Comment by borski 2 days ago
Once again: watch any of the videos. The vast majority of them involve anyone standing around the operative walking away just fine. This was a targeted attack.
Some civilians got hurt, but the intent was not to harm them, and that is the point.
> Once again: watch any of the videos
What makes you think that I did not watch them? And why do you think a few videos circulating online are representative of a few thousands explosions?
> Some civilians got hurt, but the intent was not to harm them
What makes „some“ any different than a hundred or a million? How can you be certain of the intent if civilian casualties were/should have been anticipated?
Didn’t mean to imply you hadn’t watched them at all; was simply trying to use them as evidence.
> What makes „some“ any different than a hundred or a million? How can you be certain of the intent if civilian casualties were/should have been anticipated?
The point I’m trying to make is that there was a very small amount of explosive in each device. They could have added more material had they wanted to do more damage.
There were many ways to make this far more damaging, and they could simply have shot rockets or bombs from the air.
This was a targeted attack, focused on the specific users of these devices, who are Hezbollah militants. Bystanders were not intended to be harmed, which makes this, by definition, a discriminate and surgical attack on Hezbollah militants.
I’m not really sure what about that isn’t clear.
1. Those pagers were purchased by Hezbollah, for Hezbollah. They were distributed by Hezbollah, to Hezbollah. I have extremely little doubt that Israel had intel telling them this, and that these weren’t used by hospitals by doctors and nurses.
2. Of course you can’t guarantee this, but the expectation is that operatives have these devices on them, as it is how they communicate with the rest of Hezbollah. That is a reasonable assumption in the fog of war.
3. Of course you can’t guarantee that. You minimize casualties by making the impact smaller but still meaningful; by using less explosive, but still enough to accomplish the goal.
There are no guarantees in war. Ops fail sometimes. You try to predict collateral damage, which Israel clearly did, by targeting specific devices used by and distributed by Hezbollah, and by using a relatively small amount of explosive.
Both of those things indicate that care was put into minimizing collateral damage. Even if they minimized the amount of explosive to avoid detection, that still accomplished the secondary effect of minimizing damage.
This was as successful a military op as it gets.
I think you need to look at the nature of the attack, the targeted, the design of the weapon, and the intended outcome. These devices were not designed specifically to be lethal (although some were). They were designed to send a message by maiming the targets and to create a distrust of needed comm tech by not just Hezbolah, but by Hamas and the Iranians too. I’m sure the designers of the attack realized that some would be lethal and that some non-targets would be affected. All that went in to the calculation. They decided the strategic and tactical payoff was worth the collateral damage. Welcome to warfare.
While it seems few bystanders suffered physical injuries, it's naive imho to think that this won't cause enormously elevated fear among the population at large. 'Koolaid' is still synonymous with mass cult poisoning in the US even though that incident happened ~50 years ago in a different country. Everyone in Lebanon is having nightmares about random electronic devices turning out to be bombs, even though they know that's logically not the case. Just like people in New York feel differently about seeing airliners than they did before 9-11.