The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
The New York Times describes it as such:
"Ali Bani Odeh’s wife and four young boys hadn’t seen him in a month and a half when he came home to Tammun, in the West Bank, from his construction job in Israel late on Friday to spend the last few days of Ramadan with his family.
On Saturday night, the boys persuaded him to take them out for a drive. Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, was coming, so there were new clothes to buy. The day’s fast had been broken, so there were sweets to be had, too.
They picked up fried doughnut holes in Tubas, saving them for later, but the clothing shop they went to in Nablus was closed. It was already past midnight, so they headed back to Tammun: Khaled, 11, the oldest, in the back with Mustafa, 8, and Muhammad, 5. Othman, 6, blind and incapable of walking or feeding himself, was in his mother’s lap in front.
As they rounded a corner slowly, a few minutes from home, young Khaled and Mustafa recounted on Sunday, their mother, Waad, 35, asked her husband to pull over and take Othman from her so she could get something from her bag on the floor. Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire."
The situation in the West Bank (and similar forces are at play in Gaza, too) remind me of what's wrong with American policing, at a far more extreme scale.
The people charged with enforcing the peace deploy lethal force with near impunity at the slightest "provocation" (a child throwing a stone, a car driving too fast); I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are, to operate in constant fear and perceive absolutely everything and everyone as a deadly threat to be neutralized. The soldiers themselves are raised in a culture with deeply racist undertones, making them all too ready to view any random Palestinian as a terrorist. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy that should be overseeing them works only to protect them. It's no surprise that things like this happen as often as they do.
Reform in the US is imaginable, I can and do believe, but it's much harder for me to imagine it in Israel - even much of the so-called left in Israel is too radicalized against Palestinians after 100 years of conflict, the Second Intifada, and October 7.
That's a huge problem (immediate, unjustified escalation to violence becoming the norm) and:
> The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
"I feel unsafe" has become the catch-all excuse for everything in the recent decade. It's used to justify everything from Karen complaining about someone's behavior in public to people calling the cops on someone for looking at them wrong, to making a scene on a public bus, to police officers jumping the gun and escalating to violence, all the way to war crimes. When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card? Like a magic spell that you can cast before doing something crazy. It's like that old "He's coming right for us" South Park joke, but instead of being a joke it has real life and death consequences.
The IDF is a foreign occupation army, not the police.
At least in the US, the police come from much the same communities as they patrol, and there's some sort of democratic accountability. Don't like the police? You can vote for local government candidates who will implement reforms.
In the West Bank, Palestinians are subject to arbitrary violence at the hands of foreign soldiers. The IDF is not there to protect Palestinians. It's there to protect the Israeli settlers who are taking Palestinian land. If Palestinians don't like how the IDF behaves, tough luck. Palestinians can't vote in Israeli elections, so they have zero say in the government that exercises ultimate authority over their lives.
This is a fundamentally different situation from policing in the US.
Their media is non stop hammering the citizen with scary Muslim stories since the beginning of the country, every day since birth, with a density as if nothing else ever happened in the world.
Deprogramming is possible. Just tell them it is impossible to argue it was their own idea. They know how hard it was rubbed in their face.
A certain amount of politics should/must be tolerated on HN, because you cannot compartmentalize technology, politics and morality.
No-one, not even people who say they like technology but do not care about politics, should be able to live their life wihtout knowing that we live in a world where six-year old blind children are murdered with automatic assault rifles.
(For the same reason that no-one should be able to live not knowing that jewish once were murdered in the millions in gas chambers.)
I have followed this conflict since Operation Cast Lead and the beginnings of the siege on Gaza.
Israel has been using enormous amounts of force against the Palestinian people since then, with death tolls of _at least_ 100 dead Palestinians for every dead Israeli.
For a very good account of life in Israel around the time of Cast Lead I recommend Guy Delisle, brilliant diary in comic form.
His partner was working for Doctors Without Borders, the Israeli Army refused to let them enter Gaza to help the people suffering under their bombardments.
Imagine, this is just one of thousands upon thousands of incredibly tragic and similar stories of the last few years (going back much further than October 7th).
Most such stories never see the light of day. Hind Rajab is one such story which got some reasonable exposure [0]. I suppose this one will as well get due exposure at some point.
But the vast majority of similar atrocities will just vanish in the sands of time.
