Comment by hersko
Comment by hersko 3 days ago
If it was targeting pagers used for Hezbollah's internal communication then it would be justified, no?
Comment by hersko 3 days ago
If it was targeting pagers used for Hezbollah's internal communication then it would be justified, no?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hezbollah_confl...
No one serious disputes that Hezbollah opened a new conflict with Israel in 2023. This is occurring simultaneously with the Hamas-initiated conflict.
> it would be justified, no?
It's never justified to trigger explosives when you have no idea where said explosives are.
What if the dude if hugging is kid/wife/mom ?
What if he's picking up his kids from school, visiting the local food market, &c.
What if he's driving and end up crashing in a bunch of people walking on the sidewalk
When you drop a bomb you at least know where it's going, here you have no idea.
Look at what's going on in Ukraine, if you can't tell a good from a bad shit you have to get your eyes checked. Hitting a column of tank isn't the same as targeting a civilian building
Wars are always bad and there will always be war crimes on all sides, it doesn't mean that everything is equal
> In WW2 20% of US bombs fell within 1000 feet of their target, which were often in densely populated areas. Its only modern technology that lets us know where its really going
Is this supposed to be a gotcha ?
WW2 is the reason we updated the Geneva conventions to protect civilians lol
Somebody shared videos: https://x.com/warfareanalysis/status/1836041245996584983/vid... Looks like bystanders are fine.
> What if the dude if hugging is kid/wife/mom ?
Then they also die/get injured. Being in close contact with a terrorist is a dangerous pass-time, and armies targeting foreign threats need to accept some level of collateral damage. In this case, we have thousands of injured terrorists, with hundreds dead, and an additional fraction of those numbers being non-military targets (civilians). It's certainly unfortunate and unpleasant, but this is an excellent ratio.
Let’s assume you accurately determine which thousand pagers are going to which people, and that you accurately determine which thousand are Evil Hezbollah Members and definitely not someone’s cousin or whatever.
Regardless of these (tenuous) assumptions, if you detonate a thousand small bombs, it seems fair to also assume that some of them might not be on the bodies of their intended targets, but rather outside on the counter by the shower or over by the car keys or something.
So no, I’d say this is a pretty tough sort of operation to justify.
The pager isn't top secret.
Pagers employ unencrypted communications and (because they are receive-only devices) use a broadcast system to deliver messages to the pager. [0] Israel is publicly very, very friendly with at least one very wealthy Five Eyes country, and may have less-public support from many other wealthy and technologically sophisticated countries. If Israel happened to not have the domestically-developed capability to get a copy of every single page sent in an area of interest, they could ask their good buddies at the NSA, CIA, or other such global intelligence agencies to shunt that information to them in a timely manner.
Given the organization's sophistication, there is absolutely no way that Hezbollah believes that the contents of their pages are secret. The worst-case outcome of a lost pager is that the organization temporarily loses convenient contact to the person at the other end of that pager. While this could potentially be operationally disastrous, it's more like losing your service weapon than it is leaving the plans for D-Day on a public bus.
These are not some random rednecks at a west Virginia Walmart. They're professional soldiers of a military organizations handling a secure communications device.
Not sure if you've ever been in the military, but when I was there, if I had left a secure device or my gun somewhere out of sight/reach and someone else got to it, I'd get in a ton of trouble and probably go to prison.
It's war. Much worse things have been happening in this war already (e.g. Hezbollah explicitly targeting Israeli residential areas and killing civilians). By contrast this action seems much more targeted and justifiable.
If your bar for taking action is "there can't even be a chance of hurting a civilian", then your army can't do anything, and your entire civilian populace is slaughtered when it's taken over by the enemy intent on destroying your country.
Would it be moral to make people who work in israeli army explode even when not in uniform?
Yes, they are belligerents in a battle.
I am more pro-Israel in these conflicts, but you are a military target or you aren't, you don’t leave the military when you remove the uniform, only when you agree to leave the military.
In fact it is a common tactic of Hamas, when it is discovered they have passionately murdered civilians, that they immediately claim that it was an IDF soldier. Such as the case with Shanni Louk
I admire the clarity of your moral compass. But consequently if that is ok, then targeting reservists is also ok, right? And since almost everyone in Israel is a reservist there are really no civilians in Israel only military targets, right? So, Hamas an Hezbollah blindly firing rockets are actually striking military targets with surgical precision
The problem for your “argument” comes when you apply the harsh light of actual fact to it. Israel has 169,500 active personnel and 465,000 reservists. This represents 6.6% of their population. Furthermore, those age 18-40 can be called up in a national emergency just as most countries can call up a draft. This is not the same as reservists and still represents a fraction of the population.
Attempting to pass off as fact that everyone in Israel is a reservist and are therefore legitimate targets is simple disinformation. You already knew that, though. But hey - you had a point to make, right?
I probably haven't used the right term, I thought reservists are people who went through military service. This article (with obvious agenda) https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-myth-of-compulsory-militar... says that the enlistment rate plummeted from 75% to 50%.
This more recent (and accurate?) article based on actual numbers puts it at 69%: https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/art...
So, >every other person in Israel has gone through military service. If you compare that to "collateral damage" when killing Hamas' terrorists, shooting rocets blindly is more accurate
That's a weird question. It's war. There's no morality involved. But if your question is "is it within the norms of war to strike service members when they're not in uniform", then the answer is emphatically "yes".
> It's war. There's no morality involved.
There's a little.
That's why countries make agreements such as the Genocide Convention, Geneva Conventions, etc. There are (meant to be) strict consequences for breaking these rules. (I noticed you change your wording from 'rules' to 'morality' - still wrong.) Breaking these rules is why we have the concept of 'war crimes'.
The word 'war' also implies two armies battling, rather than an invasion following occupation. In any case, the Geneva Conventions apply in all armed conflicts.
Since the Geneva convention still exists*, no, it is not "within the norms of war to strike service members when they're not in uniform". See Protocol I.
Targeting off-duty or non-uniformed service members violates both international law and the core moral principles of warfare, as outlined by the Geneva Conventions and other international agreements. Denying this isn't just factually wrong, it's deeply immoral.
* Along with the Principle of Distinction, Proportionality, Non-Combatant Immunity and Civilian Impact, etc.
This is likely to settle out as one of the most surgical non-infantry attacks in the history of modern warfare, and because Israel is involved, 20% of the commentary is about how the people who set it in motion belong in the Hague. Think about what that says to people weighing the (correct!) claims that Israel has committed widespread war crimes in its occupation of Gaza.
Why don't you hold Hamas to these same standards?
edit: Also, can you cite anything to back this claim?
> Targeting off-duty or non-uniformed service members violates both international law and the core moral principles of warfare, as outlined by the Geneva Conventions and other international agreements.
I don't mean just it's in one of the articles of the Geneva Convention I mean where you're making your inference more specifically.
And Hezbollah? Firing rockets at civilian targets is at least as much a violation of that as firing pagers at off-duty personnel is.
I would argue that this attack is more targeted than firing rockets over the border into civilian population
Hezbollah would nuke Israel if they could. You think they're above pager bombs? They just cant execute
If it was targeting pagers used for Hezbollah's military wing then yeah, kind of justified. But Hezbollah is bigger than that, and seems this attack targeted the whole organization, not just the one that is commonly designed a terrorist organization.
I guess for an American comparison it's a bit like attacking all republicans for the actions of the Proud Boys or any other militia.