Please adhere to the guidelines, particularly this one:

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please adhere to the guidelines, particularly this one:

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Well, it's not like Hamas leaves Israel with another choice. Hamas embedded itself deep into civilian areas in a clear violation of international law, and ever since Israel left Gaza in 2006 they attacked Israel with all sorts of weaponry and terrorism.

For Israel, there is no alternative to fully eradicating Hamas. They cannot risk a repeat of 2006-2023. And it's high time for the backers of Hamas (especially Qatar) to realize that Israel cannot and will not back down this time. If the Arab states want to secure an existence of Palestine in any form, they got to step up and stop supporting terrorists.

(And yes: Netanyahu has got to go as well, there is no hope for a peaceful two state solution as long as he's in office)

- Israel has to eradicate Hamas as its existence is too much of a threat ("there is no alternative")

- Hamas has embedded itself in the civilian population in Gaza so that they are indistinguishable

- therefore, Israel must eliminate all Gazawis to guarantee its security

So.. Will Israel kill millions to avenge the deaths of thousands?

We are a highly technical community, we should be able to debug the situation and find edge cases rather than trivialize it.

True, I apologize for the misrepresentation; but reasoning is the same. At some point Hamas is too deeply ingrained in Gazawi society for Israel to perfectly excise it.

Hamas is the civilian government of Gaza and therefore includes firefighters, doctors, policemen, teachers. Israel does count them as members of Hamas and relies on statistical methods to select targets (ie you are on the same WhatsApp group as a member of Hamas, therefore you are likely to be a member, see the "Lavender" target selection program).

For a point of comparison, after Nazi Germany collapsed the Western allies had German civil servants fill questionnaires to assess their level of involvement; of 3.6 millions surveyed, just 1% were charged as "main culprits" (Hauptschuldige), whereas a third were designated as "followers" (Mitläufer), who basically contributed to the regime's crimes but nontheless got to keep their jobs after the war. I'd argue the allies were way too lenient on Germany, but the current Israeli approach (kill them all) is too extreme and will not work because its objectives are unrealistic.

> You also ignore the possibility of Hamas eventually giving up or some other diplomatic solution being reached.

I sure hope peace will be reached but Israel is waging a war without clear conditions of victory, leaving only total destruction of the enemy as their strategic objective. Think of the US trying to eliminate all the communist Vietnamese by compiling kill counts.

My impression is the war will end either when Gaza is drained of all of its population, or Israel tires of the war and reduces its stated objectives (probably this would involve a shift in government).

> We are a highly technical community, we should be able to debug the situation and find edge cases rather than trivialize it.

We can't solve everything with tech principles. Even in our field, probably the biggest thing separating a senior from a junior is humility and ability to connect with other people.

Guess why they're keeping the Palestinians on a run: to ransack the entire place for weapons caches or Gaza Metro entrances. And that's not eliminating the Gazan population, by the way.

I don't like it very much myself, but honestly, I do not see any other way of making sure Hamas does not rise up again.

> Will Israel kill millions to avenge the deaths of thousands?

Again: it's not about revenge any more, it's about preventing the repeat of 2006-2023 aka constant terror from Qassam rockets and other terrorism.

Let's say Israel finds all caches and tunnels, while not disturbing the population of Gaza (besides blockade, forced displacement and destruction of their homes), and then lets the population back in. Israel cannot tell Hamas militants from civilians, so some measure of Hamas will survive the event -- indeed, it might even reinforce anti-Israeli sentiment. What then would stop these leftover Hamas members from rebuilding whatever smuggling routes and weapon caches they had?

> Again: it's not about revenge any more, it's about preventing the repeat of 2006-2023 aka constant terror from Qassam rockets and other terrorism.

According to OCHAOPT Israel suffered 138 casualties on its own territory (ie excluding Gaza and the West Bank) from Palestinian attacks from 2008 to the eve of October 7. Would you say the current Israeli response (which itself inflicts terror) has been proportionate? Where would you place the threshold where it would no longer be an acceptable response?

The staggering number of civilian casualties, deaths and literal executions that have been inflicted in the name of peace must give the acting populace a pause. In the name of humanity. The place is just rubble now. How much more security could one country want? No one else has done something like this since the first world war.

