Comment by tptacek

Comment by tptacek 10 months 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.

dunekid 10 months ago

>Israel doesn't occupy Lebanon

Shebaa Farms are currently occupied by Israel. Which is Lebanese, acknowledged by both Syrians and Lebanese.

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runarberg 10 months ago

[flagged]

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tptacek 10 months ago

I don't see how an attack launched by one hostile military force against combatants of another, where both forces are in declared open combat, can possibly be described as "state-sponsored terrorism".
Again: all the available reporting suggests strongly that Israel wasn't simply targeting every pager in Lebanon. These were specific pagers procured by Hezbollah for military operations, something widely reported months before this attack.

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- rbanffy 10 months ago
  
  Even if it targeted only military personnel, they were targeted going about their daily activities, putting their families and others who might, as we saw, just be shopping near them, at risk.
  
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  runarberg 10 months ago
  
  I think this is the reason booby trapping consumer devices which resemble those in use by civilians is an explicit war crime.
  You can't guarantee the explode as intended. It is gonna be very difficult for Lebanon to find all of the unexploded devices and secure them. Very likely one of those booby traps will find their way to a thrift store in the next few years and unexpectedly explode when handled by innocent hands.
  
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- runarberg 10 months ago
  
  It is a stretch to call a pager a military equipment and the use of one a “military operation”.
  No, Israel rigged consumer electronics used by people during their civilian lives off the battlefield as they posed no threat to anybody. There is no definition of terrorism which doesn’t encapsulate this act.
  And no, this act is not justified even if every targeted victim of this attack was a Hezbollah member. As I said before, there are more members of this organization than fighters and generals.
  
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  tptacek 10 months ago
  
  No, that's not what the reporting says. Hezbollah operates its own military networks for these things, procures these pagers specifically for military purchases, and issues them to Hezbollah fighters.
  "Off the battlefield" doesn't mean anything here: if they're members of the armed wing of Hezbollah, they are black-letter IHL combatants whether or not they're actively engaged in combat, the same way everybody aboard a naval vessel is a combatant if you sink it, including the cook.
  Put it this way: if it turns out that these pagers were widely used by non-military personnel, like school teachers, I'll absolutely say I was wrong, and that this attack was probably hard to justify. If reporting firms up that these pagers exclusively carried by military personnel, does that change things for you?
  
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- [removed] 10 months ago
  
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