Comment by masswerk
By definition a blind weapon.
By definition a blind weapon.
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.
It's a pager! Also, there's some evidence for this, as 2 out of 12 killed are children.
And it's not a full-fledged war, yet, as illustrated by the fact that the targets were still in their civilian settings. Generally, this may backfire quite a bit, as in a massuve influx in recruiting. (If the same happened to the US and reservists were blown up by some obscure vector amongst their families and while shopping, what would you expect? Awe and accepting defeat?)
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.