Comment by bjourne
You are juxtaposing two different concepts. 1) military objectives (weapons factories) and 2) combatant status (fighters). Factory workers are not combatants. While I don't think Elbit Systems should be allowed to operate globally, killing their workers is not legitimate.
At this point it is not even certain that all exploded pagers were "Hezbollah pagers" and that it wasn't just a random shipment of pagers the Israelis booby-trapped. Pagers are still used by emergency and medical services in many parts of the world.
Rather than arguing about this, we can just note references to the law of armed conflict, and the definition of "direct participation in hostilities".