Comment by 93po
Comment by 93po 3 days ago
[flagged]
Comment by 93po 3 days ago
[flagged]
If that were the case, Israel wouldn't be intricately planting bombs in Hezbollah pagers.
Gaza has fairly low civilian:combatant death ratios, lower than in most comparable urban wars. It's not hard to calculate them, the information is partly public (published by Hamas and IDF). However, many people chose to believe whatever they want to believe instead of going for the facts, I've seen some people come up with numbers ad hoc that are ten times than what Hamas reports, or they claim IDF has basically not killed any Hamas combatants at all.
You could listen to testimony from those within the IDF:
"the IDF judged it permissible to kill more than 100 civilians in attacks on a top-ranking Hamas officials" ... "We’ve killed people with collateral damage in the high double digits, if not low triple digits" ... "they were authorised to kill up to “20 uninvolved civilians” for a single operative, regardless of their rank, military importance, or age" ... "It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai...
When looking at this we have assess both the theoretical rules of combat and the actual implementation of those and compare them to an ally nation in other active combat zones like the US, UK, NATO forces in various places. No army is good at being ethical, foir want of a better word, but the Israelli government and the IDF seem to fail much more at holding to what most people would consider acceptable standards of behaviour.
Not really? Part of what happened with Gaza and Hamas was that Netanyahu (and governments before his) spent a decade taking Hezbollah more seriously than Hamas (for good reason!). They are geared up for a precise and carefully-executed conflict with Hezbollah in ways they were not with Hamas.
At the same time: 100% reasonable to look at today and say "if you can pull off an attack like this, why the fuck are you still leveling apartment buildings in Gaza, after having permanently crippled Hamas months ago". Like, there's a moral dimension to this! But I don't think that dimension is "feel real bad for Hassan Nasrallah". Play stupid games, &c &c.
The pagers do give Israel a certain veneer of plausible deniability that they wouldn’t otherwise have if they had used more traditional bombing methods.
Literally everybody in the entire world believes Israel is responsible for this. An Mk-82 bomb dropped from a bomber would have more deniability. This was a joke about Israel's tactical signature back when James Mickens included it in a Usenix Security throwaway paragraph back in 2014. There is absolutely no deniability here, unless someone very powerful is deliberately trying to frame Israel (which is not what is happening).
And yet they set thousands of them off no matter who was nearby.
Everyone cares about collateral damage. The thorny part is how much to care... what is the calculus for how much is acceptable? Israel, rightly or wrongly, seems to be comfortable with around a 100:1 ratio.