Comment by Vicinity9635
Comment by Vicinity9635 10 months ago
A 10 year old girl died too. They took no precautions to limit damage bystanders even assuming every person with one was a BadGuy™ which makes it terrorism and reprehensible.
Comment by Vicinity9635 10 months ago
A 10 year old girl died too. They took no precautions to limit damage bystanders even assuming every person with one was a BadGuy™ which makes it terrorism and reprehensible.
> A 10-year-old girl also died.
The death of that one girl, if it isn't entirely made up for propaganda purposes, is obviously very very tragic, but since almost all pro-Hezbollah commentators are referring to that one specific case that's a pretty clear sign that no other children died. Interestingly I'm now seeing comments where they're making her younger from 10yo to 9yo, now even 8yo. You can ask yourself why people are doing that.
While in their own attacks Hezbollah specifically targets Israeli civilians hoping for children to be among the victims.
> They took no precautions to limit damage to bystanders
The fact that those explosions were small enough to not kill even a single-digit percentage of several thousand targets who carried those pagers in their pockets near vital organs and blood vessels refutes your allegations.
> assuming that every person with a pager was a BadGuy™
These days, even in Lebanon, normal people simply own a cell phone so they can be called. When was the last time you even saw one? They are incredibly rare. The purpose of a pager is to receive (movement) orders and, in the case of Hezbollah, to make tracking more difficult. While it is possible that medical personnel may have used some of these pagers, it is highly unlikely that a new shipment of pagers would not primarily go to Hezbollah's "valuable" command staff, for whom being able to move and operate undetected is the greatest concern. According to Wikipedia, Hezbollah has more than 20,000 full-time fighters, and at 3,000-5,000 devices, this would not have been enough to resupply even a major part of the entire organization, so it is unlikely that any civilian outside the command structure would have received one, even less a random 10yo girl.
Ask yourself again if this is terrorism:
- if the attack was so specifically targeted at military targets
And collateral damage was minimized by:
- using a vector unlikely to be used by innocent civilians
- a sufficiently small explosion not to seriously injure people standing in close proximity to the target as indicated by the many videos floating around
> The death of that one girl is obviously very very tragic, but since almost all pro-Hezbollah commentators are referring to that one specific case, and if that case is even true, that's a pretty clear sign that no other children died. Interestingly I'm now seeing comments where they're making her younger from 10yo, to 9yo, now 8yo in order to exploit the death for propaganda purposes.
She has been consistently identified as either 8 years old or simply a "young girl" from the very first news accounts; I've never seen her given any other age in a news media account. There's probably some confusion in second-hand non-professional-news accounts (like this HN comment thread), confusing her age with other numbers in the same articles (at various times, the total number killed has been reported as 8, 9, 10, or 11 in the same articles identifying her as a particular victim. It is fairly easy to swap her age with the total victim count if you aren't being careful.)
Not even close. Thousands of pocket bombs. Some dead civilians, and a lot of dead terrorists. Not reprehensible but a well-executed op.
It's not uncommon for perfectly legitimate military operations in urban areas to kill more civilians than enemy soldiers. Managing to only injure a few civilians while seriously wounding hundreds of enemy soldiers in an urban area is a remarkable achievement.
Hezbollah of course is an entirely legitimate military target. They've been indiscriminately raining down missiles on northern Israel for months, forcing tens of thousands of Israeli's to abandon their homes. Israel has every right to put a stop to that, and it would have been perfectly reasonable for them to kill tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians in the process of killing the tens of thousands of Hezbollah members responsible for this.
Let’s say for each one of these Hezbollah casualties, you replaced the pager with 4 infantry attacking them. Civilian casualties would be far higher. The fact that they couldn’t “see” the target at the time of detonation is irrelevant.
The videos I’ve seen are of the pagers exploding and someone standing less than a foot away being unscathed. Incredibly sophisticated and precise.
But you will be always riding some unproven assumptions. E.g., even if those pagers had been initially issued to maybe-combatants, they may have diffused to other audiences and uses, since. It may be well that you're just blowing up some teenagers getting messages for where the rave is.
(Also, even if you hit the intended target, it's a summary execution of people you may suspect, but who haven't done anything, yet, and may or may not have become active in any hypothetical future.)
I applaud your empathy but I don't think this number of active military adversaries have been taken out in cities with so little civilian casualties ever in history. We should probably be applauding this action over say the standard targeted bombing of the Hezbollah militants homes which is pretty much the previous 'least casualties' method used.