Comment by respondo2134

> Conducting a military operation that has a fully predictable rate of civilian casualties is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians.

By that logic only the absolute number of (expected) civilian deaths matters... which can't be right.

If it were true, then exploding a city bus (1 soldier, 10 civilians) would be more moral than striking a military base (1,000 soldiers, 11 civilians.)

It would also suggest a kind of blame-shifting if one side decides to install their missile launchers in the playgrounds of elementary schools or whatever.

> you are fully aware will result in significant collateral damage.

and the terrorists deliberately place themselves in a position where attacks on them results in massive collateral - aka, they want a human shield.

For these people, there will never be an attack good enough, targeted enough, or proper enough

It's because they're not motivated by fairness but a pre existing idea of who is good or bad

> no bystanders hurt

This is incorrect. There are reports of maimed civilians and a murdered child.

There is no comprehensive information yet on the ratio of civilians to militants maimed by this attack, and any claims otherwise are propaganda.

A 9 year old child was killed, proving this attack wasn't as targeted as you think. However Israel is happy to accept any amount of collateral damage as long as it doesn't happen to them.

Whatever words you're reading when you look at mine might be incredible, what I wrote is almost 3000 wounded in the crossfire, including children.

You're ignoring that and pretending they're accused of something else. Why?

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Found it: multiple reports say 5,000 pagers

It was in public, and there are videos of the public explosions. There are videos of hospitals with many doctors laying around bloodied.

Poking holes in the fuselage of a jetliner isn't going to take down a plane. Consider the cases of a turbine fan blade taking out a window, the case where the MAX door panel blew off, the cases where the cargo door came off, and the 737 "convertible" case. You'd have to take out a large part of the structure to bring it down.

Take a look at all the photos of B-17s taking severe combat damage yet returning home. Jetliners are a lot more redundant today than the B-17s were.

However, if the hole took out the flight controls, or set a fire, then the airplane has a big problem.

What about the person sitting next to the target?

> I’m not even sure that explosion would take out a plane

I take it you would have no problem being on a plane with one (or even multiple) of these pagers going off then? What kind of argument is this?

Hamas terrorists boarding commercial airplanes? With their secret pagers on them?

Somehow I don't think so.

My understanding is that pagers are typically radio Rx-only, and that it is not possible to track their location like a cellular device -- which is likely why Hezbollah chose to use them.

Though it would be possible to add this ability when the hardware was intercepted, a transmitting device is also easy to detect.

From what I can find, the targeted pager-model can receive UHF messages in the 450~470MHz range. That could reach passenger jet cruise altitudes if the transmitter is strong enough.

I think it's safest to assume Hezbollah are using strong transmitters, because they'll want to be able to broadcast across rather large areas and in a way that resists potential jamming.

On the flip side, I'm having a hard time imagining these as threats to an entire airplane, given the tight constraints on how much explosive power can be secretly snuck into a functioning pager.

Pagers don’t “connect” to networks.

They may have discriminated carefully on which devices were modified, but any care or intelligence ends there.

When they triggered the bombs, they can’t have known who or what was in the blast radius. Video shows one going off in a produce market. The fact that those variables are uncontrolled make it indiscriminate, by definition.

>After all, people usually don't hand their phones to random strangers or leave them lying around - and those pagers aren't even mere personal devices used for private purposes

And even compared to a phone, the limited functionality of a pager means the owner isn't going to hand it to a friend to show them a funny video or sports highlight, or to a kid to let them play games on it.

> You absolutely can. It's highly likely to be in the targeted person's pocket.

This seems intentionally avoiding the point. Duh, it's a pager. The real question is can the person donating the explosive tell if the pocket is completely isolated from innocents or if it's standing in a crowded line sitting very near to a childs head.

I do believe that Israel _tried_ to discriminate but its an explosive, you can only aim those to a point. Israel wasn't deliberately trying to kill children/harm innocents, Isreal did knowingly engage in a set of actions where it was possible outcome.

I want to be clear i am not trying to choose a side. These are actions of war in the 21st century.

> After all, people usually don't hand their phones to random strangers or leave them lying around - and those pagers aren't even mere personal devices used for private purposes. Why would any of those devices end up anywhere else but the pocket of the person using it?

I leave my phone all the time, my kids are actually playing games on it. Also, I can be on public transportation, I can be driving, near a flammable object, or boarding a plane. As demonstrated an 8-year-old girl died, it's enough proof that an innocent died.

Yeah but what pissed them off so much? (spoiler: it was Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon)

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Nice, using Islam as a scapegoat. Lebanon is a democratic republic that has 43.4% Christian population. If that is their intention, why not focus on their country first rather than attacking Israel?

