With thousands of them going bang, that's unsurprising.

As the page says, "after her father’s pager exploded while he was next to her".

That's right. Any evaluation or discussion of this needs to take account of the fact that it makes the perpetrator culpable of an illegal act of war in which the lives of innocent children are disregarded. There are all sorts of "clever" but reprehensible things warring parties could do, but are considered to be beyond the pale. So, this is a stupid action by a reckless, immoral party which will continue to have consequences for all of us -- especially if we don't deal with anything that we control.

This is an indictment of all of modern warfare. Which, fair enough, but "war is bad" isn't an especially interesting argument.

Again you are responding to an argument which was explicitly and clearly not made. The comment you are replying to asserts that this is an illegal act of war.

Everything only works by agreement and adherence to rules: some explicit, some considered to be so blindingly obvious to a human that there should be no need to state them.

Some of the rules around warfare involve doing your utmost to avoid collateral damage. In this case the collateral damage involves a ten year old girl.

Please try to respond to the actual arguments instead of a cheap, easy strawman. It helps improve the quality of the site.

They did their utmost to avoid civilian casualties as they always do. In fact they were probably lower than a traditional attack because the Jihadis didn’t have time to hide in hospitals and schools. There is no conceivably attack of this scale that would have resulted in fewer civilian casualties. It’s insanely precise.

The way it goes with Israel, they never inflict civilian casualties; anybody they kill is deemed to gave deserved it in some way.

Flagged, heh. It's on display in this thread. A certain top commenter, who does not have a list of the killed, is assuring us that anybody killed surely deserved it. How could he know that, as he doesn't even know who was killed? To fanatical supporters of Israel, it is axiomatic anybody killed by Israel deserved it. He doesn't need to know who died to "know" they had it coming.

That seems like a good reason to use more focused weapons.

This would seem to be more focused than the usual.

This conflict has had a historically very notable property where civilian casualties are so much higher than military casualties as to be clearly anomalous.

Hezbollah is not Gaza, and they are not Hamas. This is not the same conflict.

According to Israel, it is the same conflict, but if you tally up civilian casualties from previous Israeli-Lebanon conflicts, you'll find a similar rate.

There's an alarming number of astute observations in this thread that are getting mysteriously flagged

The ratio is at least as high in WW2, but only if you include war crimes and genocides. I think we can agree that WW2 featured notable and anomalous civilian casualties from the first industrial genocides, can't we?

If you look more closely at the data, you'll see that Germany, for example, suffered 3.8 million civilian deaths and 5.5 million military deaths. This was after Germany was completely invaded, thus the fighting reached every city.

The civilian-military death ratio in Gaza is, according to peer-reviewed independent estimates, at least 2:1, and that's if you assume that every male 18-60 is an enemy combatant. If you don't, you find a ratio of at least 4:1, with estimates mostly around 6-9:1. And this data is from before the collapse in infrastructure had time to really drive up the excess death count : https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...