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I have no words. You really have no idea what those words you read mean, do you?

No, denying work permits is not a war crime. You took the quote out of context and have no clue what it refers to. No country owes it to another country to provide their citizens (or non-citizens in this case) with work permits. There's no crime in cancelling work permits. But it is a punishment. Similarly, when a country enacts a policy of tariffs on imported goods, visa restrictions etc. They apply indiscriminately to all the citizens of the country against which the measures are applied, yet these aren't even crimes, let alone war crimes!

To sum it up for you: not all punishments are crimes. Thus a collective punishment doesn't have to be a crime, let alone a war crime. Being collective rather than individual changes nothing about the nature of this relationship.

> Pillage is prohibited.

Pillage of what? Gaza is a downtrodden hellhole. Life there is destitute and miserable. Unlike you, I've been there. There's nothing Israelis want from that place. There's nothing Israelis could possibly use from that place. It's a huge ghetto dumpster, revolting in every respect.

I've been to Gaza because I worked for a grocery store in Ashqelon, and we used to deliver some produce from there. The cabbages and the cucumbers to be specific. They were awful. Nobody would buy that stuff. My understanding was though that this must've been some coverup for buying weed or similar. I was too low on the totem-pole for this info to be shared with me. But, even if it was weed, it wouldn't be coming from Gaza! Lol. It'd be coming from Sinai, transiting Gaza.

> Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.

What does this have to do with cancelling work permits? Nobody owes Gazans work permits to begin with. That was a humanitarian measure to try and get these people to see the light. No sane Israeli wants to employ Gazans, but the government tried to encourage this cross-border employment in hopes to sooth the tensions. Guess that didn't work well. In Hebrew, the expression "Arab work" is similar in spirit to "Chinese quality" in English. If your house is falling apart months after renovation because the workers stole concrete, painted over spots that should've been removed prior to painting, put the breaker room under the leaking sink -- that would be described as "Arab work" (even if not performed by Arabs).

This results from the almost ubiquitous attitude among Gazans employed in Israel, where they'd do as little and as bad of work as possible, just to stick it up to people who hired them. Kind of similar to how black slaves sabotaged their work for white masters in the US etc. Except Gazans aren't slaves. They were given these jobs as a means to help them accumulate wealth and possibly develop some better understanding of their neighbors...

> After almost two years, there are approximately 11 500 civilians killed in Ukraine,

Again, you are pulling your numbers out of your rear. Mariupol alone suffered close to 30K civilian casualties. But Ukrainian reporting is honest, unlike that from Gaza. Ukraine doesn't have the means to count their dead. And they don't disguise their projections, even though they might be very close to reality. Unless they can actually find the body and establish the cause of death, they don't report it as death.

Also, Ukraine can fight and it protects its own citizens. And it has a very good reason: Russians will not hesitate to torture and abuse its population. Gazans cannot fight. Their strategy is to bleed on the enemy, and they go cry to the international community about how bad their enemy had beaten them. Also, Israelis don't torture the enemy, at least not systematically the way Russians do. And I say this because I served half a year in Israeli military prison in Tzrifin. It's not a five-star hotel, but if I were in a fight against Israel, and my situation looked dire, I'd go to the prison again. It sucks, but it's livable. Also, in my first month in Tzrifin I was in the "alef" division (that's the place for the soldiers who want to return to service and generally obey the orders etc.). Alef would be sometimes sent on the guard duty to Makhaneh 16, which is the military prison for the terrorists. At least was at the time. And, yes, it's a prison, it sucks, but it's nothing like Russian prisons...

In a similar situation, but against Russia: I wouldn't hesitate to shoot myself. The depravity and torture performed systematically by Russians is on a completely different level.



I have provided links for every single claim I made, including the numbers of dead in Ukraine and the articles of the Geneva convention that I quoted verbatim and in its entirety.

