They are openly showing that they can do whatever they want.
All the rest is gaslighting so that you'd not be completely sure that that's what they are saying, thus not so confident in yourself. Another kind of attacking other's morale.
This is the key thing here. People can whine about this attack, but this was targeted and it worked with low collateral damage, which also makes it legal (as in not a war crime).
The problem is everything else that Israel is doing since Oct 7, causing 1/3 of the Palestinian casualties to be children.
Customary international humanitarian lawprohibits the use of booby traps – objects that civilians are likely to be attracted to or are associated with normal civilian daily use – precisely to avoid putting civilians at grave risk and produce the devastating scenes that continue to unfold across Lebanon today. The use of an explosive device whose exact location could not be reliably known would be unlawfully indiscriminate, using a means of attack that could not be directed at a specific military target and as a result would strike military targets and civilians without distinction.
Is it precise? From the pager terror attacks only 9 or killed, maybe 2 of them "fighters", at least 1 child, 2700+ wounded including medical staff and other innocent people. That's not exactly precise in my books.
If this was the other way around, we'd have global outrage, days of mourning and piles of new weapons for Israel right now. We'd be speaking about one of the worst terrorist attacks in history.
This was a stupid decision by Israel. They have given the green light to mass attacks through consumer products. Can they really afford to protect all their imported products (electronics, food, water, etc) from every type of attack?
Five years ago, if you had asked me if Israel would be committing terrorist attacks across Palestine, Lebanon and beyond, I would have said absolutely not.
I would have been wrong, even back then, but jesus fucking christ, what an absolute shambles.
How my government supports this state-sponsored terrorism is beyond me.
How many thousands of children have been slaughtered by Israeli troops?
If you want to be pedantic, and you're talking only about this specific attack, children were killed in these pager/walkie-talkie blasts too. Are they enemy combatants to you?
Hezbollah is a political party as well as a paramilitary group. What if Canada did this to The Oath Keepers or CSPOA or The Proud Boys or another group in the US? They're all objectively bad people, buy only a few have committed terrorist attacks. Do they all and the people who happen to be around them deserve to die by a foreign government's actions?
A: Without evidence I have a hard time seeing planting bombs in devices was solely targeted at fighters. Odds are an entire shipment was targeted and many people who weren't Hezbollah received bombs
B: Blowing up devices that were by definition carried everywhere certainly killed families and associates who didn't deserve to die.
During the Iraqi war we considered Iraqi leadership targets and I wouldn't have been surprised if they considered our leadership targets as well. If they had in fact only killed Hezbollah I would have no problem with the attack.
They were probably mostly in the hands of Hezbollah members, if not fighters. This is probably why they went off in hospitals as well. Lots of medics who volunteer who's normal job is being a doctor in a Beirut hospital. Lots of logistics and people hiding weapons in the back of buildings for them.
They're not full time militants if I understand correctly. Most of these people will have civilian lives and jobs to go to.
Certainly some innocent family members died. There's no such thing as a completely surgical strike. It is better than what they've been doing in Gaza though, by several orders of magnitude. I don't think anybody can defend what's been going on there with a straight face.
About some pipe rockets killing a random bloke or two.
And this
against a Lebanese political organization
appears to be wrong since their attack wasn't at all this targeted. It's a mass terror campaign against whole Lebanese population in order to saturate its attention and reduce morale before an invasion.
We all got complacent relying on big nations with big militaries for punishing such behavior, and they are all in bed with the criminal.
Despite this not being Hezbollah's best moment, I think they and similar guerrillas are the exact kind of people we should learn from for solutions to Israel and the rest of the problem.
At this point, r/worldnews comments are so thoroughly astroturfed by so many global powers, their only use is to get an idea of what various propaganda machines think.
So if I understand correctly, Israel managed to get a bunch of people in Hezbollah to use pagers and walkie talkies that contained bombs. But they have not been able to gather enough intelligence from control of those communication devices to find and rescue the remaining hostages? And if they weren’t able to catch useful information from those devices, why did the people holding those devices deserve to get blown up?
From a spy craft and capabilities standpoint it’s an amazing attack. I’m skeptical that using the devices as bombs is more useful than using them for spying, but who knows? It is super fucked up that random people who happen to be near the targets could be hurt. But between that and the stuxnet attack, it’s safe to say that Israel is capable of crazy sophisticated attacks.
This reminds me of when during sieges during the Middle Ages they used to lob the bodies of the dead back inside the castle. I'm not sure if it's because of the lines they've crossed over and ignored regarding civilian casualties on this, or that this will essentially cause other parties to cross those same lines. This is giving ideas to China and Russia, and humanity has been far shittier in the past, I really don't want to see how bad we will regress to.
Terrorists killing terrorists... Nice. Seriously... what is next? Exploding toilet seats with verses from quran, issued last ramadan only to elite hezbollah members?
Ok, on the one hand, yes, blowing up Hamas is funny.
OTOH, this is not cool, bombing random people is a problem.
The US has this wonderful system called the Hellfire R-9X which is basically a flying slap-chop that ginzus a single target with 9 pop-out blades. Can we hand a couple over to the IDF and Mossad so they stop randomly blowing up parts of Lebanon?
It's not killing Hamas that's the issue, it's the collateral.
There you. You can’t stop people from fighting, but we certainly can stop helping them kill each other.
And look, I get it’s a hot button issue for a lot of people. I’m not suggesting anyone is wrong for whatever side they choose. It’s too complex of an issue for my pea-brain to fully understand. What I do understand is that the US and other countries need to be working toward helping both sides find a reasonable and peaceful solution — whatever that may be (I’ll leave that to the smarter people to figure out).
There's still gonna be some collateral damage with those, that can't be employed at scale as readily -- you'd have to concurrently target huge numbers of people from airborne platforms, and these are pretty small charges. Given that Hezbollah isn't fighting in the open -- understandably -- this is probably about as good as it realistically gets in terms of collateral damage.
Israel could maybe use DIME charges to have a smaller difference between lethal radius and damaging radius, but that's got its own unpleasant aspects.
Dense inert metal explosive (DIME) is an experimental type of explosive that has a relatively small but effective blast radius. It is manufactured by producing a homogeneous mixture of an explosive material (such as phlegmatized HMX or RDX) and small particles of a chemically inert material such as tungsten. It is intended to limit the effective distance of the explosion, to avoid collateral damage in warfare.
Upon detonation of the explosive, the casing disintegrates into extremely small particles, as opposed to larger pieces of shrapnel which results from the fragmentation of a metal shell casing. The HMTA powder acts like micro-shrapnel which is very lethal at close range (about 4 m or 13 ft), but loses momentum very quickly due to air resistance, coming to a halt within approximately 40 times the diameter of the charge. This increases the probability of killing people within a few meters of the explosion while reducing the probability of causing death and injuries or damage farther away. Survivors close to the lethal zone may still have their limbs amputated by the HMTA microshrapnel, which can slice through soft tissue and bone.
If Israel isn't using those already, I guess we could send 'em some, if we have some sitting around. Realistically, though, I doubt that collateral damage is gonna be possible to reduce a whole lot, given the fact that Hezbollah's hiding in a civilian population.
You're concerned we can't scale up arbitrary killings? Would you prefer something on a larger, more industrial scale, perhaps with large, gas-fueled ovens?
Killing should be hard, and it should be personal, not vaguely waving a hand in a general direction. You should know their name and hopefully have filled out a few forms beforehand.
If you want to kill somebody, when you aren't at war with their entire country, then BE SPECIFIC.
Drone strikes that take out a known Al-Queda leader: ✅
Drone strike that takes out a random Afghan wedding: ❌