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[flagged]
Why this, of all things? It's horrible, but look at where the school was, why did they put a school there? Who puts a school next to a military base? There's way darker stuff than people missing a military base and hitting an adjacent school by accident.
Most of the really important military targets in Israel, such as the Mossad headquarters, are in the middle of residential areas.
Yeah I was surprised to see that last year when they were targeted (and almost hit? or hit?) by Iran. Yikes.
> Who puts a school next to a military base?

These days they’re calling themselves the “Department of War”

The extent to which some people will twist to justify that which can not be justified is mind boggling.
What's the twist? I'm curious why this event was chosen, if for any reason. Personally I am frustrated by people building a school next to a military installation. It feels extremely negligent. I find that to be pretty unsettling and wish people wouldn't do that, because military installations are legitimate and predictable military tagets.
I fully agree, and think the international community is making a big mistake by not (re)formalizing international law and the rules of war, we should force all nations (including those not in conflict -yet-) to store school locations etc. as machine readable maps... we will never be able to roll back the clock and find out if Iran would have properly declared the presence of the school or not, ... but we can PREVENT SIMILAR SITUATIONS in the future, or at the very least have a mechanism which makes it crystal clear when one or more parties are playing very dirty games.

Wouldn't it be much nicer to live in a first world with more clarity, where it is immediately obvious which nation either knowingly bombed a kids school, or what other nation knowingly uses some poor children as human shieds...

But thats not the world we live in: apparently we live in the world where the event also happened, but where the rules weren't set up to provide such clarity a priori. And this second world is IMHO darker than the also dark first world.

> I fully agree, and think the international community is making a big mistake by not (re)formalizing international law and the rules of war, we should force all nations (including those not in conflict -yet-) to store school locations etc. as machine readable maps... we will never be able to roll back the clock and find out if Iran would have properly declared the presence of the school or not, ... but we can PREVENT SIMILAR SITUATIONS in the future, or at the very least have a mechanism which makes it crystal clear when one or more parties are playing very dirty games.

The problem with that idea isn't that a country like Iran would fail to properly declare all of its schools, it's that it would improperly declare military targets as being schools. No one could trust the maps.

If you really wanted to do something like that, the maps would have to be compiled by some neutral 3rd party with on-the-ground verification.

Russia would use that information to attack your schools. They don't care about war crimes in some countries, they see them as things you get bonus points for.
Oh Russians are bad… we all agree. But it wasn't them who bombed the schools in Iran.
What would be the punishment on nations that used the map to decide where to bomb first?
Did you know nearly every middle to larger sized US military base has base housing and even schools?

That’s the twist.

Downvote it all you want; I’m right.
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I think nobody was justifying what happened, just pointing out more than one party did unjustifiable things.
I mean...sure...but if you are going to be consistent you are going to have to criticize the Allied victory in WWII. There were literally piles of dead children in cities all over fascist Europe. We do not even have exact numbers because in some cases the death toll had to be estimated by weighing the ashes found in bomb shelters.
And the civilian bombings, explicitly named "morale bombing" (we called it "terror bombing" when the Axis did the same) were later found to be completely inefficient; a waste of trained crews and expensive bombers that did not contribute to victory at all. Or in other words,

YES.jpg

It's one thing to throw thousands of tons of unguided missiles randomly, and it's something else when you brag about the "all knowing AI", how your intelligence services are the best and how your missiles are accurate.
It turned out that the real dark stuff was the fiends we made along the way.
> Who puts a school next to a military base?

https://www.militaryonesource.mil/education-employment/for-c...

Americans it seems.

Also, in my country, there's a large shopping area next to an army base, very hard to spot which hangar-looking building is full of stores (or a single large store, or a trampoline park) and which belongs to the army.

I mean.. AI knows best, and we should trust it, even when picking targets, right?

[flagged]
That's horrible. If they get bombed, we'll know why...
Not every nation thinks it has a God-given right to go half-way around the world and bomb other nation's bases, let alone schools. The kids at Fort Bragg Literacywatsdat Junior High have more to worry about violence-wise from each other cf. some imaginary foreign threat.

Again, really difficult concept to grasp. Take some time.

You have a good message in general but here at hacker news we try to avoid personal attacks and that sort of thing. Just letting you know why you’re being flagged; but I do agree Americans are generally clueless.
In my defense, the likelihood that the US has schools on bases did occur to me. It's just I think you shouldn't put schools on or near bases and expect them to not get bombed, if not by accident. So I think it applies to all parties.

> Not every nation thinks it has a God-given right to go half-way around the world and bomb other nation's bases,

I would pause at this assertion. The US is a global thing, with global friends and enemies. Iran being one of our big foes is a knowing thing.