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Israeli prime minister admits responsibility for mass pager explosions in Lebanon
(www.middleeastmonitor.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
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The pagers weren't precise at all.
More precise than dropping a bomb on an appartment building, I suppose...
But, yeah, not the best example of preventing collateral damage.
Do you have any info on this? I couldn't find any info on the target Vs civilian rate of the attqck. Not even how many were targeted. Only some media coverage of single civilian stories and innocent children getting hit. I assume this is inevitable in a large scale operation like this. But, from the videos available, it seemed like the explosives had very limited radius, where even people standing next to the targets were not hit or even knocked over!
Compare that to flattening entire cities, to get to the targets, i'd call it pretty precise!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device_attacks
Sounds like it was pretty well targeted then??!
It says thousands of explosions and over 3500 injuries. But that seems pretty targeted. One would assume that most of those 3500 injured, must have been the people carrying the thousands of devices that exploded.
If you have thousands of explosions, you have thousands of targets, and therefore thousands of injuries!
Looking at the video on that link, seemingly, only the person carrying the device, was affected. The guy. Standing next to him, jua st walks around, after the explosion, seemingly unaffected.
I am comparing this, to schools and entire cities being demolished, to get to Hamas. You cent tell me that there is a difference between their efforts in those two efforts
No.
Just because someone pisses next to the toilet most of the time, doesn't make it "well targeted" if for once he manages to get half of his piss inside the toilet once. And then you are still left with a huge puddle of piss.
Or rather there was still an insane number of civillians murdered and injured.
Also if anything had gone slightly different in the supply chain or Hezbollah had caught wind of it, instead it could have killed 0 Hezbollah and 100% Civillians.
Maybe you heard of Russia sending letter bombs through Europes postal system. That is about the equivalent. It is completely reckless and has no ambitions to reliably target. It is a method of terror and that was the goal above all else.
ok so as long as it is very well targeted it is ok to explode thousands of bombs in grocery stores, synagogues, churches or streets of cities like Tel Aviv*, London, Berlin, Washington etc so long as it targets terrorist operatives (but likely traumatizes and terrorizes civilians)?
*: not the capital you wise ass I know
Yes! (unless you know a better way?)
not being a genocidal expansionist state that feeds terrorism in your neighbours is a good way to start
Hezbollah's beef is religious - they think they'll be denied paradise if they didn't join Hamas' attack
doesn't matter for the person who joins the nearest anti-Israel militant group because his child, love ones were blown to bits by Israeli bombs or they were kicked out of their house by Israeli armed settlers
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/
https://web.archive.org/web/20240113063836/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/30/how-israel-helped-create-hamas/
Seems like you're focused on Hamas here & this is exactly the mindset that makes sure the violence will never end. If Hezbollah hadn't attacked Israel last year, all these people would be alive.
you mean the civilians who were killed by Israel? Yes they should have been alive no matter what, I agree.
Are you suggesting that the civilians on the Israeli side 'deserved it'?
No, we disagree on that. Civilian deaths on no side can be justified. But yes, whoever does that is a terrorist organization.
Should Israel allow Hezbollah to kill as many civilians as they want, to avoid being called terrorists on the internets?
Should Israel pursue expansionist and genocidal agendas knowing full well that it will only increase the insurgence of organizations like Hezbollah or Hamas in the region so that they can use these organizations as an excuse to invade the whole region?
No, they shouldn't. But how should they react to their civilians being attacked when they're staying on their side of the border?
definitely not by driving civilians who were staying on their side of the border away from their homes
Should they have somehow forced them to stay while they were bombing Hezbollah positions? How?
Alright so we are on the same page on Israel bombing civilians' homes. I might also add Israel is bombing so indiscriminately that the age distribution of people killed by Israeli bombings looks exactly like their age demographic.
I mean if killing a majority of civilians is well targeted then you're saying the idf was going after civilians which is a war crime so
So if Hezbollah launches a campaign to mail anthrax to leading Israeli military and civilian leaders, will you call that well-targeted as well?
