Comment by bbatha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bbatha | Hacker News Reader

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> 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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