Comment by spidersenses

Comment by spidersenses 2 days ago

1 reply

> 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

dragonwriter 2 days ago

> 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.)