The scale of these atrocities and our governments' support are the reason why this story should be on HN. We elect people who support this, therefore it's only right it follows us and comes up often, even when it's not convenient. That "inconvenience" (skipping a story in HN feed every now and then) is nothing compared to the oppression our democracies support
This kid will grow up and fight, and I don't blame him. Gaza is a concentration camp, West Bank is an apartheid. These people have the audacity to bribe and threaten our governments to do their nationalist ethno-state bidding in one hand while pushing the narrative that the west must not have any identity or borders in the other. They fund PACs that threaten 80% of congress with "we'll front an opposition candidate and BTW 97% of them win". They fund NGOs who offload the people they don't want onto Europe and muddy the political waters allowing both far left and far right extremists to thrive. When TikTok woke the kids, they bought it. When Epstein died they fought tooth and nail to cover it up. Oil is $100, they do not understand the pure rage and anger they have dredged up.
As an Israeli, this is an inexcusable crime by IDF soldiers. Appallingly, I expect them to receive no punishment. My country's government is criminally racist.
Eh, tbh I've given up. Can't point out the terrible things that the IDF are up to without being labelled an apologist, or terrorist supporter, or just getting a massively negative reaction.
Now I'm not one to fall prey to the conspiracy theories around Judaism...but like...is it not possible to say that both hamas and the IDF do terrible things? And that innocent civilians are caught in between, with the usual bad faith reasons of "they were hiding hamas members" aka the exact same rhetoric that Russia used when accused of something terrible that they obviously did, deflection and formal outrage.
The very fact I feel I have to tread so carefully with my comment is an indication that something is seriously, seriously wrong. I don't live in China, I don't live in Russia. But when speaking about Israel or the IDF, I feel like I do.
I am German. My government does not acknowledge the tragedy that has been unfolding in Gaza since the Hamas attack in October 2023. It’s absurd. Since then, Jewish people in Berlin who were demonstrating alongside Palestinians against the war in Gaza have been beaten down by the German police. In 2021, Esther Bejarano, the last survivor of the Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra, passed away in Hamburg. Whenever she commented on the culture of remembrance, the media was eager to report on it. Whenever she commented on the situation of the Palestinians, it was not reported in the media. People sometimes ask how it was possible that the vast majority of so-called ordinary people in this country back then could simply tolerate these crimes against Jews and look the other way. Now that should be clear to everyone. The Max Planck Institute in Rostock estimates that well over 100,000 people have been killed in Gaza. But nobody here gives a damn (at least not publicly). We’re even supplying weapons there. Everyone acts as if they’ve forgotten what was written in German newspapers about the current Israeli government when it took office, and as if there were no connection to what’s happening in Gaza right now. I am deeply and profoundly disappointed in the elected officials and public servants of my country. They have learned nothing from the atrocities committed by their grandfathers.
(The eyewitness) told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account.
I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired.
"No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
Regarding rules of whether or not this should be posted here - I think it's less about whether it's important and more about whether it causes arguments.
As the saying goes, religion and politics.
People are going to have varying and at times oppositional views to things like this, and frankly the rest of the internet is often flooded with those discussions, so bubbles isolated from them can be a positive.
We don't need to mourn the woes of the world every hour of every day.
I see people saying this story doesn't belong on HN. genuine question, if this story were about a german national would it be considered as political? is palestinian existence inherently more political than other peoples' existence?
I think the middle eastern conflicts are a tragedy. That said, this story does not belong on HN. As others called out this is a tech community and while there is sometimes an overlap with politics, it should at least be somewhat related like mass surveillance or AI being used for war.
HN is one of the most informative and least toxic communities and I’d appreciate if it would stay this way.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
These are not even a isolated or a new pattern that Palestinian people are enduring such atrocities by the rogue israeli regime with full impunity from the western super powers. In fact, the Palestinian people have been suffering such oppression and injustice everyday at the hand of zionist society on a regular basis since 1948.
In fact, here are some more such equally horrible actions of the israelis just in the recent days that you may not find on the western media ever.
Historically, the western news media have always downplayed or completely ignored the persecution of Palestinians at every cost. Now due to rise of social media and citizen journalism, the israeli and zionist atrocities are coming out every single day hundreds of times, causing the abysmal distrust in these media outlets across the globe. To salvage their credibility, the western media now picking up some stories here and there, yet use the very artistic and convoluted language not to damage the image of the rogue zionist regime as much as possible. Journalists with conscience, who could not take anymore such order from their bosses, kept resigning from these news outlets:
* The New York Times
- Anne Boyer: The Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry editor for The New York Times Magazine resigned in November 2023. In her resignation letter, she wrote that she could no longer work for the publication amidst the "reasonable tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering" and "verbally sanitized hellscapes."
- Jazmine Hughes: An award-winning staff writer for The New York Times Magazine resigned in November 2023 after signing an open letter by "Writers Against the War on Gaza." The outlet stated the signing violated its policies on public protest.
- Jamie Lauren Keiles: A frequent contributor and writer for the magazine also resigned in solidarity with Hughes after signing the same open letter.
* BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation)
- Karishma Patel: A presenter and journalist who walked out of the BBC in October 2024. She later published an essay in The Guardian criticizing the broadcaster's "obstructive editorial policy" and its decision to shelf the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack.
- Bassam Bounenni: A veteran North Africa correspondent for BBC Arabic resigned in October 2023. He announced his departure on social media, stating it was for the sake of his "professional integrity" regarding the coverage of the escalation in Gaza.
- Noah Abrahams: A freelance sports reporter for the BBC resigned in October 2023 in protest of the broadcaster's refusal to use the word "terrorist" to describe Hamas, highlighting the internal friction over language and terminology.
* Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)
- Nour Haydar: A political reporter in the Canberra bureau resigned in early 2024. She cited concerns over the broadcaster's coverage of the Gaza conflict and its treatment of culturally diverse staff as primary reasons for her departure.
* Reuters
- Valerie Zink: A Canadian photojournalist who resigned from Reuters in August 2025. She publicly denounced the agency's coverage as a "betrayal of journalists," specifically citing an instance where the outlet allegedly published unsubstantiated claims from the Israeli military to justify the killing of a Palestinian colleague.
419 comments
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-forces-kill-west-bank-...
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/p7mq5k5bs
The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
The New York Times describes it as such:
"Ali Bani Odeh’s wife and four young boys hadn’t seen him in a month and a half when he came home to Tammun, in the West Bank, from his construction job in Israel late on Friday to spend the last few days of Ramadan with his family.
On Saturday night, the boys persuaded him to take them out for a drive. Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, was coming, so there were new clothes to buy. The day’s fast had been broken, so there were sweets to be had, too.
They picked up fried doughnut holes in Tubas, saving them for later, but the clothing shop they went to in Nablus was closed. It was already past midnight, so they headed back to Tammun: Khaled, 11, the oldest, in the back with Mustafa, 8, and Muhammad, 5. Othman, 6, blind and incapable of walking or feeding himself, was in his mother’s lap in front.
As they rounded a corner slowly, a few minutes from home, young Khaled and Mustafa recounted on Sunday, their mother, Waad, 35, asked her husband to pull over and take Othman from her so she could get something from her bag on the floor. Suddenly, the boys said, they saw laser pointers shining on their family from every direction, heard their mother scream, heard their father say “God is great” — and then heard a deafening fusillade of gunfire."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/15/world/middleeast/palestin...
The people charged with enforcing the peace deploy lethal force with near impunity at the slightest "provocation" (a child throwing a stone, a car driving too fast); I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are, to operate in constant fear and perceive absolutely everything and everyone as a deadly threat to be neutralized. The soldiers themselves are raised in a culture with deeply racist undertones, making them all too ready to view any random Palestinian as a terrorist. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy that should be overseeing them works only to protect them. It's no surprise that things like this happen as often as they do.
Reform in the US is imaginable, I can and do believe, but it's much harder for me to imagine it in Israel - even much of the so-called left in Israel is too radicalized against Palestinians after 100 years of conflict, the Second Intifada, and October 7.
> The main justification floated is that the car was "going fast" and thus made the undercover Israeli soldiers feel unsafe.
"I feel unsafe" has become the catch-all excuse for everything in the recent decade. It's used to justify everything from Karen complaining about someone's behavior in public to people calling the cops on someone for looking at them wrong, to making a scene on a public bus, to police officers jumping the gun and escalating to violence, all the way to war crimes. When did "I feel unsafe" become this ultimate i-can-do-anything-and-avoid-responsibility card? Like a magic spell that you can cast before doing something crazy. It's like that old "He's coming right for us" South Park joke, but instead of being a joke it has real life and death consequences.
> I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are
IDF trains them.
https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/with-whom-are-many-u-s-polic...
> I wouldn't be surprised if IDF forces deployed to the West Bank are trained much like American police officers are'
American police officers ARE trained much like IDF forces. By the IDF! https://jinsa.org/jinsa_program/homeland-security-program/
At least in the US, the police come from much the same communities as they patrol, and there's some sort of democratic accountability. Don't like the police? You can vote for local government candidates who will implement reforms.
In the West Bank, Palestinians are subject to arbitrary violence at the hands of foreign soldiers. The IDF is not there to protect Palestinians. It's there to protect the Israeli settlers who are taking Palestinian land. If Palestinians don't like how the IDF behaves, tough luck. Palestinians can't vote in Israeli elections, so they have zero say in the government that exercises ultimate authority over their lives.
This is a fundamentally different situation from policing in the US.
Deprogramming is possible. Just tell them it is impossible to argue it was their own idea. They know how hard it was rubbed in their face.
No-one, not even people who say they like technology but do not care about politics, should be able to live their life wihtout knowing that we live in a world where six-year old blind children are murdered with automatic assault rifles.
