I think they considered any Hezbollah member carrying one of these pagers to be a legitimate target. Why are senior administrators at hospitals and media workers carrying military command and control equipment?

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.

The assumption here—at least from my part—is that this pager attack was an illegitimate state sponsored terrorist attack and deserves to be condemned as such. That statements such as “war is brutal” does not apply here as even war has rules for conduct, and even in wars the innocent deserve to be protected from harm. And war does not excuse terrorist acts.

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.

I don't see how an attack launched by one hostile military force against combatants of another, where both forces are in declared open combat, can possibly be described as "state-sponsored terrorism".

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.

It is a stretch to call a pager a military equipment and the use of one a “military operation”.

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.

No, that's not what the reporting says. Hezbollah operates its own military networks for these things, procures these pagers specifically for military purchases, and issues them to Hezbollah fighters.

"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?

One of the casualties was the child of an MP. That is not military. So we know of at least one instance of a non-military member being targeted, and their kid killed.

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.

That wasn't really an answer to my question, right?

The answer is no. The nature of the attack does not make it OK even if it turns out that only military personnel had these pagers. It is not OK for Israel to weaponize consumer electronics which are widely used in a civilian area, even if the users at the time are most likely military personnel.

But this question is irrelevant because this is very unlikely to be the case. The victims seem to be many civilians.

Even if it targeted only military personnel, they were targeted going about their daily activities, putting their families and others who might, as we saw, just be shopping near them, at risk.

I think this is the reason booby trapping consumer devices which resemble those in use by civilians is an explicit war crime.

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.

>Israel doesn't occupy Lebanon

Shebaa Farms are currently occupied by Israel. Which is Lebanese, acknowledged by both Syrians and Lebanese.