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I think the desire to throw grenades over the fence comes more from the neighbor coming over the fence once in a while and murdering anything he finds.

You forgot to mention your neighbor razed the yard and killed some relatives too. Throwing some Molotovs, while it may not justified, is still an expected reaction.

By firing thousands of rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas? That is polite, civil, and worthy of a joke to you?

It looks like Israel wants to be secure. It was attacked in October and since then retaliated to attacks.

It is not a terrorist attack, it was an reaction of Hezbollah indiscriminately firing rockets into Israel. That are terror attacks. Something UN troops are supposed to stop, but that is another topic.

You can look up what Hezbollah wants and that is nothing else than the elimination of Israel. The terror is almost exclusively one sided here and it is sourced from radical fundamentalism.

And no, Israel doesn't not murder, rape and torture, that is purely projection.

This is a pretty heated thread, and I’m not trying to fan any flames: the Assyrians and Sumerians were there before that. It always seemed a bit arbitrary to me to claim land based on whose religion started first — although not quite as arbitrary as “my God said it’s mine, so there.” Plus I believe they claimed that Ashur promised the land to them.

I think we can all agree that the ancient Roman and Byzantine empires were not exactly gold standards in protecting human rights. However, the fact that something was done to the Jews thousands of years ago does not make it acceptable to do the same to another population today.

The birth of Islam did not cause a whole new race of people to spring from the ground, some of their ancestors lived in the region as well. And according to the Torah the Jewish people who came to that region with Moses during the exodus had to fight off the caananites and philistines before they could settle, so apparently itd been occupied for a while- not that I'd put too much stock in the ancient history thats come down to us, certainly not enough to enforce modern territorial claims

Thanks, fixed.

It's legible both ways.

Almost a million people are displaced in Gaza (violently) as we speak.

Violently expanding into Gaza?

Yes, very violently, and on a massively greater scale than before. Just ask the country's National Security Minister:

Backing settlement, Ben Gvir says he’d be ‘very happy to live in Gaza’ after the war

If ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Palestinians leave the Strip, ‘we will be able to bring in more and more people,’ minister says

https://www.timesofisrael.com/backing-settlement-ben-gvir-sa...

By native i assume you mean arab. Not to mention that the infant mortality rate dropped something like 90% after the state was founded and the arab population is still growing at a huge rate.

The percentage of native population used to be 100%, so I don't think pointing out the change in percentage really works in favor of your argument.

These weren’t sold at a Best Buy.

They were purchased by a known terrorist organizations that any westerner would go to jail for having a financial relationship with .

The types of people they deal with to buy anything at all - including black market weapons and machinery - are dubious

The US does these exact same things to infiltrate Mexican cartels

There are acceptable levels of collateral damage.

You can bomb an ordnance storage facility even if there's a hospital right next to it (or, in fact, right not on top of it).

They've made sure the pagers were used by Hezbollah first and foremost, tough shit if few were given to kids to play.

And yes if Ukrainians were able to blow up all drones within say 50km of the front lines on the Russian side they'd be justified to do that, even if some were in civilians' hands.

Even if up to 30% of casualties were civilian this would still be quite a surgical strike in my opinion. At 50% I would not say so anymore. Nobody knows yet anyways.

How could I possibly personally guarantee that?

If your standard for engaging in military action is that they must be able to prove to you personally that their target is really a militant, you are completely delusional.

Western media has full control over information and if Ukrainians would do something like this, no one would even know.

There were multiple cases of Ukrainians doing something evil or borderline evil that were swept under the rug. One of the recent examples is the cassette munition explosion over a beach in Sevastopol, which killed few children and wounded a hundred of people. I stopped following the war closely but it got my attention because that's my home town. And in this case I even agree that the rocket wasn't specifically targeting the beach (that would be stupid), it was likely targeting the nearby airbase; but that's not the point.The point is that every single time something like this happens, it gets silenced.

There are multiple high-quality videos of the explosion recorded from different angles. On Reddit, a high-quality video of an even like this, surreal and frightening, would otherwise have been upvoted to skies. But not when it puts Ukrainians in bad light! One the next day, as a random Reddit user, you'd never even know about this event (I wonder how many people know about this at all).

And again, this is just one example. I can probably collect few hundreds of cases likes this over the first two years of the war, where as a Western media consumer you would never know about something that could potentially change your opinion on the conflict. And just like this, you're being manipulated. Of course, so are the Russians who solely rely on Russian news sources. The only way to know the truth is to follow both sides closely, especially to what each side hides and silences. You'd be surprised.

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I was trying to bridge a communication gap by offering an interpretion. In truth I don't understand your comment at all, but I never go to stack overflow empty handed for example.