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by DoctorOetker 95 days ago
At the time of the bombing that school was not on Open Street Map, instead the military base (where the school was installed!) had been added a bit more than 5 years ago. Obviously international law requires targets to be thoroughly verified, which obviously didn't happen.

I am not blaming OSM for what happened, but just to avoid having a great FOSS project being used for unverified targetting: perhaps we should have stronger requests for verification for military domains around the world. OSM could contact the governments and ask if any non-military entities reside in that base. If the government refuses to confirm or deny, or just pretend there is no school, then OSM can bring this response up at a later date.

1 comments

> ... was not on Open Street Map

Would expect nothing less of the current administration than to use Open Street Map in their killing campaign (maybe Apple Maps should have been cross-checked)

Hey, I typically avoid the use of proprietary maps, but I am very interested in how Apple Maps knew there was a school before the bombing.

I am also interested in seeing verifiable proof that Apple Maps displayed a school there before the attack occured, and I certainly agree all available maps should have been checked, including past satellite imagery, which surely would have betrayed the presence of large amounts of children (from shadow lengths). As I said before, what happened there was inexcusable.

What is known is that Israel and USA divided the targets according to respective materiel proximity, which MUST mean that a common list of targets would have been maintained and then divided by proximity / weapon range. This means that in theory Israel could have selected the target, just like USA may have selected certain more northern targets, and then misplaced trust could have enabled blindly bombing a target selected by the other nation state.

In other words I certainly see it as a possibility that Israel intentionally shared this target pretending not to know about the girls school. They certainly can be suspected of having a motive: revenge for the killings of their children on the music festival. The genocide in Gaza apparently doesn't sufficiently quench their thirst for revenge, especially since everyone knows Hamas is effectively Iran-in-Gaza. From the perspective of Israel it's also an excellent way to ensure sustained conflict between Iran and the USA, and thus force the USA to continue contributing firepower in this escalation.

IF the above were the case, in my opinion the best move for the USA is to acknowledge as quickly as possible that while they bombed the target location, that this target selection was by Israel.