In regular armies, activated reservists are valid combatant targets. Reservists become civilian, under the principle of distinction, when they are deactivated and fully integrate into civilian life. More applicably to the situation with Hezbollah, which is an irregular army, functional criteria apply; meaning, very roughly and in my paraphrase, "is some aspect of the armed wing of Hezbollah your day job?"

I don't know that we disagree much here. We both agree that simply because Hezbollah operates a school does not distinguish the employees of that school as combatants. There are civilian combatants; for instance, whether or not your yourself were ever going to take up arms in Syria, if you work in a Hezbollah arms depot or weapons factory, even if you're just counting the bullets, you're most definitely a combatant. It depends.

You're refraining from speculating on something I am clearly not refraining on. I get that. I am (much) further out on the limb than you are. When the evidence shows I'm way off on this stuff, I'll absolutely say so. The big place where our premises differ is: I believe Hezbollah pagers to be military equipment, and you believe random Lebanese people with weak associations to Hezbollah might carry them as well. I'll say right now that is not a crazy point of view; it's just one I don't currently share.

You are juxtaposing two different concepts. 1) military objectives (weapons factories) and 2) combatant status (fighters). Factory workers are not combatants. While I don't think Elbit Systems should be allowed to operate globally, killing their workers is not legitimate.

At this point it is not even certain that all exploded pagers were "Hezbollah pagers" and that it wasn't just a random shipment of pagers the Israelis booby-trapped. Pagers are still used by emergency and medical services in many parts of the world.

Rather than arguing about this, we can just note references to the law of armed conflict, and the definition of "direct participation in hostilities".

There is a big misunderstanding here; you seem to believe that because Hezbollah is so invariably coupled with civilian life and has by own decision foregone uniforms and other basic traditional military structures, this somehow raises the requirements for Israel to strike them. The opposite is true.

I want to push back on this because I am making a stronger claim. This kind of argument came up a lot in the Gaza conflict, and pulled in proportionality arguments and discussions about Hamas embedding military assets deliberately in vulnerable civilian targets. I'm saying none of that happened here. I don't believe (but I could be wrong, as I often am) that Israel just killed a bunch of Hezbollah medics and schoolteachers. They attacked, with great specificity, actual soldiers of a military peer with whom they are in open conflict.

I believe you can rules of engagement under IHL straight off the ICRC's documents; that this isn't even a tricky case.

“Customary international humanitarian law prohibits 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. A prompt and impartial investigation into the attacks should be urgently conducted.”

https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/18/lebanon-exploding-pagers...

They are not booby traps, since they are not traps to begin with. No one sane calls rigging the military comms of your enemy to blow a "booby trap".

Sure, your understanding of ihl is better than hrw's and anyone who disagrees with you is insane.