The intended targets of the exploding papers weren't civilians. Very few actual civilians ended up hurt by the detonations, much fewer than attacks by conventional weapons. It's about as targeted an attack as one can achieve from a distance.
As an act of warfare, Israel did a splendid job on this. Thoroughly impressive work.
> Very few actual civilians ended up hurt by the detonations, much fewer than attacks by conventional weapons.
The reports are 4,000 wounded and 12 killed unintended targets in order to kill 42 targets.
On what planet is that “very few actual civilians”? I think you knew full well before posting that’s a ridiculous claim which is why you did it anonymously.
This is not correct. Each one that had this pager was connected to Hezbollah, i.e. a soldier of Hezbollah. This attack was meant to "disable" a very big portion of Hezbollah, which it did (4000 of them).
This is one of the most sophisticated attacks to avoid civilian casualty.
"The reports" are that 12 were killed total, not that 12 civilians were killed. Only 2 of the killed were civilians as far as I can tell. Several of those who people on Twitter tried to claim were civilians, including a doctor, were admitted by Hezbollah to be Hezbollah members and given Hezbollah funerals.
I've never heard of "42 targets", and given 12 people died total, obviously 42 targets were not killed.
You should provide some sourcing for your numbers.
For the IDF, a 28.6% civilian death rate is actually quite good. Their own classified data reveals an 83% civilian casualty rate in Gaza—nearly three times worse.
The Lebanon pager attack: 12 civilians (including 2 children) killed out of 42 total deaths (28.6% civilian casualty rate).
Gaza genocide: Leaked IDF intelligence documents show 8,900 militants killed out of 53,000 total deaths as of May 2025 (83% civilian casualty rate).
The numbers you state are from the Lebanese government and Hizbollah. So I don't think we can assume they are accurate. I don't have any better numbers, though.
You specific argument though misuses even those numbers. 42 is the number of people actually killed. I couldn't figure out how many were targeted (how many pagers did explode), but I'd assume the number could be much higher than the number of deaths. Without that number we cannot determine how well targeted this was. I also don't think it is plausible that for every target you injure 100 bystanders. So I would assume the number of targets was at least an order of magnitude higher.
There's also another number from Hizbollah, that 1500 of their people were injured. But no idea it those would be included in the 4000 wounded number.
People tend to easily forget that the civilian casualty ratio for conventional warfare is around 50%
These attacks killed and maimed children, but firing JDAMs kills and maims even more children.
Not excusing the Israeli military here... they definitely dropped a lot of JDAMs, unguided artillery, and indiscriminate autocannon munitions on Gaza.
But the specific point on the pager attacks being against civilians is not a great argument.
Another thing I will note is that a lot of Palestinian groups also use similar reasoning towards targeting the Israeli population on the basis of the fact there is mass conscription in place.
When one quotes Health Ministry for numbers of casualties and deaths, that is relying on HAMAS for information. To knowingly use sources that have demonstratbly be shown to be false, inaccurate, or misleading makes one also unreliable.
You're telling me that the 2,800 injured were mostly Hezbollah operatives? Was this sourced and verified anywhere? What is the rate of combatant to non-combatant casualties is this instance compared to "conventional weapons"?
These pagers weren't purchased in stores by civilians. You see, Hezbollah had a problem: Their phone network was totally compromised. Israel was using operatives' phones as tracking beacons. So Hezbollah purchased a few thousand pagers through specialty channels (which we now know had been compromised by Israel) to distribute to their commanders. They believed this would improve their security, because unlike the two-way radios in cell phones, pagers use a one-way broadcast radio, and there is no need to know or report the pager radio's location.
Given this context: A limited number of specialty electronics, acquired and distributed by Hezbollah as a means of military command and control, and subsequent to this operation Hezbollah's C2 was demonstrably neutered--you believe that the majority of injuries were innocent civilians?
Basic logic indicates that the vast majority of those killed and injured were, in fact, nodes in Hezbollah's command and control structure.
"You're telling me that the 2,800 injured were mostly Hezbollah operatives?"
Yes, because these pagers were only used by Hezbollah and Israel was able to read the messages they sent on them so they could know if they were in use by a Hezbollah member.
The IDF is only able to kill 17 people they classify as "Hamas" for every 100 people they kill in Gaza (per their own internal reports). They have a self assessed 83% civilian kill rate.
The issue is using civil infrastructure as weapon, that could arguably be an act of terror. As pagers are rarely used in non-criminal settings, i guess this is somewhat okay in my opinion, but the callousness and overall reactions (proudness, smugness) of israelis and most of the west on this near-terror attack is in my opinion another proof of a lack of empathy that is starting to be pervasive in our societies.
