It's getting flagged has it should be, according to the hn guidelines that you should read:
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Look I'm far-left and pro palestinian but I do flag stories like that because there are places on the internet to discuss current world news/atrocities and hn isn't one of them ?
> Hamas released the last 20 living Israeli hostages who had been captive for just over two years.
> In turn, Israel freed nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees.
edit to add: I have expressed no opinion here, I'm just quoting the part of the article I was curious about after seeing pictures of the very small convoy
> rules do not apply to war, Geneva Convention notwithstanding.
I don't know what so-called international law says, but if you're going to try to apply rules to war, it seems pretty essential that they apply to all sides or no sides, otherwise you create an exploitable situation that's ripe for abuse. The reward for following the rules should be that the other parties in the conflict follow them, too. The punishment for breaking them should be that the other parties no longer follow them.
The rules allow for wars. They don't prevent killing every combatant the other side has. The two sides agree to have a war, then their combatants kill one another until one side gives up or runs out of people to draft as combatants. The rules prohibit killing various classes of noncombatants, with some situational exceptions.
The supposed force behind the Geneva Convention is the threat of being tried for war crimes after the dust settles.
If you are Putin, and can accept never traveling to a list of western countries again, that threat is toothless.
But if you are literally defeated (as opposed to being forced to retreat from Ukraine, the most anyone could hope for in the invasion), it could weigh heavily on you. Or not. Politics are stupid.
that’s a very manichean view. War ist all shades of (horrible) gray and you can have rules, a lot, none, everything is possible. Don’t know what you mean with “Geneva Convention notwithstanding” here, it’s exactly the kind of rules that _can_ exist in times of war – or be completely ignored on both sides.
It’s not because it’s war time that one should just resign, shrug and accept any atrocities. The less atrocities during war time, that more chances for a stable peace afterward.
I don't think one side would have randomly agreed to release without an exchange. Are you suggesting it would be better to leave the hostages of both sides in captivity just in case something happens upon release?
I'm not reading that Israel released every person of Palestinian descent from their prisons. In another source I see "agreed-upon number of Palestinian security prisoners" which apparently is the 2,000 we heard about today. In another source I see that 9,619 people in Israeli prisons in December 2024 were Palestinian.
It sounds to nme that Israel had freedom to choose who would be released or would stay in prison. That there was a number of people negotiated without specifying individuals, and that the number was about 20% of the total prisoners.
You‘re reading strange things into my factutal statement that Yahya Sinwar was part of the last big exchange. He‘s been in jail for abducting two Israeli Soldiers AND MURDERING FOUR PALESTINIANS.
“factual” is correct, but it’s anecdotal, not a statistic and hence bears no relevance here. Your comment is phrased in a way that implies this past anecdote should dictate future decisions, I disagree.
How is this not relevant? Israel doesn't really want these prisoners because they cannot extort them like Hamas. Although they did release some quite horrible terrorists here. I guess they just want them to go away.
sorry, my mistake, it’s relevant, but anecdotal. It is not relevant for *decision making*. One should not make decisions based on individual cases and anecdotes, it should be based on data/stats.
Even if building a statistic, including this one case, „let’s not relieve any palestinian prisoners, ever“ is not an option. What about „there could be a future terrorist in the midst of the prisoners, hence let’s let the remaining israeli prisoners die, because keeping that one terrorist will save more than 20 lives“? Do you see how problematic sacrificing people’s lives based on a some hypothetical is? And I am not even mentioning the freedom of all other non-terroristic palestinians…
But I guess, after so much death, so much pain, I don’t expect hate to become less any time soon. Maybe one day. Germany and France killed millions of eachother’s civilians yet managed to make peace one day – the big difference is, both had clear borders and autonomy.
Feel free to add your high-quality data about mass amnesties of islamic terrorists to the discussion! I'm curious about what you can come up with and keep an open mind to be convinced by your statistical rigor.
But until then, I'd like to remember you of something most people asking for statistical evidence often forget: it's nice to be right if you have statistics available. If you don't have any (viable) statistics, it's much more important to not be wrong than to be entirely right: you don't need to have any data to know that jumping out of an airplane at an altitude of 2km without a parachute is a very bad idea. You also wouldn't ask for a double blind peer reviewed study that confirms a 100% death rate of people doing that. And you wouldn't dismiss the one story about the one guy having done the jump as "anecdotal".
I never said I have data, I said what you are mentioning is anecdotal.
I know it’s easy to be a critic, but I think it’s important to remember what is statistically relevant and what is not. Might sound very harsh and cold considering the topic we are discussing, I understand this.
The analogy of jumping out of a plane is really a false equivalence: there is logical, physical, reasoning, as to why that would be a bad idea. Statistics is not the only option. Extrapolating a decision affecting hundreds of thousands of people from a single occurrence is, in my opinion, never a solution.
It’s a difficult question. Hamas’ incentives are _not_ aligned with the well being of Palestinian civilians.
If we see another terror attack in several years one may have to question the reason of this line of thinking.
The discourse of this conflict has had a lot of people saying the genocide of Palestinians is bad (true!) but then doing this awkward hand wavey dance of trying to avoid having to confront that Hamas is a violent terrorist cell planted by a foreign government (Iran) rather than a freedom fighting force that cares about the general populace.
Yes, it's horrible and complicated, and there is no "good" solution.
But I believe that protecting innocents is morally superior to punishing the guilty. Innocent Israelis and Gazans are being freed, along with (probably) some despicable people.
But acting morally may yield strategically and utilitarianily harmful outcomes against bad faith adversaries.
Personally I think this was a geopolitical blunder of Israel and western interests. The net outcome is favorable. But it could have been much more favorable. I suspect we’ll see a gradual reconstitution of Iranian based power.
The West Bank continues to be under Israeli military occupation and constant annexation, and Gaza is still a giant dystopia controlled partially by Israel and partly by Hamas
It should be positive for both Pro-Israelies and pro-Palestinians.
Really educating to see where the narrative will shift now.