Comment by lelanthran
Comment by lelanthran 2 days ago
> Israel and Lebanon are not at war.
Maybe not, but the combatants holding those devices were at war, no?
Comment by lelanthran 2 days ago
> Israel and Lebanon are not at war.
Maybe not, but the combatants holding those devices were at war, no?
> Approx half the casualties are civilians
Citation needed for that. None of the news reports, even the heavily biased ones, have reported mass civilian casualties.
The citation, as requested:
"two children and four health workers in a hospital in southern Beirut were among the 12 people who were killed on Tuesday."
- Public Health Minister Firas Abiad in a press conference
I expect more detailed reports will be shared over the next few days about the total casualty.
> So that's 50% of those killed, right?
Wrong. You claimed:
>>> Approx half the casualties are civilians
Casualties doesn't mean "those who died", it means "Injured or killed".
If you have to use a definition for a word that differs from the dictionary for your argument to work, it's your argument that is broken, not the dictionary.
Your entire argument in this thread is based on not knowing what "casualty" means.
casualties refers to injuries as well as deaths. I think the citation they were looking for was for the ~2800 number. I don't think it's reasonable to say that 6/12 killed were civilians, so half of all casualties were civilian.
We dont know until we get more reports, like you said, it could be higher... but it could also be lower.
This is a dumb position though because all logic would suggest the two ratios are proportional. Civilians are not significantly more likely to die of their injuries than non-civilians. While 12 is a bit of a small sample, it's not unreasonably small to make extrapolations.
Apart from the issue where this ignores how many people got injured (a much larger number), there's a very simple "survival bias" reason (ironically) why this argument doesn't work.
Children (and potentially health workers, as opposed to men of fighting age) are much more likely to die of such an explosion than men of fighting age. In other words, children will be significantly overrepresented here.
That still looks like a more targeted approach than "precise strikes" on schools and humanitarian zones like in https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyx9znxl4eo
> but the combatants holding those devices were at war, no?
The attack wasn't as targeted as you seem to think. It also hit health workers and bystanders. Approx half the casualties are civilians (including children).
According to Humans rights watch: https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/18/lebanon-exploding-pagers...
> Thousands of pagers simultaneously exploded across Lebanon and parts of Syria on September 17, 2024, resulting in at least 12 deaths, including at least two children and two health workers, and at least 2,800 injuries, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Health.