I know people talk about the "entitlement epidemic", but entitlement is just another name from narcissism, in essence a lack of empathy. Which seems to be more and more socially acceptable and even rewarded (with internet points mostly), like your comment show (i'm not jumping on you, you are tamer than many, so i think it's a better exemple for my point than more violent ones).
And since that's the example we show our kids today, i'm now officially more worried about our society ability to handle social media than climate change.
Pagers are used by more then just criminals(see doctors) and targeting random criminals as opposed to millitants wouldn't be justifiable. But these particular pager that were wired up were specifically intended only for Hezbollah internal use and were sold to Hezbollah by Israel through a third party front.
Did it only focus on Hezbollah military officials? Hezbollah is a political party. This is like package bombing US congressmen, Presidential cabinet members, etc. Which would be considered a terrorist attack obviously (and was when Israel sent our politicians, including our President, mailbombs shortly after WW2)
It's technically and sort of a political party. It's also an occupying military force in Lebanon; it is foremost an instrument of the IRGC. It's useful to understand that Hezbollah is Shia-supremacist organization, and Shia muslims constitute a minority of the Lebanese population.
Anyway sadly even if they did start attacking civilians, say Palestinian civilians as a random example, who is going to enforce the penalty for war crimes. These days its seems they're more of a suggestion than a rule of engaging in war.
Huh? Lebanon is not being held to war crime laws, and is the poorer nation. They bombed Northern Israel for over 2 years, including a soccer field full of children that weren't their targets but are very much dead.
Targeting here goes beyond reasonable expectation from a military at war. Compare that to the russian terror of lobbing 500kg bombs at random housing blocks.
I suspect that "random housing block" was on top of some non-random tunnels full of non-uniformed military intentionally using the occupants of those houses as human shields.
Otherwise there's no reason to use such a large bomb on some houses.
That's like planting a bomb in front of a military camp. You might have a target, but in the end you just kill whoever was nearby at that time. In the case of the pager attack, that includes children aged 11 and 12, as well as a nurse.
That's much closer to a terrorist attack than to legal warfare.
"planting a bomb in front of a military camp" is like the textbook goal for bomb-planting devices (airplanes, artillery, MRLs), its one of the most normal scenarios out of all of normal war scenarios.
Planting a bomb on each soldier would be even better.
There might be some potential legal defense in terms of proportionality of collateral damage but it's so thin here as to be absurd.
Regardless, given the number of war crimes this army has been found guilty of, this is somewhat moot. What's another war crime in the grand scheme of things.
You can have a reasonable expectation secure military pagers are only going to be used by soldiers. Given how few collateral deaths there were this was a reasonable assumption.
The principle of proportionality is explicitly about expectations, i.e. expected military advantage vs expected collateral damage.
You seem to be holding Israel to an impossible standard of guaranteeing zero collateral damage, which IHL does not require because no military is capable of that.
Hezbollah was actively launching thousands of missiles at Israel when these pagers blew up. They stopped launching missiles at Israel en masse soon after these pagers blew up. What a odd coincidence.
No war in history has completely avoided any civilian casualties or attacks on civilian populations, as even limited conflicts often involve indirect harm (e.g., from stray fire, blockades, or displacement), and larger wars almost inevitably affect non-combatants.
Curious how the concept of the 'war crime' is weaponized by the pacifist and largely ignored by the non-pacifist that knows how proper deescalation can take place.
The intended targets of the exploding papers weren't civilians. Very few actual civilians ended up hurt by the detonations, much fewer than attacks by conventional weapons. It's about as targeted an attack as one can achieve from a distance.
As an act of warfare, Israel did a splendid job on this. Thoroughly impressive work.
> Very few actual civilians ended up hurt by the detonations, much fewer than attacks by conventional weapons.
The reports are 4,000 wounded and 12 killed unintended targets in order to kill 42 targets.
On what planet is that “very few actual civilians”? I think you knew full well before posting that’s a ridiculous claim which is why you did it anonymously.
> in order to kill 42 targets.
This is not correct. Each one that had this pager was connected to Hezbollah, i.e. a soldier of Hezbollah. This attack was meant to "disable" a very big portion of Hezbollah, which it did (4000 of them).
This is one of the most sophisticated attacks to avoid civilian casualty.
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"The reports" are that 12 were killed total, not that 12 civilians were killed. Only 2 of the killed were civilians as far as I can tell. Several of those who people on Twitter tried to claim were civilians, including a doctor, were admitted by Hezbollah to be Hezbollah members and given Hezbollah funerals.
I've never heard of "42 targets", and given 12 people died total, obviously 42 targets were not killed.
You should provide some sourcing for your numbers.
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> The reports are 4,000 wounded and 12 killed unintended targets
Which reports? According to whom? Hezbollah?
