Comment by tptacek
Comment by tptacek 3 days ago
Who uses pagers? Aid workers carry phones. The pagers are deliberate opsec move for Hezbollah.
Comment by tptacek 3 days ago
Who uses pagers? Aid workers carry phones. The pagers are deliberate opsec move for Hezbollah.
Presumably Lebanese DevOps on-call isn't sharing pagers from a shipment to Hezbollah from Iran.
Hezbollah is essentially a government entity in much of Lebanon, they totally would. Hezbollah runs schools, hospitals - it's easily the largest social services provider in large swathes of Lebanon. That's why it enjoys so much support, in many ways it was a much more competent alternative to the failed Lebanese government.
People who work in schools in Lebanon carry smartphones like everybody else. Pagers are obsolete. Some doctors may carry them because they work when the cell network is down, but they don't all re-up from Iran all at once. Hezbollah carries pagers because they're one-way devices that are hard to track, which is not a problem a Lebanese school teacher has with his Chinese Android phone.
Nurses and medical staff, at least in the US.
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/15/1219737658/why-do-doctors-sti...
For collateral, I was thinking more along the lines of non-Hezbollah civilians right next to the target, or perhaps a building set on fire
Here's a video of someone standing right next to the target: https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1836037485492629605
They are unharmed.
At the same time, I don't think there's any reason to disbelieve accounts (and video footage) of children among the injured. Unless you're sending operatives with pistols and killing targets individually, I don't think there's a way to do a strike of this scale without killing innocents.
So 1-2 feet away is safe from serious injury resulting from the explosive force itself. Though the probability seems high at least some out of thousands had people standing close enough for worse, or further away and hit with shrapnel.
I’m just commenting on injury though, not making a moral or ethical judgement. That’s not an easy call when an opponent is embedded in a population of non-combatants.
not sure of band allocations around israel, but in the US pagers were long wavelength devices and, as such, could receive signals much further inside buildings than pre-wifi cellular bands could reach. again, band / frequency (wavelength) allocation dependent. but if similar there, pagers might get signals in tunnels whereas cellular bands may not, for one plausible conjecture.
I'll consider that a possibility when it comes from an independent party detailing exactly which processes failed, why, and what remediation is being done beyond sacrificial dismissals. The particular WCK strike you're referring to wasn't even the first one killing WCK workers, just the most high-profile among many others.
[1]
> Yeah, it's really important to situate that attack on the World Central Kitchen in the context of these many other attacks that have occurred since October in Gaza. We've documented incidents of attacks on guest houses, on convoys of aid organizations, including Doctors Without Borders, MSF, the UN institution there UNRWA, the International Rescue Committee, and Medical Aid for Palestinians and another American aid group. And in every single one of these instances, these groups notified the authorities, the Israeli authorities multiple times about the GPS coordinate of the guest house, of the convoy that was moving. When it was convoys, they were taking agreed-upon routes that the Israelis had told them to take. And in every instance, these attacks occurred with zero prior warning to the aid organizations, and we're talking about, you know, 15 aid workers having been killed in these attacks and another including two children, family members, and another 16 injured.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/05/14/1251200131/israeli-strikes-on...
That's right. Any evaluation or discussion of this needs to take account of the fact that it makes the perpetrator culpable of an illegal act of war in which the lives of innocent children are disregarded. There are all sorts of "clever" but reprehensible things warring parties could do, but are considered to be beyond the pale. So, this is a stupid action by a reckless, immoral party which will continue to have consequences for all of us -- especially if we don't deal with anything that we control.
This conflict has had a historically very notable property where civilian casualties are so much higher than military casualties as to be clearly anomalous.
According to Israel, it is the same conflict, but if you tally up civilian casualties from previous Israeli-Lebanon conflicts, you'll find a similar rate.
The ratio is at least as high in WW2, but only if you include war crimes and genocides. I think we can agree that WW2 featured notable and anomalous civilian casualties from the first industrial genocides, can't we?
If you look more closely at the data, you'll see that Germany, for example, suffered 3.8 million civilian deaths and 5.5 million military deaths. This was after Germany was completely invaded, thus the fighting reached every city.
The civilian-military death ratio in Gaza is, according to peer-reviewed independent estimates, at least 2:1, and that's if you assume that every male 18-60 is an enemy combatant. If you don't, you find a ratio of at least 4:1, with estimates mostly around 6-9:1. And this data is from before the collapse in infrastructure had time to really drive up the excess death count : https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
I've used them for DevOps on-call in the last ten years in the US, as a backup to phone-based alerts. It's far too easy to mess up phone DND settings, forget to charge a phone, be outside cell service, or leave a phone in the wrong room. The pager had a long battery life and I clipped it to my pants waistband. I definitely caught pages via the pager that I would have missed over the phone.
If you're worried about the cell network going down, they serve as a backup comms device as well since they use different infrastructure.