Comment by jsheard 3 days ago
Who said the injured are all Hezbollah members? From the above Guardian coverage:
"Among those killed is an eight-year-old girl from Bekka Valley, Abiad said, according to Al Jazeera."
This CCTV footage shows one of the devices exploding in a busy supermarket:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/dozens-hezbollah-m...
Terrorizing your opponents is one thing, but indiscriminately detonating bombs in public spaces is just plain terrorism.
if someone next to you in a supermarket was wounded from an explosive like the video shows, do you think perplexed and completely unharmed would be a good description for your experience? Maybe we saw different videos, but it's pretty hard to make such a generalized statement from a few seconds of video.
Yes? Clearly the people directly beside the target were physically unharmed and confused about what happened. For all they knew the guy had an e-vape explode or something.
Maybe in the future they'll carry some emotional damage or something, but living in a country de facto in a state of war with a formidable nuclear-power neighbour, while governed by a terrorist organization that indiscriminately fires rockets into civilian areas essentially daily, carries that risk, right? I doubt such an operation was a surprise to anyone.
> if someone next to you in a supermarket was wounded from an explosive
that "someone" is an enemy combatant currently fighting a war
if they were wearing a uniform would you stand next to a soldier during an ongoing war?
if you were a soldier would you hide in a group of civilians?
there's a lot of blame to go around and Israel is far from clean, but the Hezbollah members are clearly also putting people in harms way by using them as a shield against attacks like this
And how did watching videos of Hamas beheading people on October 7th affect you? And how did watching videos from the Hezbollah attack on the children's football field, that killed a dozen children, affect you?
> The busy supermarket saw people standing directly beside the target perplexed and completely unharmed. This was extremely localized.
I saw that video too and I'm happy the bystanders in that case were unharmed but that was 1/2000 (or 5,000?) explosions. I wouldn't necessarily extrapolate the supermarket video to the other several thousand explosions.
indiscriminately? They were all used by Hezbollah operatives by definition. It is the most targeted operation if there ever was one.
Indiscriminate in the sense that bombs have an area of effect beyond the person carrying them, so they couldn't possibly account for collateral damage when firing them all at once, and a conscious decision was made that any unlucky civilians are fair game. Indiscriminate in the same sense as dropping a bunker buster on a residential block because you believe there's a handful of terrorists inside, or nuking two cities to "encourage" a military surrender.
If you believe this tactic was just, then I trust that if Mossad obliterated your child in the process of assassinating an enemy of Israel who happened to be nearby then you would be able to forgive and forget, since it was for the greater good and they tried their best. Even if they were targeting the wrong person, as it sometimes goes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair
Incidentally when they later killed the actual target of that operation they did so by detonating a 100kg car bomb on a public road, also killing 4 civilians and injuring 16 others.
That's not what "indiscriminate" means.
Indiscriminate attacks are those [0]:
(a) which are not directed at a specific military objective;
(b) which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or
(c) which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by international humanitarian law;
and consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.
The fact that the pagers were obtained by Hezbollah to be used for their communications, and consequently could be expected to be exclusively in the possession of combatants means the attack was not indiscriminate.
Causing collateral damage does not make an attack indiscriminate. The standard for permissible collateral damage is that an attack must not cause loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian property, etc. that is excessive in relation to the anticipated concrete and direct military advantage [1].
The fact that it was so specifically targeted, combined with the small size of the explosive charges means collateral damage could be expected to be minor. And the evidence so far suggests that to have been accurate. The death of a single child is tragic, but negligible in comparison to the military advantage gained by thousands of combatants dead or wounded.
[0]: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule12
[1]: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule14
Where in aforementioned international humanitarian law, step (c), is it preordained that one child's collateral death is negligible? See, therein lies the crux of the issue. The definition itself is wise enough that you can't just lawyerese your way through the issue.
In your scientistic rationalization using weaselwords like "expected to be exclusive", "the [subjective] standard for permissible..", "a death is [objectively] negligible", and so on, it is rather the case that your explanation is so laden with prejudiced pseudoreasoning that you are blind to it and unwittingly helping to spread ideological misinformation.