It's not about being knocked over; these explosions created shrapnel and that shrapnel created tons of injuries. We don't have numbers because nobody bothered to count, but these were still bombs. There was no way they were not going to harm hundreds if not thousands of innocent civilians.
Not to mention, from the evidence that is public so far, it appears that they waited for these devices to be in public and busy locations before they were detonated
We don't have numbers because Hezbollah keeps a lid on this kind of info. You can bet your pager they'd make the numbers public if they were in their favor
I am not going to argue with this because i come with my sources, for my points of view, and you point out the lack of sources for your points of view. There is no logic in this
The point is, i do not support either side, and I have so agenda with this comment. Simply i point out that when Israel really tries, they can avoid genocides like the one they are doing in Gaza
What sources? You haven't provided any
You didn't provide a single source though?
I'm referring to the videos of some of the explosions, as well as the descriptions of injuries being more or less localised to pocket areas, fingers and face.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device_attacks
That's the same source people have been giving you that gives great detail into civilian deaths and injuries. Thousands of injuries. I'm not sure how that proves your point.
It was more precise in the way that the explosions were smaller. The targets were not precise.
These were pagers handed out to Hezbollah operatives. How do you get more precise?
Setting off multiple explosions in crowded areas is not precise.
The targets were precise. If a sniper shoots a single soldier in the head standing between a crowd of toddlers, was it not precise?
You were incorrect. They were handed to Hezbollah military and civilian officials. Hezbollah is effectively the government in that area; the civilian state is degraded due to decades of Israeli military strikes and incursions. There are tons of people who are "Hezbollah" but work the kinds of jobs the people down at your local city hall work. They're the people operating the water systems, trash collection, etc. Realize also that this pager system WAS the local emergency response system. Think of the radios carried by police, EMS, and fire departments. There were doubtlessly police officers blown up by these bombs.
And worse still, these pagers have been in circulation FOR YEARS. They didn't just send them out and immediately pop them. How many years do you keep a phone? How many of the people who had these devices later found their way to others hands?
You're a member of Hezbollah, working in the civilian branch. One day you get a walkie talkie and carry it around with you. Another day you decide to be done with Hezbollah, so you get work somewhere else and you take the old walkie talkie to a pawn shop. The next day someone else, completely unaffiliated with Hezbollah, buys a set of those walkie talkies to talk with people around town.
You're incorrect to assume that because someone had a civilian job, they could not have other roles within Hezbollah. Do you think Hezbollah needed secure communication equipment to tell the public trash collection administrator that they were holding their annual christmas raffle?
You seem to be fantasizing a lot about the distribution, as well as how an organisation like Hezbollah would handle someone that tried to sell their personal secure one-way pager in a pawn shop. Imagine being in an organisation that's extremely worried about being snooped on, getting handed a secret communication device, and then trying to sell it in a pawn shop
Yeah I'd argue it was the most precisely targeted attack possible on such a scale.
But of course - since it's Israel people use every angle possible to criticise it.
Maybe, and then the conclusion is don't attack anything on such a scale.
Do you think Hezbollah thought something like this could happen when they decided to attack Israel?
You know what's even more precise? A bullet from an AK-47 wielded by a Hamas fighter. These bombs are of similar precision to Hamas on October 7th. The Hamas militants charged across the border and started shooting every soldier they could find. A bullet is directly directed by an individual person, so they are intrinsically more precise than any guided bomb.
Did a lot of innocent Israeli civilians get caught in the crossfire? Sure. There were civilian casualties, and those increased by an order of magnitude once Israel started shooting into crowds of its own civilians. But I'm glad you recognize that Hamas does such a great job of protecting civilians. If you find the Israeli pager bombings a work of superior precision combat, you should similarly admire the work of Hamas on October 7. They are works of similar precision.
What i dont understand, is that the intend of the attacks on Gaza become a lot more obvious when you compare it to the efficiency of attacks on Lebanon.