Palestinian boy, 12, describes how Israeli forces killed his family in car

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.

For those wondering, it is verifiable story, it is covered as fact in Israeli newspapers:

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...

Collateral damage is inevitable in any war. We don't need a HN post every time an innocent person dies in one of the wars in the middle east.

An eyewitness account from the article:

(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."

It’s hard not to wonder whether better technology could someday help stop tragedies like this.

I honestly think the gaza war was largely continued as a distraction from the true atrocities Israel has been committing in the west bank. By getting all the news to focus on Gaza Israel could trot out reasoning that many people accept, but the state sponsored terrorism they are undertaking in the west bank is the kind of stuff that is truly hard for even ardent Israel supporters to overlook.

Reminder that whatever you think, war, terrorism, questions of "the right/wrong target," etc are all insperable from AI and technology these days. These soldiers were where they were for concrete reasons dictated across vast automated networks; their choices of engagement are insperable from the tools either side (army and occupied population to be clear) here has or is perceived to have. War is simply many different "user stories," to put it coldly, and there is ethical and/or practical reasons, as technologists/scientists/academics, to see it that way (even if the goal is to just know thy enemy).

This is all why Anthropic is now a "supply-chain risk", why Thiel and Musk are particularly powerful persons-qua-tech-CEOs, why embedded microcontrollers getting so cheap (or whatever) enables drones instead of suicide bombs.

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?

If anything, it's refreshing to see something that isn't about the latest apple / llm / current techbro trend bullshit

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To add something other than the totally predictable on this thread.

- Surprising (if you didn't know any better) how light-skinned all the Palestinians are in this article. I bet the average soldier in the involved IDF unit was darker. Only relevant because the conflict is often portrayed in terms of European Colonialism or US race dynamics.

- Good that Israel is investigating this, seems like it's a thing they don't want (though perhaps are less eager to prevent this sort of incident at additional risk to themselves now vs years earlier.) Hard to imagine that any loss of innocent Israeli life would be investigated rather than celebrated from the other side.

- If I were Israeli, I would be bemused and flattered by the attention and relevance the country seems to have from random people on the internet with no skin in the game. It would be wild to find random stories about an incident involving New Zealanders and Maoris (or whatever) on the front page, yet here we are.