"unlucky civilians are fair game" that's been an unfortunate fact of war since, well, war was invented. maybe you should more angry at the people who started the war and put people in harms way, instead of complaining that one of the most precise operations still had unintended civilian consequences.
taking the moral high ground is easy when you are not the one making decisions, and while the lesser of two evils (in your car bomb example) doesn't make sense on a personal level, it does make sense on a macro level
> maybe you should more angry at the people who started the war
How far back are we willing to go for that? Who evicted whom? When? How many times? In what order?
> Indiscriminate in the sense that bombs have an area of effect beyond the person carrying them
AFAICT the stock pager models are ~95 grams, and people are suggesting 3-5g of added explosives. If they used RDX, then 3g would be ~5.5 cubic centimeters, which seems like rather a lot to try to squish into a small pager unless the design also replaced the standard battery with a smaller one to make room.
In contrast, a M67 fragmentation grenade uses ~156 grams of explosives.
Basically I'm saying it sounds like the bombs are small enough that it's not quite fair to call them "indiscriminate", especially if the trigger logic involves a Hezbollah radio network that nobody else would be using.
Literally no war ever has avoided collateral damage. Trying to hold Israel to that standard is absurd and pretty transparently anti-Semitic.
operatives
A lot of people seem to think Hezbollah is purely military in nature because of the 'terrorism' label. The organization was founded to respond to Israel's invasion of Lebanon, and while it is a militant organization it also has seats in the Lebanese parliament, engages in a lot of non-military activities, and does not have simple politics - for example, it has condemned Al Qaeda and ISIS for terroristic attacks.
Labels such as 'terrorists' are as often designed to confuse as to inform. Reductionist categorization makes people easy to manipulate.
They have an assault rifle in their flag. Make no mistake about their purpose.
Well, Guatemala has (older) rifles in theirs too...
2 American state flags depict people holding guns as well. I won't mention which two lest it lead to an outbreak of hostilities. And wait until you hear about the symbology of the US flag, or listen to the US national anthem!
More seriously, quite a few other countries have guns on the flag, reflecting a turbulent recent history. As I mentioned, Hezbollah was formed in response to the invasion and occupation of Lebanon just over 40 years ago, which was not a violence-free event. Let's not even get into swords on flags.
There's a tendency among some people to draw their conclusion first and then summon reasons for it afterwards, reasons which often lack consistency. Our violent history is glorious; theirs is deplorable. Consider, for example, the Irish Republican Army; like Hezbollah, it's considered a terrorist organization by US, UK, and many other jurisdictions. But due to the huge number of Irish American people and the subsidence of that political conflict in the last few decades, lots of Americans think the IRA is cool, while reflexively lumping Hezbollah in with other Islamic groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS.
In short, I think things like 'their flag has a gun on it' are the opposite of helpful or insightful.
Mozambique, too. We should bomb them.
It's even got the bayonet fixed so there's no confusion about their terrorist intentions.
Sadly, not happening.
A lot of Israelis, Palestinians, and Lebanese are irreligious. Yet, a lot of Israelis, Palestinians, and Lebanese know people who have been affected by the conflict first hand (either refugees, civilian casualties, or combatant casualties), which makes it difficult to negotiate.
The 1990s-2000s was the last period where some sort of negotiation could succeed, because there was still a large 1st and 1.5 gen Mizrahi and Sephardic community that had some residual feeling for Muslim states, and vice versa. That's how Israel and Morocco, Azerbaijan, and Turkey pre-2012 were able to get their relationship back on track.
At this point, the peace process is dead. Even the secular opposition to Likud and the Kahanists in Israel supports a harsh military response, casualties be damned. Similar story in West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon.
Any sort of peace process will have to be backed by internal repression for a generation by all participants.
The busy supermarket saw people standing directly beside the target perplexed and completely unharmed. This was extremely localized.
If the child story is true (which is always in question), presumably they were tragically playing with the pager or the like at precisely that time.
However the footage of the attack is overwhelmingly fighting-age males exclusively. As far as military operations go, that is remarkably targeted.