Comment by runarberg

Comment by runarberg 3 days ago

The collateral numbers here are measured by their intended targets which seems to be all Hezbollah members. This is not a fair measure as Hezbollah has far more members than fighters.

The claim that this is a well targeted attack with legitimate targets ignores this reality. The attack may be well targeted, but the targets are still indiscriminate and illegitimate. That is unless you count any Hezbollah members as a legitimate target. But like I said before that is simply ridiculous.

tptacek 3 days ago

We'll see, but I don't think it's very likely that Hezbollah school teachers are carrying Hezbollah pagers. There were a bunch of news stories written about why Hezbollah fighters are carrying pagers. Ordinary Lebanese people, from what I can see (I actually looked up market data here) carry Android phones like everybody else does. And I don't think Hezbollah is handing out pagers to random janitors in Dahieh.

Note Reuters reporting on the concentration of reports of strikes here: it's not uniformly spread across the population of Lebanon.

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tptacek 3 days ago

Further reporting, corroborating a (vaguer) claim by Reuters; the NYT reports these are pagers procured directly by Hezbollah from a manufacturer.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/world/middleeast/israel-h...

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- runarberg 3 days ago
  
  We will see. But at this point it is ill advised to consider Israel to be in the right. We have seen how they conduct their targeting in Gaza, and we have no reason to believe their targeting practice is any more careful, nor humane in Lebanon.
  We have every reason to suspect they had no idea who would be carrying these pagers. That they did consider any Hezbollah member to be a legitimate target, be they senior administrators at a hospital, media workers, politicians, etc.
  At the very least they must have known that higher party members (i.e. politicians) would be carrying the pagers, and that they had no idea who was actually close when they detonated, and simply didn’t care if children got hurt.
  An army who is on trial for genocide does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
  
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  tptacek 3 days ago
  
  I think they considered any Hezbollah member carrying one of these pagers to be a legitimate target. Why are senior administrators at hospitals and media workers carrying military command and control equipment?
  If it turns out that large numbers of non-military personnel were carrying pagers that blew up, I'll be wrong about this, and I'll say so. My belief that this isn't the case isn't because I have any particular faith in Israel; it's because of the previous reporting about why Hezbollah had people carrying pagers: because it believed Israel was going to target these people through their cellphones. Pagers suck! I think people are carrying these things (or were; nobody's carrying any pagers anymore!) because they have to.
  I don't know what "benefit of the doubt" means in this situation. Israel and Hezbollah are at war. War is ruthless.
  Anyways all this is to say: Hezbollah is a military peer to Israel (I mean, I think Israel would win, but it wouldn't be easy). "Terrorism" has nothing to do with this. The conflict to me is fundamentally amoral, bilaterally, in a way that isn't the case with Gaza. Israel doesn't occupy Lebanon or control Hezbollah's supply lines. These are two opposing armies doing what armies do during hostilities.
  
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