Comment by kasey_junk

Comment by kasey_junk 3 days ago

There are too many threads and this is too complicated a topic for a technology forum website so I’m not going to weigh in everywhere.

But you yourself recognize that a) Hezbollah is a de facto government, not just a military or terrorist organization and that b) its folly to do some sort of algebra on casualties in these conflicts and intent is what matters.

It’s hard to come up with a plausible intent for a strike that injured 2700 people, with only the weakest of targeting mechanisms across a population that ranges the gamut of occupations, other than terrorism.

We would certainly view it as such if Hezbollah blew up 2700 phones of the Israeli government and military.

tptacek 3 days ago

That depends on who the 2700 people are, right? If it's 2700 random people, I agree. If it's 2600 Hezbollah operatives, not so much. If Hezbollah managed to surgically strike 2600 IDF soldiers, injuring and killing an additional 100 bystanders, I promise you I would offer the same analysis.

I'm measuring this against the standard of military operations conducted by western countries, the state of the art of which is Hellfire missiles fired into cars and apartment buildings.

I'm trying to be hedge-y as I write this stuff. We could absolutely learn things that would change my take on this!

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bjourne 3 days ago

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- tptacek 3 days ago
  
  No. All members of the armed forces of a party to the conflict are combatants, except medical and religious personnel.
  https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule3
  
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  bjourne 3 days ago
  
  Yes. The term you used was "operative" and it is not synonymous with "member of armed force".
  
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  kasey_junk 3 days ago
  
  These pagers almost certainly went off on n the hands of doctors and clerics.
  But again, this isn’t about some sort of ethical counting and categorizing of the injured. What can the intent of this attack be other than to spread terror? To say to the broad populace we will harm you when you least suspect it, independent of the military status between our countries and we will do it in surprising and asymmetric ways.
  
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- dralley 3 days ago
  
  >That is, they were not uniformed soldiers engaged in combat. Hence, they were not legitimate targets. They may not even have touched a gun if they served in Hizbollah's civil administration.
  Had precision strikes existed in 1944, nobody would complain if a Nazi office party got hit with a missile just because "they were civil administrators, not soldiers"
  
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  tptacek 3 days ago
  
  It wouldn't matter. They would have been considered combatants then, and are explicitly designated so under the Geneva Conventions now. Unless you're a medic or a chaplain, you cannot safely work for (or, really, even be "under the effective command of") Lebanese Hezbollah under the laws of armed combat.
  To Kasey's point, the reciprocal is true, too! The laws of armed combat permit Hezbollah strikes on Israeli command and administrative staff.
  
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  bjourne 3 days ago
  
  [flagged]
  
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