Evidence emerges of Israeli use of phosphorus weapons in Gaza

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/17/israel-gaza-phosphorus-civilians

by crocus • 18 years ago

37 85 18 years ago

guardian.co.uk

rw• 18 years ago

This sort of story is important; I don't care if we call this "Hacker News" or not.

[edit]: If you disagree, reply.

timcederman• 18 years ago

There are lots of important stories in the world, and each has its place depending on the news stream.

pg7• 18 years ago

Sometimes stories become big enough that they spill out of their ordinary stream. For example, there is a stream of news about Ebola fever that under normal circumstances is read mainly by infectious disease specialists. But if there is a really big Ebola outbreak somewhere, that starts to be relevant to everyone. What's happening in Gaza now seems pretty serious.

chaostheory6• 18 years ago

Well this story does touch upon a potential chemical being used and its effects - if you're looking for a yc news slant

colinplamondon• 18 years ago

I think a lot of the value of HN is the perspective that the community here applies to stories. While the story itself may not be specifically about startups or hacking, the perspective that people bring to bear is almost always informative and thought-provoking. Something may not be Hacker News, but that something may also turn into a great hacker conversation in the course of a thread.

I feel that with HN it's really about the evolving dialogue moreso than the news itself- the news is just a conversation starter.

tlrobinson4• 18 years ago

While I agree with you in general, in this case I don't think there's a whole lot of insight to be had, other than "is this illegal?" or "is this immoral?".

A good "standard" for Hacker News material might be "would Hacker News users bring a different/better perspective than the average [relatively intelligent] person?"

I don't really see that applying in this case.

swombat6• 18 years ago

There can be no useful and constructive dialogue on this topic, and therefore, whether or not it is called Hacker News, it is pointless to post it here.

It's important, certainly, but do you really think anyone here is not aware of what's happening in Gaza? So then, the only value of reporting this would be to create an interesting discussion - but on a topic so politically inflammatory no useful discussion will come out of this community, and no one will alter their behaviour in a way that will make any difference whatsoever to this conflict.

gommm• 18 years ago

I don't completely agree with you, from the current discussion on this thread, I found Maktab comment interesting.. There were also interesting link to the wired article on the point of view of the UN, a link to the use of White phosphore during the irak war. And, most importantly there wasn't any flame war (except between maybe between those who think that there can't be any constructive dialogue and those who think that there can be)....

Now, of course, I'm usually more interested in articles about startups, software, business and science but I also like Hacker news because I find the discussion interesting and the people well read. And reading the different points of view of people here on such a topic is interesting (as long as we don't get articles about Gaza every day, it's nice and as said it _is_ an important topic)

cabalamat• 18 years ago

I don't doubt that it is important. It still doesn't belong on HN. There are many issues that are important that don't belong on HN. If HN becomes a general news source, it will lose its usefulness for me, and no doubt for others.

Rod2• 18 years ago

"A woman described how on Tuesday Israeli forces "started to fire phosphorus bombs against the people"

Please. Since when is a civilian woman a reliable source of information on weaponry? Gimme a break! Bad journalism. What else could one expect from the Guardian?

gaius3• 18 years ago

Quite. WP weapons are very distinctive; the explosion they make doesn't look like anything else and they leave chemical traces. It would be easy for any investigator to bring back conclusive evidence if there were any.

Incidentally we used WP (grenades) during GW1.

Rod2• 18 years ago

I have seen photos of WP being used against enemy soldiers in Vietnam. It's quite a unique explosion, indeed. Interesting that WP was used in GW1. Hadn't WP and Napalm been banned before 1991?

I will believe in newspapers when they produce photos of WP being used against civilians in Gaza. Until then, it's nothing but fog of war, bad journalism and propaganda to me.

DenisM• 18 years ago

Or Iraq 2004:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_phosphorus_use_in_Iraq

gaius3• 18 years ago

And the video attached to that story is a trailer for Frost/Nixon! WTF!?

chaostheory6• 18 years ago

Apparently the UN also thinks it's phosphorus

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/01/yesterday-david.html

ComputerGuru2• 18 years ago

Forget civilian women. Doctors from the Red Cross, the Doctors without Borders association, the UN, and others in Gaza providing aid have described the burns on the affected victims, many of which arrive at the conclusion that these burns can only be had as a result of white phosphorus.

