Sorry. The sarcasm wasn’t as evident as it should have been.
This is the exact OPPOSITE of a terror attack, you idiot.
The only people hurt were the killers and terrorists trained and armed by Hezbollah, with virtually zero “collateral damage”.
Use a little logic–who carries a pager? Let me explain it to you: a person with a pager is somebody important enough to be on call at all times, ready to report for duty at their place of employment…
So now let’s ask: what kind of duty, and what place of employment? The pagers were all bought, and delivered to its employees by Hezbollah… defined by the US government as a terrorist organization.
If it’s hard for you to imagine how directly striking thousands of Hezbollah agents, sowing chaos in their ranks and demonstarting to them that they arw not beyond Israel’s reach, while minimizing collateral damage to civilians by very methodically targeting Hezbollah members, would improve Israel’s security, then you really lack imagination.
I am honored to be called an idiot by you.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/09/17/lebanon-pagers-exploding-hezbollah/
Again: were this attack perpetrated against the United States or against Israel, with similar violence against civilians, we would not hesitate to label it terrorism.
At this point, I don’t think there is any strike that Israel could do that would satisfy Israel’s critics. No matter how surgical the strike, Israel will be painted as an unreasonable villain.
If it turns out that only a teeny-tiny portion of the injuries and deaths are civilians (which has not yet been established), then I can at least imagine the case to be made. I’d still disagree – this is a terror attack, meant to inspire terror, not to actually significantly damage Hezbollah. But inspiring terror in thousands upon thousands of Lebanese civilians, which this undoubtedly did, seems incredibly dangerous for Israel. Is that really worth injuring a bunch of Hezbollah members (and killing a few)?
Little bombs going off all over major cities isn’t surgical in any form of the word.
I don’t think there’s any strike that Israel could do that would bomb children that would satisfy Israel’s critics, either. Bunch of fuckin idiots, demanding that Israel stop bombing kids.
It is if those little bombs are all carried by terrorists, wise guy.
That’s because you’re a fucking child that thinks that any war in history has been fought without children getting hurt.
When you’re unable to draw a distinction between murdering a child and mutilating his corpse and dropping a bomb on a building that is both used by terrorists to fight you and is inhabitted by children, your opinion is not worth regarding.
What’s the portion/percentage of civilian deaths/injuries and children death/injuries in this specific pager-explosion incident that would lead you to believe this was the wrong move?
Because bombs only kill the people carrying them. There’s definitely never any collateral damage. It’s not like they explode or anything.
nice dude you nailed it
It’s not me who can’t draw that distinction. It’s the child.
yes, I agree with you. The timing is illogical.
A job like this would be a good tactic during a shooting war, when you need to kill 3000 enemy soldiers , so you can win on a specific battlefield.
But for longer-term strategy, I don’t understand it. Hezbollah has about 30 thousand soldiers, so wounding 3000 today won’t have any long-term effect. It will just disrupt the organization of Hezbollah for a few months, till they can replace the wounded soldiers.
So now, it’s time for making wild-ass guesses, based on zero evidence: why was the attack done today? I have two blind guesses:
- Bibi Netanyahu has lost his mind. He is hung up with the internal politics of his party (today he fired his highest cabinet member ( defense minister Gallant). So he ordered a dramatic news event as a show of power.
- Time was running out. Maybe the original plan was like I described above–to wait for a tactical battlefield moment, and then kill thousands of enemy at once. But maybe Israel found out today that Hezbollah was about to check the pagers (I assume that pagers, like cell phones, need maintenance ( batteries, new screens, etc)…and if some technician was about to open up a pager, they would see the explosive inside, and the whole plan would fail. So Israel set it off today.
But I’m just making blind guesses with no evidence. Anybody else have any better ideas?
Singling out this portion (Hezbollah is “they”, for reference) – this is pretty much the definition of a terror attack. Yes, a terror attack targeting Hezbollah, but by their very nature, terror attacks usually can’t be particularly specifically targeted. Inevitably civilians are terrorized – everyone who was injured or killed (and their families); everyone who was nearby a bomb that exploded; everyone who has a friend or family member injured or killed; and even many who just heard about the explosions nearby their neighborhoods and daily lives – all these people were terrorized as well. Is all that worth slightly and temporarily weakening Hezbollah?
The ratio of combatants killed in a shooting war like the one ongoing in Gaza tends to shake out right around 1 in 3, so if it’s significantly worse than that, it would be a failure.
A terrorist attack targets the civilian population, which this certainly did not. Attacking the morale of enemy troops isn’t terrorism, it’s how every battle in history was won - maybe you could make a case for Cannae being different, but I highly doubt that the “full encirclement followed by slaughter” story is actually true.
Based on the videos I watched, you’d need to be basically touching the pager to be harmed. And if you’re an oppressed Lebanese Christian, or a Muslim who supports the mainstream parties that are cowed by Hamas, why on Earth would you be terrorized by your oppressors being struck? As you are always quick to note, it is very important that we distinguish between Hamas and Hezbollah and the Palestinians and the Lebanese.
What exactly do you think the alternative is? If full scale war with Hezbollah does break out, do you imagine it will somehow be less destructive than this?
ISTM that this action greatly increases the chances of full-scale war with Hezbollah.
I think it’s very possible that this is what Netanyahu and his allies want.
This wasn’t a war-zone. These were civilian areas, even if the individual targets were Hezbollah. My bar is much, much higher than that for civilian areas, outside of a war-zone. There were tons of civilians nearby these bombs, and some of them were injured (and probably killed).
Again, as I said in post #1642, this is the EXACT OPPOSITE of a terror attack.
It surgically struck ONLY the people holding the beepers. Yes, sometimes there is an innocent child in the arms of a terrorist wearing his beeper. There have been reports of several children and one elderly woman wounded.
War is hell. Don’t start one.
Don’t aim a quarter million missiles at Israel, don’t threaten to kill all the Jews…and guess what? Nobody will blow up your beepers.
If someone managed to sneak explosives into pagers or phones owned by US service-people, or IDF members, and detonated them simultaneously while most of them are in civilian areas doing civilian things, I’d have no trouble at all calling it a terrorist attack. I don’t think this changes because it’s Hezbollah.
YMMV. If so, it’s a semantics disagreement.
You are totally unaware of life in the Middle East. Hamas and Hezbollah have turned every city in Israel into a war zone. They launch missiles to attack civilians…and ONLY civilians-- in every city in Israel.
But when Israel defends itself by wounding the specific individuals who do the killing…that violates your definition of a “high bar”.
Sorry 'bout that…your bar is immoral.
Jewish lives matter.