As I've remarked several times on this thread, the standard I'm using for this attack isn't one in which no innocents (or even innocent children) are harmed or killed. I don't like war and would happily confiscate every firearm in North America, but that standard is one no active military in the world meets. Rather: the "state of the art" in targeted strikes is air-to-ground weaponry, which routinely kills civilian bystanders at ratios far exceeding 1:1.
Here, my guess is that the ratio is something far south of 1:100, making this strike --- I think? --- unprecedented in precision in the last 100 years of warfare. We'll learn more as the day goes on, and if/when I'm wrong, I'll certainly say so.
"Terrorism" has nothing whatsoever to do with my thinking on this. Hezbollah is a large, sophisticated, organized, well-supplied combatant force, a military peer to its neighbors, and it is in open armed conflict with Israel.
The claim that this is a well targeted attack with legitimate targets ignores this reality. The attack may be well targeted, but the targets are still indiscriminate and illegitimate. That is unless you count any Hezbollah members as a legitimate target. But like I said before that is simply ridiculous.
Note Reuters reporting on the concentration of reports of strikes here: it's not uniformly spread across the population of Lebanon.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/world/middleeast/israel-h...
We have every reason to suspect they had no idea who would be carrying these pagers. That they did consider any Hezbollah member to be a legitimate target, be they senior administrators at a hospital, media workers, politicians, etc.
At the very least they must have known that higher party members (i.e. politicians) would be carrying the pagers, and that they had no idea who was actually close when they detonated, and simply didn’t care if children got hurt.
An army who is on trial for genocide does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
If it turns out that large numbers of non-military personnel were carrying pagers that blew up, I'll be wrong about this, and I'll say so. My belief that this isn't the case isn't because I have any particular faith in Israel; it's because of the previous reporting about why Hezbollah had people carrying pagers: because it believed Israel was going to target these people through their cellphones. Pagers suck! I think people are carrying these things (or were; nobody's carrying any pagers anymore!) because they have to.
I don't know what "benefit of the doubt" means in this situation. Israel and Hezbollah are at war. War is ruthless.
Anyways all this is to say: Hezbollah is a military peer to Israel (I mean, I think Israel would win, but it wouldn't be easy). "Terrorism" has nothing to do with this. The conflict to me is fundamentally amoral, bilaterally, in a way that isn't the case with Gaza. Israel doesn't occupy Lebanon or control Hezbollah's supply lines. These are two opposing armies doing what armies do during hostilities.
In most wars, war crimes are committed. When war crimes are committed they need to be condemned, and prosecuted, not excused and repeated.
> Why are senior administrators at hospitals and media workers carrying military command and control equipment?
These are pagers, and cheap once at that, I don’t know if you have ever been a part of any activist organization, but it is pretty standard to assume you are a target of state level intelligence, and that state actors (most likely the police) is spying on you. Any activist would know to try to protect them selves and their organization by minimizing opportunities of breaches. This extends to lower level participants, who are unlikely to actually confront the police or cause any civil disruptions, but participate in other ways.
I assume Hezbollah would take similar measure. That higher level members at non-military institutions still see the need to protect them selves—and their organization—from infiltration. At the very least, it is criminally negligent of Israel to assume that they don’t, and still detonate when there is some probability the innocent will be harmed.
Again: all the available reporting suggests strongly that Israel wasn't simply targeting every pager in Lebanon. These were specific pagers procured by Hezbollah for military operations, something widely reported months before this attack.
No, Israel rigged consumer electronics used by people during their civilian lives off the battlefield as they posed no threat to anybody. There is no definition of terrorism which doesn’t encapsulate this act.
And no, this act is not justified even if every targeted victim of this attack was a Hezbollah member. As I said before, there are more members of this organization than fighters and generals.
"Off the battlefield" doesn't mean anything here: if they're members of the armed wing of Hezbollah, they are black-letter IHL combatants whether or not they're actively engaged in combat, the same way everybody aboard a naval vessel is a combatant if you sink it, including the cook.
Put it this way: if it turns out that these pagers were widely used by non-military personnel, like school teachers, I'll absolutely say I was wrong, and that this attack was probably hard to justify. If reporting firms up that these pagers exclusively carried by military personnel, does that change things for you?
Israel has consistently lied about the military nature of their targets in Gaza. I see no reason to believe they behave any differently in Lebanon.
Also, even if they were all military—which they probably weren’t—they were still going about their civilian lives far away from the battlefield, as they posed no threat to anybody.
Now that some time has passed we know a little more about the victims. Including a press conference by Lebanon’s Minister of Health Firass Abiad. There have been 12 recorded deaths so far. Of those were 4 medical workers, one 8 year old girl, and one 11 year old boy. The press conference noted that many of those carrying the pagers were civilians. And made special mention of the toll this scale of an attack had on their medical system.
The best interpretation for Israel here is that they conducted a terrorist attack in a civilian against an armed group during their civilian lives, inflicting at least some civilian casualties. But we know how Israel conducts it self in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine, and we have every reason to expect their intentions were far more nefarious.
But this question is irrelevant because this is very unlikely to be the case. The victims seem to be many civilians.
You can't guarantee the explode as intended. It is gonna be very difficult for Lebanon to find all of the unexploded devices and secure them. Very likely one of those booby traps will find their way to a thrift store in the next few years and unexpectedly explode when handled by innocent hands.
I also want to raise an issue which I’m not sure you personally have, but I have seen elsewhere on this thread and echoed by state department spokesperson Matt Miller that the targets were somehow legitimate because they were members of Hezbollah, which they claim is a terrorist organization.
Hezbollah is a much larger organization with many different functions, including governmental function, but also education and health care. We know that the targets did not only include their military wing, indicating that the targeting was indeed indiscriminate.
If people want to legitimate this terrorist attack by claiming that any member of a group which does terrorism is a legitimate target, that opens the door for all sorts of targets which unambiguously should not be considered military targets, including politicians and workers for governments and their political organizations.
If your country says that the IDF is a terrorist organization (a claim rather easy to make) your country than has the right to target any members of the Knesset that belong to any of the ruling parties is a legitimate target in a terrorist attack, if their family members are hurt in the attack, they become a legitimate collateral damage. Any worker for any ministry in Israel who contributes to the IDF somehow would also become legitimate.
This is of course not true, and the only conclusion we can draw here is this attack is an unambiguously immoral act of terrorism.