Comment by tptacek
Comment by tptacek 3 days ago
No. All members of the armed forces of a party to the conflict are combatants, except medical and religious personnel.
Comment by tptacek 3 days ago
No. All members of the armed forces of a party to the conflict are combatants, except medical and religious personnel.
It indeed does. Unless you are a medic or a chaplain, if you are even under the effective command of Hezbollah, let alone employed by it, you're a valid combatant target. Uniforms and current participation in combat operations has nothing to do with it.
If you want to make the claim that Hezbollah operates schools and hospitals and that employment at those institutions doesn't designate somebody as a combatant, I will absolutely agree with you. But it's very unlikely, to me, that those people are carrying Hezbollah military command and control telecoms devices. We could learn otherwise, and if we do, I'll acknowledge that. But from what we're learning now, it's not looking likely.
No, you emphatically are not. The criteria is membership in the armed forces: https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule4 Had it been otherwise, practically everyone working for the Israeli state would also be a "valid combatant target". Including reservists since they are also "under the effective command" of the IDF. I have no idea who carries these pagers and neither does you, so I'll refrain from speculating.
In regular armies, activated reservists are valid combatant targets. Reservists become civilian, under the principle of distinction, when they are deactivated and fully integrate into civilian life. More applicably to the situation with Hezbollah, which is an irregular army, functional criteria apply; meaning, very roughly and in my paraphrase, "is some aspect of the armed wing of Hezbollah your day job?"
I don't know that we disagree much here. We both agree that simply because Hezbollah operates a school does not distinguish the employees of that school as combatants. There are civilian combatants; for instance, whether or not your yourself were ever going to take up arms in Syria, if you work in a Hezbollah arms depot or weapons factory, even if you're just counting the bullets, you're most definitely a combatant. It depends.
You're refraining from speculating on something I am clearly not refraining on. I get that. I am (much) further out on the limb than you are. When the evidence shows I'm way off on this stuff, I'll absolutely say so. The big place where our premises differ is: I believe Hezbollah pagers to be military equipment, and you believe random Lebanese people with weak associations to Hezbollah might carry them as well. I'll say right now that is not a crazy point of view; it's just one I don't currently share.
There is a big misunderstanding here; you seem to believe that because Hezbollah is so invariably coupled with civilian life and has by own decision foregone uniforms and other basic traditional military structures, this somehow raises the requirements for Israel to strike them. The opposite is true.
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.
It eliminated their entire command and control network, hospitalized hundreds of their officers and command staff, put the IRGC on notice that it has been comprehensively infiltrated, and will force months of internal investigations and purges.
Further, it comes during a time where Iran has been publicly messaging about retaliation for the killing of Ismael Haniyeh, so there's a geopolitical angle to it as well: "we can do this, think about what we'll do next if you try launching another 300 drones at us".
I don't think it's very hard to make a military validity argument here (of course, it's easy for me to do that, since I'm shoplifting an argument from Noga Tarnopolsky and Oz Katerji here).
In every military conflict in the history of warfare, combatants have taken steps to inspire fear in their adversaries. You may be providing a definition of terrorism, but I don't think it's a useful one; I think you need to refine it more if you want to make it operable here.
In any case, where you use the word "fear" I would probably use "deterrence".
Yes. The term you used was "operative" and it is not synonymous with "member of armed force".