Comment by djohnston
Comment by djohnston 2 days ago
Not even close. Thousands of pocket bombs. Some dead civilians, and a lot of dead terrorists. Not reprehensible but a well-executed op.
Comment by djohnston 2 days ago
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.)
Curious as to your reasoning here, why would a Hezbollah operative give their pager away within a month or 2 of it being issued?
And this is war, you are applying impossible peacetime standards. To put things in perspective, a rocket attack from Hezbollah killed a dozen Israeli kids/teens on a football field in July, with zero Israeli military targets impacted.
How many is some and how many is a lot? Are you confusing dead and injured?