Israel has enormous advantage over Palestinians and while I don’t mind them waging war with Hamas, indiscriminate bombing is not ok and never will be.

The thing is, under the rules of war, protected installations (such as residential areas or even hospitals) lose their protection if they are being abused by a warring party for military operations. Otherwise, it would be an open invitation for anyone to do what Hamas did - force the other party between either risking getting shot at or violating rules of war.

No one forced Hamas to embed themselves among civilians. They did that on their own.

Of cource Israel forced them to. "Force" means to use violence to let someone do certain things, i.e. if they don't do those certain things, they get violence. And looking at the records of the past decades, whatever Hamas (among everyone else in Gaza) did or didn't, Israel did violence to them. So whatever Hamas do, it's forced by Israel, since if they don't, Israel does violence to them.

On the other hand, no one is forcing Israel to bomb civilians right now. No one will do violence to them if they stop bombing.

You should maybe research where key millitary apparatus of the Israeli state is located. The headquarters of the IDF for example.

Can you say the same about Hamas?

The arguments you are using for attacking Palestinian infastructure and people are more than applicable to Israeli infastructure and population.

In international law people have the right to resist occupation through millitary means. In a small area under occupation then there is no means to create a millitary setup that matches what the 'good guys' consider to be legitimate.

If you want to be consistent then allow Palestinians to have a millitary, air space, airports, ports, navy, jets, nuclear weapons etc. And then you can fight them on equal terms.

Slaughtering the Palestinian population to get at Hamas is a war crime no matter the excuses on tries to make to justify it.

Aside from legitimate concern about the genocide in Gaza, there's also been a rise in good-old-fashioned antisemitism, especially among young people: https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/46-adults-worldw... . For instance: 40% of those under age 35 affirm that “Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars” while it is 29% for those over 50, a remarkable 11 percentage point difference.

Empires in all incarnations are pure evil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Russi...

Putin is popular and has personal interest in remaining so, because otherwise Russian elites will find themselves a new Putin.

Fact that other countries use the war for their own politics doesn't change it in the slightest.

Let me make this clear for you: Russia invaded Ukraine, and wants to erase the existence of Ukraine.

Russia steals Ukrainian grain and agricultural machines.

Russia destroys Ukrainian museums and any historical artefact related to Ukrainian writers.

Russia steals ukrainian children to raise them as russians.

Russia is engaged in open genocidal elimination of Ukraine. They speak about it openly, they write about it, they issue press releases about it.

There is no proxy there. Russia is doing all of this by themselves.

With that said I think that the pope dying is a subject worth discussing on HN.

It's unfortunate that it seems to be descending into a flame war about Israel though.

Hacker News was once a place focused on sharing news you wouldn't find most other places. Is it time to update the guidelines?

It's in keeping with the convention that stories that have "significant new information" are on topic for HN, and that includes major mainstream news stories when they first break.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22has+died%22

> Edit: I mean Ukraine war.

Yes but it's not clear yet who will win, and the church cannot afford siding with the losing side, especially that now it's weakest it's been since medieval times.

Edit parent meant Ukraine war, not the Israel conflict quote Pope had.

No matter who did it, it would still be 'evil'. There would be 'good guys' and 'bad guys'. Specially when the labels would be applied to dead children and innocents under rubble. Everyone keeps forgetting them.

Just because you think they would do the same to you, does not justify your actions.

I do not have much hope that Palestinians would behave “better” according to any sensible measure of the word.

I would conjecture that many governments would position themselves differently and that criticism would face less obstacles.

In the end it would be as much of a catastrophe.

It also dilutes the current and very real responsibilities of the 'effectors'. In saying 'they would have done the same' it becomes very easy to justify the unjustifiable.

> [basically] What if in a different world Hamas had all the weapons plus the backing of the US while Israel only had shoddy weapons?

In a hypothetical world where Usain Bolt was raised on Greenland and became interested in competitive gaming: would he have become the fastest human? Probably not. Different timelines.

This Sam Harris exercise is meaningless. The goal is not to measure the level of evil in the hearts of or . That’s impossible. Hypotheticals that have nothing to do with reality are also fruitless. The goal is to figure out what evil actions are being committed and stop them.

But the abuser only did those things because he was abused as a child for eight yea— What’s that got to do with the problem at hand?