Take a look at this Creative Commons documentary by AlJazeera (forget their bias, just look at the facts presented by authorities in the video): http://cc.aljazeera.net/asset/language/english/gaza-white-ph...

Summary of clip:

Israeli bombing with bombs of white flames. Children’s playing with the phosphorus fires from the bombs burning. Women speaking about the bombs being dropped and the burns it has caused. Young man with burnt wounds. Man in hospital. Doctor Medhath Abbas speaking. Israeli bombing with flames. Marc Garlasco speaking about the use of white phosphorus. Voxpops. Wide view of bombs bein used. Women crying. Fumes from the bombs dropped. Children playing with the flames of phosphorus. Aymen Mohyeldin PTC

Dilpil• 18 years ago

A small nitpick: Al Jazeera isn't biased any more than mainstream American networks are biased. In fact, many right wingers in the Arab world call it a mouthpiece for the west.

Maktab2• 18 years ago

White Phosphorus is not a banned substance, nor is there anything obviously illegal about Israel's use of it in this conflict. It's certainly not a chemical weapon or any other sort of WMD, despite what some of the more breathless reporting would imply.

The only international convention which may regulate the use of White Phosphorus is Protocol III of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, however as WP is designed primarily to be used as a smoke-generating agent it falls under Section 1(b)(i) of the Protocol for most uses, which states: (b) Incendiary weapons do not include:

(i) Munitions which may have incidental incendiary effects, such as illuminants, tracers, smoke or signalling systems;

If used as an incendiary weapon, other restrictions in the Protocol might apply. These include a prohibition on using WP as an incendiary weapon directly against civilians or by air-dropped shells against military targets in heavily civilian areas. But again, this does not apply when WP is used as a smoke-generating agent and it's perfectly legal to use WP as either a smoke-generating agent or an incendiary weapon against military targets if they are not located within heavy concentrations of civilians, such as in an open field.

Israel (along with the US) is not a signatory to Protocol III of the CCW and so it's not subject to its restrictions in any case, but the IDF's military manuals instruct its soldiers to abide by its restrictions voluntarily. Thus far, there hasn't been any evidence that Israel has used it as anything other than a smoke-generating agent, which is absolutely necessary in this kind of urban fighting, or that it has intentionally been used as an incendiary weapon against civilians. In fact, the particular shell Israel uses (the US-made M825A1) is remarkable for having a much slower fall-time through the air than WP weapons of old like those used heavily in WWII, so it provides sufficient time for people to get out of its way and makes it a lot less effective as a weapon.

So all indications are that Israel's use of White Phosphorus is well within the accepted and legally-permissible bounds that govern its use. That does not mean that groups like HRW should not keep a strict eye on the IDF's use of it in case there are transgressions and targeted attacks on civilians, but it does mean that we need to stop this ridiculous tendency to regard any use of WP as an illegal and barbaric action. It's a legitimate weapon with legitimate uses and NGOs and the media should recognise that.

As an aside, the International Solidarity Movement used as a source by the Guardian is hardly an impartial source, having long been linked to Hamas and supportive of that organisation. Any video, witness interviews and photographs released by the ISM should be regarded as immediately suspect unless corroborated by other sources.

chaostheory6• 18 years ago

and to think that swombat thought "There can be no useful and constructive dialogue on this topic"

swombat6• 18 years ago

That wasn't constructive, it was destructive (i.e. it destroyed the premise of the entire article), and it wasn't dialogue, it was a monologue.

knieveltech2• 18 years ago

You would have an excellent point if the practice of using phosphorus flares was what was being reported. Unfortunately, the issue that's most heavily reported on is use of phosphorus-based artillery. I invite you to explain to me how reports from UN staff that WP-based artillery shells where used on several warehouses of aid supplies in the midst of a UN compound doesn't constitute use of WP as an incendiary against heavy concentrations of civilians. While you're at it feel free to discuss how WP artillery shells can be deployed in an urban environment without affecting "heavy concentrations of civilians".

anamax3• 18 years ago

> WP as an incendiary against heavy concentrations of civilians. While you're at it feel free to discuss how WP artillery shells can be deployed in an urban environment without affecting "heavy concentrations of civilians".

