Comment by djohnston
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.)