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source?
For the IDF, a 28.6% civilian death rate is actually quite good. Their own classified data reveals an 83% civilian casualty rate in Gaza—nearly three times worse.
The Lebanon pager attack: 12 civilians (including 2 children) killed out of 42 total deaths (28.6% civilian casualty rate).
Gaza genocide: Leaked IDF intelligence documents show 8,900 militants killed out of 53,000 total deaths as of May 2025 (83% civilian casualty rate).
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The numbers you state are from the Lebanese government and Hizbollah. So I don't think we can assume they are accurate. I don't have any better numbers, though.
You specific argument though misuses even those numbers. 42 is the number of people actually killed. I couldn't figure out how many were targeted (how many pagers did explode), but I'd assume the number could be much higher than the number of deaths. Without that number we cannot determine how well targeted this was. I also don't think it is plausible that for every target you injure 100 bystanders. So I would assume the number of targets was at least an order of magnitude higher.
There's also another number from Hizbollah, that 1500 of their people were injured. But no idea it those would be included in the 4000 wounded number.
People tend to easily forget that the civilian casualty ratio for conventional warfare is around 50%
These attacks killed and maimed children, but firing JDAMs kills and maims even more children.
Not excusing the Israeli military here... they definitely dropped a lot of JDAMs, unguided artillery, and indiscriminate autocannon munitions on Gaza.
But the specific point on the pager attacks being against civilians is not a great argument.
Another thing I will note is that a lot of Palestinian groups also use similar reasoning towards targeting the Israeli population on the basis of the fact there is mass conscription in place.
> People tend to easily forget that the civilian casualty ratio for conventional warfare is around 50%
Causality in war includes people that were only injured. This was far, far more than a 50% casualty rate. More like a 9552% casualty rate.
Yes, since conveniently the attacker also gets to define who is a civilian.
When one quotes Health Ministry for numbers of casualties and deaths, that is relying on HAMAS for information. To knowingly use sources that have demonstratbly be shown to be false, inaccurate, or misleading makes one also unreliable.
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You're telling me that the 2,800 injured were mostly Hezbollah operatives? Was this sourced and verified anywhere? What is the rate of combatant to non-combatant casualties is this instance compared to "conventional weapons"?
These pagers weren't purchased in stores by civilians. You see, Hezbollah had a problem: Their phone network was totally compromised. Israel was using operatives' phones as tracking beacons. So Hezbollah purchased a few thousand pagers through specialty channels (which we now know had been compromised by Israel) to distribute to their commanders. They believed this would improve their security, because unlike the two-way radios in cell phones, pagers use a one-way broadcast radio, and there is no need to know or report the pager radio's location.
Given this context: A limited number of specialty electronics, acquired and distributed by Hezbollah as a means of military command and control, and subsequent to this operation Hezbollah's C2 was demonstrably neutered--you believe that the majority of injuries were innocent civilians?
Basic logic indicates that the vast majority of those killed and injured were, in fact, nodes in Hezbollah's command and control structure.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-...
Here is Hezbollah boasting to Reuters before the pagers attack, about how it moved to using pagers and couriers to counter Israeli intelligence.
As you can guess, with the advent of mobile phones in the 2000s, pagers became obsolete in Lebanon
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"You're telling me that the 2,800 injured were mostly Hezbollah operatives?"
Yes, because these pagers were only used by Hezbollah and Israel was able to read the messages they sent on them so they could know if they were in use by a Hezbollah member.
The IDF is only able to kill 17 people they classify as "Hamas" for every 100 people they kill in Gaza (per their own internal reports). They have a self assessed 83% civilian kill rate.
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The issue is using civil infrastructure as weapon, that could arguably be an act of terror. As pagers are rarely used in non-criminal settings, i guess this is somewhat okay in my opinion, but the callousness and overall reactions (proudness, smugness) of israelis and most of the west on this near-terror attack is in my opinion another proof of a lack of empathy that is starting to be pervasive in our societies.
I know people talk about the "entitlement epidemic", but entitlement is just another name from narcissism, in essence a lack of empathy. Which seems to be more and more socially acceptable and even rewarded (with internet points mostly), like your comment show (i'm not jumping on you, you are tamer than many, so i think it's a better exemple for my point than more violent ones).
And since that's the example we show our kids today, i'm now officially more worried about our society ability to handle social media than climate change.
Pagers are used by more then just criminals(see doctors) and targeting random criminals as opposed to millitants wouldn't be justifiable. But these particular pager that were wired up were specifically intended only for Hezbollah internal use and were sold to Hezbollah by Israel through a third party front.