The rule isn't against the use of WP where there are heavy concentrations of civilians, it's against using WP as an incendiary where there are heavy concentrations of civilians. Using it as a smoke-generating agent where there are heavy concentrations of civilians is perfectly okay.

FWIW, the "laws of war" (and this isn't one as far as Israel is concerned) are a tit-for-tat thing. Unless Hamas has agreed to them as well, they're not relevant.

And, it's kind of hard to argue that the concern is about "bad acts" when comparable acts by Hamas don't rate a mention.

And yes, I'm looking forward to the discussion of proportionality.

brl• 18 years ago

Does this look obviously illegal to you? It does to me.

http://www.geenstijl.nl/archives/images/fosforgroot.jpg

I think this is a world record for number of different war crimes captured in a single photograph.

malkia2• 18 years ago

Now that's photoshopped!.... Just kiddin' off course - that's a real TERROR right there!

santacruz• 18 years ago

:) it's so lame

d0mine• 18 years ago

If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. </quote> http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

swombat6• 18 years ago

It's probably worth noting, now that this story has been on here for a few hours, that it has produced very little worthwhile discussion - just one mention of some interesting facts about white phosphorous weapons, and a bunch of flame wars about whether this topic is appropriate for HN. Imho that's a good indication that this topic was in fact not appropriate.

qw2• 18 years ago

Perhaps the users value their karma points too much. A lot of votes are based on whether the user agrees with the post, and not based on the value it brings to the discussion.

palish6• 18 years ago

Okay, sorry, no. This story is ridiculously Reddit.

"This sort of story is important; I don't care if we call this 'Hacker News' or not."

pg once linked to a Reddit comment by a passionate Redditor who refused to follow the rules. The gist of the comment was, "I refuse to post this Ron Paul story to the Politics subreddit because I feel it's just too important."

And now here we are about a year later and Ron Paul hype turned out not to be even remotely important, and so yes, maybe Israel is using phosphorous, or maybe the whole thing is staged to make Israel look bad, or maybe....! My point is, you can't know the whole truth, so please post this to some other community that values importance over intelligence!

tlrobinson4• 18 years ago

Slightly OT, but I'm curious about the criteria for making submissions "dead". This one was briefly dead, but reappeared after a few minutes.

Can posts be made "undead" by additional up votes, or was it explicitly brought back by a moderator?

ivankirigin• 18 years ago

An editor killed it, then an editor unkilled it.

palish6• 18 years ago

The story was explicitly brought back. You can upvote a dead story, but I'm not sure whether the submitter gains karma for that, and whether that causes the story to move higher up the front page. But the story will remain dead unless necromanced.

This seems like a good time to share some thoughts about killing submissions. The troubling aspects of the current "dead submission" implementation are:

- You can't comment on the submission itself, only reply to existing comments. I understand the motivation for this, but it feels too close to censorship.

- After a submission is killed, there is no way to visit it. It is good that dead stories are no longer clickable, but I wish there were some way to reconstruct its URL for the highly motivated.

- No reason is given for killing a story. Sometimes a reason is posted in comments, but it's not mandatory. Requiring a one-line justification from the executioner would be both educational and personal.

Also, given that this unabashedly-political article is apparently supported by Management, it seems really hypocritical to disable dantheman's long-standing account without warning, apparently for submitting one off-topic political story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=434666 ... It would be "important" if courts were using evidence despite police errors, right? Then why is Gaza "important enough" to be featured on Hacker News, but the US isn't? I wish I could be certain that there's actually a double-standard in play here, but it's not mandatory to provide a reason for disabling an account (or for killing a story), so there's no way to find out unless I ask. More mysteriously, dantheman's off-topic submission was never killed; his account was simply disabled. So what's going on here? Has he emailed yet?

