Comment by mmastrac

Actual combat and conventional attacks on a guerilla force embedded in an urban civilian population is far more catastrophic and less surgical than the risk of being inside the ~0.5m lethal radius of these pagers.

It's a horrific attack with awful innocent deaths at the same time that any conventional attack that achieved the same impact on Hezbollah would have been even worse for those around them.

It is targeted, by definition. Every pager was owned by a Hezbollah member or was about to be. Same with the walkies.

That there was collateral damage is unfortunate, but Israel was definitely not indiscriminately targeting civilians, which is what would make it terrorism.

This was a surgical strike that happened to have some unfortunate collateral damage. Well within the accepted rules of war.

Do you have an example of a weapon of war that is more surgical? I think this is the typical Israel criticism that is devoid of any realistic basic to be honest.

Anything more surgical than this is actual surgery.

Agreed. Stuxnet was "surgical". Causing hundreds of explosions in proximity of civilians is not.

And very possibly in violation of the Geneva Convention's prohibition of "indiscriminate" attacks:

   Rule 12. Indiscriminate attacks are those:
   (a) which are not directed at a specific military objective;
   (b) which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or
   (c) which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by international humanitarian law; and consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.

I agree -- "victory lap" is just a figure of speech. Yesterday's results were probably far outsized impact on their own, and today's are (apologies for another figure of speech) "icing on the cake".

I would imagine that they've been feeding these booby-trapped devices to the supply chain for at least a few months and showing that multiple devices are potentially bombs is just an even more powerful psychological victory. What devices can they even trust now? Will they need to go back to sneakernet?

Agree. If one device was booby-trapped the first thing I would be doing is disassembling all my others devices for the same.

Unlike reality, fiction needs to be believable.

Independent estimates peg Hezbollah membership in Lebanon to a wide range, 20k to 50k. Reporting says the pager shipment was 5000 units and so far ~3000 known targets. Figure some devices broke, hadn't been activated yet, didn't trigger correctly, etc. Figure not every member needed or had a pager, call it 50% to be safe but it might be reasonable to think only the equivalent of a team leader would have one. Either way this is a significant fraction of their contact capabilities.

"Netflix subscribed to Israel" became a common meme during the eventful last year.

Tomorrow? Contracts have probably been signed, casting has begun. /s

Wrong on all three:

1) The victims of yesterday's attack were overwhelmingly terrorist soldiers and mid-level management which fits the definition of surgical. If the results of this operation are as good as suggested by all the early reports, they just carved a major hole in the upper ranks of the organization (not even including the major damage they've caused over the last six months with surgical strikes on leaders).

2) We don't have confirmation that's it's them (but it likely is), and we know far more than that: we know that it incapacitated thousands of members of a designated terrorist organization with minimal impact outside of them.

3) Well, that's just your opinion, man.

Well I don't agree on (1) or (2). I think they are at least attempting to degrade the capabilities of Hezbollah, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the US and others. I don't really want to get into the depths of Arab/Israel conflicts as I don't think anyone really has a good solution to that, certainly not me.

However, I do find anti-BDS laws very hard to justify. It seems that many conflate antizionism with antisemitism, probably because some of the most vocal people are actually just dogwhistling against Jews in general. However, there is a large contingent of people, especially in the West, who are opposed to Israel's battlefield tactics and the current conflict, while simultaneously believing that Israel has a right to exist and defend themselves. Those people might reasonably decide that they want to boycott Israel or Israeli products to make their views heard (hit them in the pocketbook), but are prohibited from expressing themselves by these laws.

Are they unconstitutional in the US? One would imagine that if the Citizens United case says that money is speech, that would equally apply to people who want to boycott Israel. After all, we already tolerate much worse forms of antisemtic speech here. Why would we not also tolerate people voting with their money?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws

For sure, yesterday's was a terrorist attack, since it indiscriminately hit civilians (multiple children, healthcare workers, etc.)

That said, before more people jump on the rethoric of declaring a specific entity terrorist:

The decision is usually made by your state's authorities, and depending on where you live, Hezbollah might not be considered a terrorist organization, or its military wing might be considered terrorist, but not Hezbollah as a whole (like in the EU).

Since we've seen medics among the victims, it's pretty clear that this was not surgically targeting a the military wing, and thus few people would dare claim that this was targeted against terrorists.

8 senior Hezbollah officers are dead. So far the only clear indication of a non-Hezbollah injury is from a Hezbollah officers daughter.

Sounds successful and well targeted.

If you don't want your electronics to explode randomly, don't attack Jews.

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Mostly terrorists are dead and this killed far less civilians than the alternative ways of waging war (ground invasion or bombing campaign). This is the level of surgical operation that everyone was calling for since Hezbollah declared war on Israel on October 8th, and now that Israel is delivering that level of precision there's still some people complaining, it's unbelievable how naive some people are.

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Nah

Please do teach us all how to wage a war on a jihadist organization, with zero civilian casualties. How would you do that? Apparently, extreme targeting by micro explosive devices is not enough. No matter what Israel would do, it will always be held at an enormously higher standard than other countries.

Why did Hezbollah start firing rockets into Israel in the first place? it was totally unprovoked. Now they are reaping what they sowed.