Did it only focus on Hezbollah military officials? Hezbollah is a political party. This is like package bombing US congressmen, Presidential cabinet members, etc. Which would be considered a terrorist attack obviously (and was when Israel sent our politicians, including our President, mailbombs shortly after WW2)
It's technically and sort of a political party. It's also an occupying military force in Lebanon; it is foremost an instrument of the IRGC. It's useful to understand that Hezbollah is Shia-supremacist organization, and Shia muslims constitute a minority of the Lebanese population.
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Does a political party shoot missiles over international borders and stockpile arms?
"It's not a war crime the first time!"
Anyway sadly even if they did start attacking civilians, say Palestinian civilians as a random example, who is going to enforce the penalty for war crimes. These days its seems they're more of a suggestion than a rule of engaging in war.
War crime laws only apply to poorer nations sadly
Huh? Lebanon is not being held to war crime laws, and is the poorer nation. They bombed Northern Israel for over 2 years, including a soccer field full of children that weren't their targets but are very much dead.
If anything, it's the opposite.
Targeting here goes beyond reasonable expectation from a military at war. Compare that to the russian terror of lobbing 500kg bombs at random housing blocks.
Or the Israeli terror of lobbing 2000lb bombs at random housing blocks for that matter.
I suspect that "random housing block" was on top of some non-random tunnels full of non-uniformed military intentionally using the occupants of those houses as human shields.
Otherwise there's no reason to use such a large bomb on some houses.
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Yes, agreed.
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Does it? Do you have any data on how many of these devices ended up in civilian hands?
Afaik they intercepted a shipment for Hamas members only. Do you have more information?
How many civilians there even use these pagers instead of mobile phones? Are there any?
Hamas is in Gaza, this attack was against Hezbollah and civilians in Lebanon.
>Afaik they intercepted a shipment for Hamas members only
Ignoring that it was Hezbollah, not Hamas, I would point out that many of Hezbollah members are civilians.
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> Afaik they intercepted a shipment for Hamas members only.
What? Hamas didn't have any of the pagers, Hezbollah did.
A year on, some Lebanese bystanders hurt in Israel’s pager attack still recovering... Over 3,400 were wounded when devices belonging to Hezbollah members exploded https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-year-on-some-lebanese-bystan...
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* * *
That's like planting a bomb in front of a military camp. You might have a target, but in the end you just kill whoever was nearby at that time. In the case of the pager attack, that includes children aged 11 and 12, as well as a nurse.
That's much closer to a terrorist attack than to legal warfare.
"planting a bomb in front of a military camp" is like the textbook goal for bomb-planting devices (airplanes, artillery, MRLs), its one of the most normal scenarios out of all of normal war scenarios.
Planting a bomb on each soldier would be even better.
Yes, but planting a bomb in front of a military camp is absolutely legal.
There might be some potential legal defense in terms of proportionality of collateral damage but it's so thin here as to be absurd.
Regardless, given the number of war crimes this army has been found guilty of, this is somewhat moot. What's another war crime in the grand scheme of things.
there is 0 war crimes that IDF has been found guilty of by any legal authority.
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Many of the people who had the pagers were doctors, lawyers, bureaucrats...
Maybe I'm wrong, but, I think Hezb0-lla-h is pretty much the "government", especially in southern Lebanon
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You cannot quarantee who is holding the pager at the moment of explosion.
You can have a reasonable expectation secure military pagers are only going to be used by soldiers. Given how few collateral deaths there were this was a reasonable assumption.
“Expected” is not enough. These bombs didn’t go off in active war zone. They went off in public in Lebanon, and maimed and killed civilians.
I found this thesis from some guy doing a master in international operation law at the Swedish defence college, https://fhs.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1974147/FULLTEXT...
and I interpret his analysis as that it was targeted enough to be legal.
The principle of proportionality is explicitly about expectations, i.e. expected military advantage vs expected collateral damage.
You seem to be holding Israel to an impossible standard of guaranteeing zero collateral damage, which IHL does not require because no military is capable of that.
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Hezbollah was actively launching thousands of missiles at Israel when these pagers blew up. They stopped launching missiles at Israel en masse soon after these pagers blew up. What a odd coincidence.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wech_Baghtu_wedding_party_airs...
No war in history has completely avoided any civilian casualties or attacks on civilian populations, as even limited conflicts often involve indirect harm (e.g., from stray fire, blockades, or displacement), and larger wars almost inevitably affect non-combatants.
Curious how the concept of the 'war crime' is weaponized by the pacifist and largely ignored by the non-pacifist that knows how proper deescalation can take place.
might is right. /s
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That's a relatively new concept, certainly not true historically.
The people those pagers were given to were NOT civilians. They were active members of Hezbollah.
Tell that to the dead civillians
Like the 12 Syrian Druze children Hezbollah killed in this attack? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majdal_Shams_attack
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