Comment by jakeinspace
Comment by jakeinspace 3 days ago
Unlike stuxnet, this attack had a lot of non-hezbolah civilian casualties. It’s "targeted" in a sense, but not really much more targeted than a drive-by assassination attempt. Anybody close to these people could have sustained serious injury, and there are reports of children injured and dead. We’ll have to wait for details to emerge.
Politically, this is the sort of action that invites comparison to conventional terrorism. It also begs the question of why Hezbollah or other actors shouldn’t try a similar attack against civilian targets. It’s almost like a chemical or biological attack, which most countries shy away from because it’s so hard to defend against (a big part of why it’s illegal). No country can perfectly safeguard its supply chain from intentional sabotage.
I’m afraid that the entire world is a little bit less safe after this move. Maybe Israel is goading Hezbollah into all-out war, who knows, but this affects all of us.
For a non-infantry massed attack on a military asset, the ratio of military to civilian casualties here is probably going to end up being unprecedented in the history of modern warfare; this will probably end up being an extraordinarily surgical attack by any military standard. Civilians are routinely killed in targeted strikes, because targeted strikes are almost always conducted by air. This attack may end up being distinguished by how few civilians were harmed.
Neither Israel nor Hezbollah is mobilized for all-out war here. Hezbollah is depleted from its disastrous efforts in Syria; Israel is fully committed to combat operations in Gaza. The north of Israel has been evacuated for months because of indiscriminate rocket attacks from Hezbollah. Hezbollah is an arm of the IRGC, which is more or less at open war with Israel. If either side could have launched an all-out assault (or, I mean, a more conventional all-out assault than this one), they would have done so already.