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Comment by dralley

6 days ago

Fair enough, 12 total only includes the original pager attack, not the subsequent radio one. However, you seem to have made the same mistake. 42 people were killed total, but that does not mean that there were 42 targets.

In any case, if Hezbollah themselves admit that 1500 of their fighters were injured by the attack (according to your own source), it seems extremely dishonest to claim that all 4000 were civilians or that there were only 42 targets.

I didn't say 42 targets.

Per the report: 42 dead, 12 of which were civilians. It follows that 30 were considered Hezbollah.

  • Several of those initially claimed to be civilians were later acknowledged by Hezbollah, so that number is still a bit fuzzy.

  • The report is 4,000 civilians injured (which means they just didn't die -- people lost fingers, limbs, eyes, etc.)

    Presumably if you have thousands of Hezbola people walking around within their homes, businesses, hopistals, shops, etc. it makes sense you'd have many civilian injuries when these went off. There wasn't a geo fence around them and if someone was in an NICU or preschool the explosions were indiscriminate.

    So while there was some element of precision in placement of who had these pagers, there was zero awareness (by design) to where they actually were when they all exploded.

    • I haven't seen a report of 4000 civilians injured. I have seen a report of 4000 people injured across the two attacks, but presumably some fraction of these are targets.

      42 killed, of whom Hezbollah said 12 were civilians (later admitting some of the 12 were fighters).

      Historical average is about half of the wounded or killed in conflicts to be civilians. < 12/42 would be a relatively "good" ratio.

      5 replies →

    • but we have the benefit of seeing live videos from actual shops where these hezbollah members were, and you can see the explosion was small enough to not hurt anyone in the vicinity

      even if very close, one of the videos shows a supermarket line, and no one around is hurt

>42 people were killed total, but that does not mean that there were 42 targets.

So they only managed to hit 30 targets with 12 misfires… that makes it even worse.

> In any case, if Hezbollah themselves admit that 1500 of their fighters were injured by the attack (according to your own source)

That’s 1500 in addition to the 4,000 civilians. The fact they managed to wound 2.5x+ as many civilians as targets isn’t exactly making them look better…