Ok, but you were just talking about “minor injuries”. Do you take that back?
It’s not a terror attack. It’s hard to imagine a more discriminate mass attack. A targeted assassination is almost perfectly discriminate but you can’t do that against thousands simultaneously. This is the next best thing.
Even a bomb dropped on a pure military facility will kill some civilians; probably even some children. Impossible to avoid completely. Every pager here went to a Hezbollah militant. Obviously one can’t be sure that the devices were in the possession of the target at the exact time they went off, but it’s about as close as is reasonably possible.
You can see from the videos that they were almost perfectly selective. Even people standing a couple feet away were unharmed. Only those with the devices right next to them were injured or killed.
Terror attacks deliberately target non-combatants. This was exactly the opposite. We’ll never know if Hezbollah would receive the same criticism because in no universe would they behave this selectively toward combatants.
By the same logic Hezbollah is justified in bombing those fields because of Israel’s own genocidal behavior.
There’s no “good guy” faction here.
Cite for soccer-playing Israeli children committing genocide against Lebanon?
I know this is NOT a breaking news thread (wrong forum) but could I politely ask you folks to take it to one of the political or Pit threads to debate the validity of the action?
I’m trying to get good information on the event, and we have at least a half dozen threads to talk about the comparative morality already.
Just a request from one of your information seeking fellows.
Right and I will say for me personally, that even if we were to call this a terrorist attack it does belong in its own special bracket. Targeting mostly hezbollah does mean it’s pretty much normal warfare.
However, it is true that in the US this would be looked at very differently with roles reversed. And yes there are Israelis guilty of war crimes, including killing US citizens and have ICC arrest warrants. So let’s not pretend any asymmetry is baked in by Israel just humanely defending itself.
It’s hard to speculate on something so distant from our reality. Almost everything Hezbollah does is plain old terrorism by any reasonable standard, such as the unguided rockets they send into Israel. Their actions in Gaza notwithstanding, Israel’s attack here is not that.
The most you can say is that it did undoubtedly strike fear into the civilian population. But that clearly wasn’t the goal and it wasn’t because they were subject to indiscriminate attacks.
This is a disturbingly glib way to hand-wave away and dismiss a very, very dangerous enemy.
Hezbollah has a quarter million missiles capable of hitting every city and every private home in Israel. They have precise guided missiles (provided by Iran ) which can ground the entire Israeli Air Force ,by destroying the runways at 4 locations. They have 20 or 30 thousand combat-experienced soldiers (minus the 3000 whose pagers exploded yesterday). And they have a vast network of tunnels to attack from.
It is not a rag-tag “middling infantry force”.
While no one (no one sane) wants to see an expanded or extended conflict or any other kind of head-on confrontation, Israel has overwhelmingly more guys and more weapons, many of whom are already deployed in the region. As for whether the brass has learned important lessons from previous Lebanese campaigns, I hope we don’t find out.
The war won’t be fought by Hezbolla’s guys on the battlefield. It’s all missiles, launched from underground tunnels. Their ground forces are for quick terrorist raids across rhe border, then retreating to their tunnels.
Till now, Hezbollah has restrained itself due to the basic logic of MAD (mutual assured destruction.). The city if Beirut is their political base, and they don’t want to destroy it.
But they are Shiites who glorify martydom. They may decide , like Hamas did, that they don’t care about the lives of their own citizens. They may decide to sacrifice Beirut. And Israel has few other ways to threaten Hez.
It’s hard to keep up with these threads, as they move so fast. But, regarding two things I think worth noting:
It won’t be only Hezbollah using pagers. Even here in the US many hospitals still use them.
And regarding the lack of sympathy for the innocents, let’s remember that Lebanon is not Gaza. Shias make up about 1/3 of Lebanon’s population, with (roughly) another 1/3 Sunni and 1/3 Christian. Only the Shia broadly support Hezbollah.
From the New York Times:
Officials said that Hezbollah had ordered more than 3,000 pagers from Gold Apollo, distributing them not just to fighters, but also to rank-and-file members across Lebanon and in Syria and Iran.
I know I started this thread, but I have the info I was looking for (thanks, everyone)! It seems to be veering into yet another Israel thread and I’m not interested in that, so I’m unsubscribing.
Moderating:
This is not the place to argue “Israel’s genocidal behavior”. We have a pit thread for that where posters are allowed to make and defend claims of that nature. This is a thread about a specific attack, and it would be helpful to stick to that and its repercussions, not to re-litigate the entire Israeli conflict.
Please don’t go there again.
Only the batch of pagers ordered by Hezbollah was rigged with explosives. If hospitals there were using them, they were given them by Hezbollah.
To what extent hospital workers there have a choice in the matter may be another question. But they didn’t blow up every pager in the country, or pagers randomly ordered by individuals, or pagers ordered specifically by hospitals.
Even in Lebanon, I really doubt people outside Hezbollah are using pagers. They’re probably using smartphones like everyone else.
When i needed to reach my doctor urgently, and when my mother’s surgeon wanted me to let her know when i was outside the locked door she wanted me to go through, they have me their cell phone numbers. They did not ask to be paged. I’m dubious about anyone using pagers outside of fringe groups with special needs, like Hezbollah. I’m a little surprised you can still buy them.
That’s the genius of Capitalism.
When the market demands, the invisible hand Mossad supplies.
Verily, they giveth with one hand, and taketh away Hezbollah’s other hand.
I bet there’s someone in the ranks of Hezbollah’s procurement department who is sweating bullets right now.