Comment by bbatha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bbatha | Hacker News Reader

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That's true but doesn't really respond there are three levels to consider regarding this and whether Israel truly did minimize civilian casualties.

1. Were the pagers/radios distributed to only Hezbollah members or was Hezbollah the main purchaser of the lots? Plenty of professions (doctors) still use pagers.

2. Did Hezbollah distribute these only to militants or did members of its civil service receive these as well? Keep in mind that Hezbollah is a legitimate political party in Lebanon and provides social services and operates hospitals. They have plenty of members and leaders who have never personally lifted a finger to harm Israel.

3. Did Israel verify that these devices were in the hands of Hezbollah members at the time of detonation and that those members were isolated to minimize collateral damage? The answer to this is clearly no, the logistics are simply impossible to track who is holding 3000+ passive devices. And we've seen reports of civilian causalities including a dead child.

Hezbollah is constantly firing missiles into northern Israel. Accounting for causalities is a luxury in war and Hezbollah is a militia that forces Israel into war.

It was an effective war strategy and I doubt you can name weapons of war that are more targeted. So I don't see how your criticism can hold up even if the questions were answered.

I would not want to answer them, because I believe you would not accept any answer anyway.

Hezbollah is not a mobile device distribution organization. From my understanding they bought these to avoid Israeli tracking for their own people. No civilian doctor would use these pagers but there are medics working for Hezbollah like any militia/army.

Due to the nature of the devices I doubt it's physically possible to verify every explosion. Just like you can't verify it with a bomb or even a bullet. It's tragic that civilians are hurt but that would happen in any case when there's a war.

Hezbollah themselves bootstrapped a phone in the past. They also recently fired on a football field and killed 12 children. Then they hide in tunnels while leaving the general populace of Lebanon to deal with the wrath of the war that they started while they keep shelling the northern part of Israel. These parts of Israel and Lebanon are abandoned now because of their war. For once, they actually got some consequences for their own actions.

Was it 100% perfect and surgical?

Hell no. Nothing ever is, that's fantasy land. But it's about the closest thing that you can get to an ideal attack in these specific circumstances. The fact that the attack produced less than 1% in casualties shows the concern for collateral damage in this situation.

> Hezbollah is not a mobile device distribution organization. From my understanding they bought these to avoid Israeli tracking for their own people.

That's exactly my point, if for example, Hezbollah just bought 2500 pagers out of a lot of 3000 armed pagers that means 500 were distributed to civilians.

> No civilian doctor would use these pagers but there are medics working for Hezbollah like any militia/army.

And why wouldn't they use these pagers? Doctors use pagers all of the time. As mentioned we know very little about who actually received a pager. Even if the doctors were all Hezbollah that doesn't make them all part of the militia wing of the party: they operate civilian medical services including 4 hospitals and 12 clinics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah_social_services

I would think that a 2000 of the devices are sitting in a warehouse as spares or waiting for distribution. These are relatively new devices.

> And why wouldn't they use these pagers? Doctors use pagers all of the time.

These devices were specifically ordered by Hezbollah. An army buys its own equipment not in order to hand it out to the civilian populace. They don't hand out guns to doctors who carry. Why would they hand out their internal communication device?

> Even if the doctors were all Hezbollah that doesn't make them all part of the militia wing of the party

It doesn't make them a great target but it does put them in the valid line of fire. The fact that someone works as a civilian doctor isn't relevant. If they have a Hezbollah beeper they are probably an army medic.

Hezbollah put the entire populace of Lebanon at risk without a second thought, people acting as their "beard" trying to legitimize a terrorist organization (that killed many Americans/French too) are part of it. This is a military communication device, the only case where a civilian has access to it is if they took it from a combatant.

The fact is that if there were significant civilian victims they would have been paraded in front of cameras repeatedly. There were some probably, but not many.

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