Comment by SiempreViernes
4 days ago
I'm confused: you acknowledge the possibility that there could be non-valid targets in Hezbollah, yet you cannot see parallels to the case of an attack against a water supply?
The one distinction I can see you raise is about the spatial concentration of the affected persons, but I don't see how this essential to the point.
You are of course free to put your delineations such that the matter of concentration results in two different arguments, but frankly I think you should just reject the use of analogies altogether and save everyone else a lot of grief.
I do not argue that civilian members of Hezbollah as a political movement are unacceptable targets, I simply acknowledge that perspective exists.
And the location of the target is entirely the point when the alternative to the pager attack is a JDAM, an attack with greater collateral damage, but still a valid target. Imagine instead of an explosive charge, these pagers were somehow phoning home and providing location data that Israel could use to perform airstrikes. Based on that intel, those air strikes would be entirely legitimate, and they would include far more collateral damage than the charge in the pager.
An attack on the water supply is indiscriminate. A water supply poisoning makes no attempt at differentiating between the targets and the civilian population.