On a personal note, I'm not looking to pick a fight. I'm just concerned about my fellow users and about the direction of the community. It would be great if dantheman's account wasn't actually disabled for submitting a political story, and all of this was just a misunderstanding.

pg7• 18 years ago

Are you sure it was dead? I just looked in the kill log, and there is no record of an editor killing it. The kill log is only kept per server invocation, but the server process has been running since yesterday evening, PST.

pg7• 18 years ago

I don't think this post is a violation of "the rules." HN is not supposed to be just about hacking, but about anything interesting to hackers-- anything interesting to the intellectually curious. There is not necessarily zero overlap between that and Reddit. E.g. Reddit users probably started posting earlier about the present recession, but when the matter became serious enough we started to have some stories about it here too.

As for the claim that this should be killed because it's a crap link, it definitely seems over the threshold for that. It's not just a bunch of random, biased bystanders who are making this accusation, but the UN (http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/01/yesterday-david.html). So it is at least something that has to be taken seriously.

palish6• 18 years ago

Okay. Thank you for taking the time to convey your reasoning. It's valid, and you care a lot about the issues in Gaza. I'm just concerned that newer users may use this to justify their own bad behavior, but I suppose that can be dealt with.

davi2• 18 years ago

There's a difference between things that are interesting to the intellectually curious, and things that are interesting to hackers. This topic provides a good example.

The economony is a big, somewhat hackable system. We elect representatives to steer it and shape it. When a big, important system's performance starts to degrade, that attracts the attention of hackers.

The Israel/Gaza war is much less hackable seeming. Important, appalling events are occurring, but to my mind they are not hacker news.

It's a subjective call. This is your site, and of course you are entitled to decide what is Hacker News.

[edit] Politics and wars are also hackable, in some sense, so maybe this distinction is less crisp than one would like. But there does seem to be a difference between using this site to talk about economics, and using it to talk about conflicts between nations or political parties. In the case of entrenched conflicts, discussion is very unlikely to change anyone's model of how the world works. The thing I like about discussion here is reading it and participating in it supports the evolution and refinement of my model of how the world works.

ntoshev• 18 years ago

This is politics, and it is not even news. Israel has been accused of using such weapons a couple of years ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_phosphorus#2006_Israel-Le...

Clearly it is not more important now than it was then. I am all for a broad spectrum of topics covered here on HN, but this is just a controversial topic that is useless to discuss here.

noor420• 18 years ago

Speaking of Israel, here is a video you folks may find interesting:

"Who controls the USA? Bush or Israel" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGroeDe4VYM

(posted earlier) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436905

axiom4• 18 years ago

Fantastic.

I'll start posting stories about Hamas storing weapons in mosques, schools and hospitals. And firing rockets at civilian centres in Israel.

Then we'll have ourselves an old fashioned reddit party! first one to invoke godwin's law wins!!

ksvs• 18 years ago

When Hamas kills 1100 people you can.

axiom4• 18 years ago

It's all so simple and one sided isn't it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hamas_suicide_attacks

Seriously let's have a debate on this. This being a hacker forum is the perfect place to do it isn't it?

malkia2• 18 years ago

Face it! Lots of people would just blindly support Israel, as much as Palestine... Problem is their distribution

johnyzee• 18 years ago

I think the fact that this thread has 70+ comments, yet has not turned into a political flamefest, but rather an intelligent discussion on whether it belongs, is an almost unbelievably strong testament to the quality of the HN community.

I say this as someone who has very strong views on the topic, yet hope and pray that issues this divisive will not be allowed to sow seeds of disunity in an otherwise harmonic and well functioning community.

tlrobinson4• 18 years ago

Except most of the comments are debating whether or not this sort of thing should be on Hacker News in the first place.

endtime• 18 years ago

HN is better than reddit because it doesn't have politics, plain and simple. Let's please keep it that way.

known2• 18 years ago

Everything is fair in love, war and business.

known2• 18 years ago

Governments must step-in and give incentives to Inter-Faith marriages between Jews and Arabs.

This will prevent terrorism.

Evidence emerges of Israeli use of phosphorus weapons in Gaza

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