Comment by achow

Is the target the relevant piece or is it actual impact? If you have a single military target who is known to use X brand phone, is it war to kill 5,000 people to get this one target? Is it not instilling terror on the people who use those devices?

It is this rationalization that enables powers to bomb civilians and ethnic groups under the guise of targeting military targets who stand no chance if they segregate themselves from the populace due to the power dynamics. And then the cycle only continues as each side adds fuel to the fire.

I mostly agree with you, but I also agree with a parent comment that part of that gray area depends on who's side you're on. For instance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombings

That was a Marine barracks that was part of a "military peacekeeping operation". Granted, 128 non-military Americans were injured, but all of the dead people were military. The U.S. politicians labelled it terrorism.

Who decides what is a civilian vs military target?

Fire bombing Dresden or Tokyo - terrorism, or war?

Nighttime Bombing a factory that produces ball bearings - terrorism, or war?

Overall I agree. However, the difficulty that I see is when someone attacks a, sometimes nominally, military target in a situation or method where it will unreasonably injure or kill civilians. Or even when the military target is mostly an excuse to target civilians.

I think it can also get less clear when the target is an enemy's infrastructure, industry, or political infrastructure.

Fort Hood?

>On November 5, 2009, a mass shooting took place at Fort Hood (now Fort Cavazos), near Killeen, Texas.[1] Nidal Hasan, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist, fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 others.[2][3] It was the deadliest mass shooting on an American military base and the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since the September 11 attacks until it was surpassed by the San Bernardino attack in 2015.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Fort_Hood_shooting

>These people should always wear military uniform and live in a separate neighborhood

That is on the table, yes. Otherwise, while they mingle with civilians, it's clear that the civilians are in danger. If I'm one of them, and I'm intent on persuing this action, moving to military quarters is going to come to mind.

Imagine one of those pagers, hip height, at a shop queue or bus stop. Or you're on a bike in traffic next to one of them.

Everything about this sucks. It absolutely is indiscriminate. It's different than droning a guy at his house and accepting his wife as collateral damange. This is 3,000+ maiming explosive devices scattered all about with no way of mitigating the collateral damange.

They didn't indiscriminately set off thousands of bombs in supermarkets and homes. That's not at all an accurate description of what happened. That would be terrorism.

They gave a terrorist organization the ability to give its most important operatives a bomb to wear. And then they detonated that bomb. That's not terrorism. It's about as targeted of an attack as you can imagine. Blowing up terrorists is objectively a good thing.

> these are both terror tactics, you're setting up a false dichotomy

Eh, there is utility to this attack beyond terror. Israel just simultaneously took out Hezbollah’s communications and definitively outed its senior members. Also, strategic bombing à la WWII wasn’t psychological—it was intended to wipe out the civilian population that worked in the war factories.

States engage in what you call terror tactics all the time, for legitimate military and illegitimate reasons. The clusterfuck with the Middle East is the sheer number of non-state actors. In Gaza, that’s complicated. But in Lebanon, it’s not—-the Lebanese state is widely recognised. Hezbollah is not a state, but it’s also not purely a political party.

What do you mean? You fire out the "detonate" command on the frequency used by Hezbollah - only pagers connected to that network blow.

It's statistically probable you'll overwhelmingly damage terrorists. Sadly collateral damage is inevitable in war, and this is far more precise than even a laser guided bomb.

Carpet bombing is a large area bombardment done in a progressive manner to inflict damage in every part of a selected area of land. (From Wikipedia).

In what way does the pagers attack resemble covering an entire area with a carpet of bombs?

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surely more surgical than what these guys were doing, which is repeatedly shoot missiles at densely populated areas, for months.

In comparison to bombing to smithereens the entire block, and having hundreds/thousands of people die under the rubble, some of them over the course of days - yes.

Do you know that 100 is more than 1? Some people get confused by simple arithmetic.

Stuffing explosives into civilian appliances is the definition of indiscriminate.

If doing this isn't already banned by the Geneva Conventions, it is only because it wasn't practical to do. But then again, very little that has happened in this region during the last 80 years has been following any international law.

> It's downvoted because it's the definition of proportional.

Two wrongs don't make a right... are we really at that level of brain activity on HN of all places ? this is schoolyard level

You can have proportional terrorism, proportional war crimes, proportional crimes against humanity. Proportionality doesn't tell you much, it certainly doesn't tell you anything about it being indiscriminate or not

> Certainly not "indiscriminate".

Cool, go tell that to the two kids who died: https://www.rte.ie/news/2024/0918/1470609-hezbollah-israel/

Also feel free to read the actual texts defining these things, detonating explosives in supermarkets is indiscriminate by nature, there is just no way around it if you're in good faith : https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule12

Both sides are clearly operating out of the boundaries we defined for conventional wars, is it really that hard to accept ? They're not even trying to hide it really... such a strange allergic reaction to these basic facts

Am I misinformed, or was 3,000? They are the most senior 3,000? When you send out 3,000 explosive into the general population, how do you mitigate the collateral damage? I truly don't know the answers here. I'm under the impression that they all detonated simultaneously, so I'm keen to infer that there was very little thought given to civilians unlucky enough to be in the vicinity.

Man. Blasting off fingers and genitals is really something...