Gospel” and “Lavender” I find very offensive as a Christian and they are very intentional. Orthodox Jews can be violently anti-Christian and will even spit on them to replicate the treatment of Jesus at his crucifixion, the naming is not coincidental, it’s to mock Christianity. The alliance between Zionists and Evangelicals is a very bizarre phenomenon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com