I didn't say that refusing work permits constitutes collective punishment. The mass destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza, including, again, all hospitals, high schools, university, most schools, kindergarten etc. constitute collective punishment in a form that is a clear crime under the Geneva conventions. See the ICJ finding of plausible genocide if you want to see this from actual international law judges, not some rando on HN.

Thanks for the lesson in anti-Arab racism among common Israelis though. And for confirming that Gaza was already a miserable ghetto that no one would want to live in under the "benevolent" Israeli occupation.


Your links are worthless because you don't understand what they say...

Anyways, here's another example, which was in the news right now. Dutch Muslims attacked Israeli soccer fans. This is an example of collective punishment because people who probably have nothing to do with what's going on in Gaza have been beaten, ran over by cars etc. in a fit of collective punishment.

And while this is definitely a crime, it's not a war crime, because it wasn't committed by soldiers and the Netherlands and Israel aren't at war.


The level of sophistry here is amazing. The Dutch are neither at war with Israel, nor occupying them. The actions of some Dutch civilians against some Israeli tourists can not constitute war crimes, because these are not combatants. They are crimes, make no mistake: the penal system of the Netherlands will hopefully see to that.

In contrast, Israel is at war with Gaza, and all of the actions I am discussing are official military and government actions. Cutting off the supply of power and water, cutting off food and medicine, deliberately bombing civilian infrastructure: these are all explicit actions taken by Israel as retaliation against the civilians of Gaza in a form of collective punishment, as their leaders gleefully proclaim internally. And they constitute undeniable war crimes because of this.

Hopefully in time the ICJ will receive enough support from the EU to actually prosecute this obvious violation, though my hopes are slim: the pressure from the USA to shield Israel from international law is immense.


You just repeated what I wrote, but tried to make it a counter-argument? That makes zero sense...

But later you demonstrate that you have no effing clue, not even the basic outline of what can possibly qualify to be a war crime. And this was the whole point: you don't understand what the words you are so eager to use mean.

Now, while people at ICJ aren't impartial in this case, they aren't as dumb. So, this is why, for example, they only charged Netanyahu and Gallant with war crimes. Even though, for example, Smotrich would be a lot more fitting their obviously politically-motivated narrative. And the reason for this? -- A technicality! Only a military person can commit a war crime. Netanyahu and Gallant are military, and that's why they are on the file, while Smotrich or any other minister isn't (and couldn't possibly be, because that'd be just too much to laugh at).

So, you saying "government actions [...] constitute undeniable war crimes". Is just an example of brain rot. You literally don't understand what a war crime is. A civilian, no matter how ruthless, no matter the extent of their actions, cannot technically commit a war crime. It's impossible by definition, in the same way how triangular squares aren't possible. War crimes have "war" in the names specifically to separate them from other kinds of crimes based on the criteria that they are committed by military. That's the whole point of the term.

And, similarly to how you have no clue about the language you use, you have no clue as to what happens on the ground in Gaza, who's responsible for what kind of bad stuff, the extent of it etc. You are just regurgitating the talking points you've learnt from people who you feel politically aligned with, but you have no practical way and no motivation to figure out the true state of events. And, you'll continue to believe whatever makes you feel more comfortable with the group of people you want to be associated with, no matter what anyone from outside that group would tell you. So, convincing you is pointless. You need to at least be ready to try to figure out why people might disagree with you, but you are still miles away from there.


"The government" is an entity controlling the military. You can split hairs and discuss which specific people in the government are actually liable and which are not, but the general point I was making was more broad: Israeli leadership is clearly committing war crimes in Gaza, and it is very easy to argue that they are beyond that, that they are carrying out a genocide. Even you admit that the prime minister and minister of defense could be liable for war crimes, so saying "the government" is not some huge generalization. Especially when the rest of the government is very much aligned (or even more extreme) than those two.

And in relation to who is biased or basing their views on some obscure and highly biased sources: it's probably the side of the conversation who is denying what, again, every single international organization who has sent people in Gaza is saying. There is absolutely no debate from any credible source that what is happening in Gaza is wanton destruction on Israel's part.




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