Comment by ivan_gammel

> 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.

Do you have any hard evidence of that? It is absolutely plausible scenario that Hezbollah distributed some of the devices to non-members as part of civil defense plan. In case of the war they may want to have a reliable and authoritative communication channel to civilians.

> 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.

No, it is not reasonable assumption, on the contrary, and we have seen that. It does look like most of the victims weren’t on duty, so it is reasonable to assume that they won‘t be carrying the device all the time.

> 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.

Minimize != avoid. They knew that the explosion may harm the wrong person, because they did not take the measures to prevent that (chosen method made it impossible). This is indiscriminate attack by definition.