It wasn't a targeted attack since they had no way of knowing where the pagers would end up in the second-hand market, as they were only activated years later.
> You’re telling me pagers used by a terrorist organization ending up in the second-hand market.
Four children were killed and dozens of _innocent_ bystanders were injured.
> What do you know about Lebanon and Hezbollah?
It's a conflict that's been going on for 30 years that I can remember and I don't think that more kinetic operations are going to accomplish anything other than fomenting an actual genocide.
Did you think gatekeeping was going to work? This conflict has spilled out into the broader world. If it were strictly contained to Lebanon and only implicated Hezbollah then you might have a point. We're well past that.
> How do people end up making such unfounded, unbiased claims so confidently??
>Four children were killed and dozens of _innocent_ bystanders were injured.
Compared to thousands of Hezbollah members. Literally one of the most targeted large-scale attacks of all time. There are effectively zero other military means that would have been even close to as selective and discriminant. Would you prefer they drop a 500lb bomb on each of their houses instead?
The pager detonations were weak enough to be effectively nonlethal unless you're especially vulnerable. That's how you end up with such a low death to injury ratio in the first place.
So per the KPI metric you've chosen, making it more lethal and more dangerous to bystanders would have been better.
Even among the injuries, you're still looking at an awful ratio, since Hezbollah had mostly migrated these devices out of their combatants in favor of newer models, and they were mainly in the hands of civilians.
And all of this is ignoring the blatant international law violation against booby trapping. This was very clearly a war crime.
Common Article 3; GC I Art. 12 & 18; GC III Art. 13; GC IV Arts. 27, 32 & 51; AP I Arts. 48, 51(2–5), 57 & 54; CCW Amended Protocol II Art. 7(2) of the Geneva Conventions.
The point is that such preposterously stupid military means are not preventing the continuation of blood-shed, and if you are saying that exploding pagers are a perfectly acceptable means of executing military goals, then .. whats next .. are Israeli citizens expected to live under the continuous threat of exploding vibrators and vaporizers, now, too?
The “War on Terror” has addled peoples minds so harshly that the notion that there is actually a legal way to wage war seems preposterous - however, there is a “legal means by which to wage war” which does in fact protect you, citizen, and you should learn about it - because when your representatives (and by proxy: you) violate those laws, you become personally liable for the repercussions that other victims will prosecute on you, and your nation state:
If ‘no bomb/missile ever is a war crime’, then .. there is no such thing as “terrorism”, either. (Although the argument could be made that there is no such thing as ‘terrorism’ at all, and that indeed, the word terrorism is merely a propaganda crutch used to justify atrocities against so-called ‘lesser cultures’ deemed inferior by the same institutions which used to use the ‘n-word’ to justify their atrocities in decades past, too, before that became difficult to do ..)
You can indeed commit war crimes with sticks too, though, incidentally.
You have to lose the war in order to be so prosecuted. So, the important thing about war crimes is not to lose once you've determined that you've committed them.
I'll start to believe this sort of fantasy when the people who win wars begin investigating and prosecuting themselves for the crimes that they committed or suborned.
The "legal way to wage war" is only relevant when you are waging war against an army. Hezbollah is not an army, it's a terrorist group. It attacks civilians. It doesn't wear uniforms. It ignores the laws of war.
“The IDF attacks civilians. It uses perfidy to indiscriminately attack the civilian population of its enemies. It, too, ignores the laws of war.”
There is no way to continue justifying acts of terror being committed by your in-group, without also become equivalent to the terrorist of your out-group.
