Comment by tptacek
Comment by 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.
The assumption here—at least from my part—is that this pager attack was an illegitimate state sponsored terrorist attack and deserves to be condemned as such. That statements such as “war is brutal” does not apply here as even war has rules for conduct, and even in wars the innocent deserve to be protected from harm. And war does not excuse terrorist acts.
In most wars, war crimes are committed. When war crimes are committed they need to be condemned, and prosecuted, not excused and repeated.
> Why are senior administrators at hospitals and media workers carrying military command and control equipment?
These are pagers, and cheap once at that, I don’t know if you have ever been a part of any activist organization, but it is pretty standard to assume you are a target of state level intelligence, and that state actors (most likely the police) is spying on you. Any activist would know to try to protect them selves and their organization by minimizing opportunities of breaches. This extends to lower level participants, who are unlikely to actually confront the police or cause any civil disruptions, but participate in other ways.
I assume Hezbollah would take similar measure. That higher level members at non-military institutions still see the need to protect them selves—and their organization—from infiltration. At the very least, it is criminally negligent of Israel to assume that they don’t, and still detonate when there is some probability the innocent will be harmed.