(For the same reason that no-one should be able to live not knowing that jewish once were murdered in the millions in gas chambers.)
Funny way of saying trying to run someone over.
Israel has been using enormous amounts of force against the Palestinian people since then, with death tolls of _at least_ 100 dead Palestinians for every dead Israeli.
For a very good account of life in Israel around the time of Cast Lead I recommend Guy Delisle, brilliant diary in comic form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem:_Chronicles_from_the...
His partner was working for Doctors Without Borders, the Israeli Army refused to let them enter Gaza to help the people suffering under their bombardments.
Most such stories never see the light of day. Hind Rajab is one such story which got some reasonable exposure [0]. I suppose this one will as well get due exposure at some point.
But the vast majority of similar atrocities will just vanish in the sands of time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Hind_Rajab
Now I'm not one to fall prey to the conspiracy theories around Judaism...but like...is it not possible to say that both hamas and the IDF do terrible things? And that innocent civilians are caught in between, with the usual bad faith reasons of "they were hiding hamas members" aka the exact same rhetoric that Russia used when accused of something terrible that they obviously did, deflection and formal outrage.
The very fact I feel I have to tread so carefully with my comment is an indication that something is seriously, seriously wrong. I don't live in China, I don't live in Russia. But when speaking about Israel or the IDF, I feel like I do.
(The eyewitness) told us the family car had just turned left into his street, facing uphill, and had come to a complete halt before any shots were fired, contradicting the Israeli army account. I asked if he had heard any warnings given by the Israeli forces, or any warning shots fired. "No, nothing," he said. "The firing directly targeted the car. I just heard the woman in the car screaming. The little kids were crying before they were killed."
As the saying goes, religion and politics.
People are going to have varying and at times oppositional views to things like this, and frankly the rest of the internet is often flooded with those discussions, so bubbles isolated from them can be a positive.
We don't need to mourn the woes of the world every hour of every day.
HN is one of the most informative and least toxic communities and I’d appreciate if it would stay this way.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In fact, here are some more such equally horrible actions of the israelis just in the recent days that you may not find on the western media ever.
1. Either the illegal settlers or the israeli occupation force themselves set a Palestinian boy on fire in Ramallah: https://x.com/dillyhussain88/status/2033528694833127569
2. An israeli ran over a 6 years old in front of her home in Hebron while she was playing: https://x.com/anadoluagency/status/2033226719986069866
3. Another israeli settler deliberately ran his car over a Palestinian child in the Nablus: https://x.com/angeloinchina/status/2033402402062434589
Historically, the western news media have always downplayed or completely ignored the persecution of Palestinians at every cost. Now due to rise of social media and citizen journalism, the israeli and zionist atrocities are coming out every single day hundreds of times, causing the abysmal distrust in these media outlets across the globe. To salvage their credibility, the western media now picking up some stories here and there, yet use the very artistic and convoluted language not to damage the image of the rogue zionist regime as much as possible. Journalists with conscience, who could not take anymore such order from their bosses, kept resigning from these news outlets:
* The New York Times - Anne Boyer: The Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry editor for The New York Times Magazine resigned in November 2023. In her resignation letter, she wrote that she could no longer work for the publication amidst the "reasonable tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering" and "verbally sanitized hellscapes."
- Jazmine Hughes: An award-winning staff writer for The New York Times Magazine resigned in November 2023 after signing an open letter by "Writers Against the War on Gaza." The outlet stated the signing violated its policies on public protest.
- Jamie Lauren Keiles: A frequent contributor and writer for the magazine also resigned in solidarity with Hughes after signing the same open letter.
* BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) - Karishma Patel: A presenter and journalist who walked out of the BBC in October 2024. She later published an essay in The Guardian criticizing the broadcaster's "obstructive editorial policy" and its decision to shelf the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack.
- Bassam Bounenni: A veteran North Africa correspondent for BBC Arabic resigned in October 2023. He announced his departure on social media, stating it was for the sake of his "professional integrity" regarding the coverage of the escalation in Gaza.
- Noah Abrahams: A freelance sports reporter for the BBC resigned in October 2023 in protest of the broadcaster's refusal to use the word "terrorist" to describe Hamas, highlighting the internal friction over language and terminology.
* Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) - Nour Haydar: A political reporter in the Canberra bureau resigned in early 2024. She cited concerns over the broadcaster's coverage of the Gaza conflict and its treatment of culturally diverse staff as primary reasons for her departure.
* Reuters - Valerie Zink: A Canadian photojournalist who resigned from Reuters in August 2025. She publicly denounced the agency's coverage as a "betrayal of journalists," specifically citing an instance where the outlet allegedly published unsubstantiated claims from the Israeli military to justify the killing of a Palestinian colleague.