Comment by cess11
4 days ago
This was about as targeted as anti-personnel landmines, but spread out in civilian areas and detonated without any knowledge of their surroundings at the time.
Because mines are untargeted and designed to maim without discrimination as to who they might hurt there is a long running effort to prohibit their use.
Hezbollah pagers aren't randomly lying around though, they're normally attached to Hezbollah members. These were also much smaller than any anti personnel mine.
This was far more targeted than, say, any artillery strike that a commander could possibly order. Targeted doesn't mean it's impossible to harm something else. That's possible with any weapon, and far more likely with larger munitions like artillery shells.
Hezbollah members include medical personnel, teachers, politicians and so on. It is a much larger group of organisations than the armed factions.
I'm not sure what you're after. What the israelis did would have been a worse crime if it actually was targeted. Is that your point?
It's not clear that Israel just set off all Hezbollah issued beepers; we don't know what methodology they used. We can guess based on reported casualties, but we don't know which casualties were involved with Hezbollah's military operations.
> What the israelis did would have been a worse crime if it actually was targeted.
It was certainly targeted, it just also had collateral damage, i.e. harm to non-targets.
What you have Israel do instead? Suppose they struck Hezbollah fighters with conventional artillery. They're not sitting around in open fields, so there still would have been collateral damage.
Would you again maintain that the strikes were "untargeted" because there was collateral damage? By this unusual definition, it seems impossible to do a "targeted" strike at least in any urban environment.
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No, the messengers were specifically delivered to Hezbollah leadership. It is not even closely comparable.
They were widely distributed and there was no way for the israelis to know where they were when they detonated them, which they likely did out of desperation and not because they had good reason to believe they were in such and such a position.
It is fucking grim to incessantly defend state terrorism.
You don't seem to have an inch of a problem with terrorist, islamist militants that not only terrorise Israel, they also terrorise Lebanon. Ask the Arab League. Even they define them as terrorists.
Something here is grim indeed and it is not restricted to some regretable educational deficiencies.
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