491–500 of 832 posts
Interestingly just nine days ago someone here shared a link to the US's Law of War manual for military personnel. It's pretty good for what it is. Since countries base this stuff on the same international treaties they've all signed, it's a guide to Israel's conduct during war (or just about anyone's) as well as the US's. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46147605 https://media.defense.gov/2023/Jul/31/2003271432/-…
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> perfectly lawful Are you a lawyer / expert in conflicts? If not, curious how you arrived at this conclusion.
No, I am not a lawyer. Does that preclude my having an opinion on the value and legality of a military strike? Anyway it seems to me that it was: - highly discriminatory - only Hezbollah commanders received these devices - it's an essential piece of military C2 gear so you'd expect they would keep possession of them at all times - the explosive was small enough to mitigate any risk to bystanders - targeted at combata…
Hacker News arrogance in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen.
Feel free to also weigh in on Napoleonic currency reform, the proportion of Siberian anime fans, DNA methylation rates of Tyrannosaurs, and anything else you know nothing about.
Or maybe I just skipped CS456: "How To Know Everything About Non-Tech Topics" in college.
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I don't know if it's "legal" or not and by who's laws, but it certainly seems like terrorism to me (i.e. intentionally creating a state of terror). I think if Lebanon found a clever way to assassinate the top 45 military commanders in Israel the same people who are defending this wouldn't be calling it a "Legal act of war".
Terrorism targets civilians. So no, this isn't terrorism.
This can be true, but terrorist acts can also be indifferent to the target, which is where the debate here comes from.
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The timing was during a war, the location was in a belligerent country, and the pagers were only and exclusively given to hezbollah leadership. The very definition of discriminate. Also, Israel has not "self-evaluated" a >80% civilian to combatant kill ratio. There was a Haaretz report that said the IDF was able to ID about 20% of those killed as militants against known databases, which is remarkably high compared to…
Re: timing - They were triggered to explode en masse, which implies that there was zero consideration to minimizing civilian harm. Re: location - They exploded everywhere you can think of, while these targets were doing civilian activities near other civilians, and not in a combat setting. Re: possession - Given the above, and Israel’s horrendous kill ratio, there was definitely no consideration for possession of the…
Zero? The whole nature of the attack shows consideration towards "minimizing civilian harm." Tricking an enemy agent into carrying a small explosive device on his person, then detonating it, will have far less civilian harm than the standard procedure of dropping a bomb on whatever building they happen to be in.
Your thinking appears unreasonably binary here, as shown by your use of phrases like "zero consideration" and "definitely no consideration," in reaction to Israel not meeting an unrealistically high standard for "minimizing civilian harm." Could Israel have done more to minimize civilian harm with that attack? Perhaps, but that doesn't mean they did nothing.
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Again, so what? You aren't off the hook because of the actions of your enemies. It was obvious these would be going off around civilians, in homes and public spaces, including hospitals, and they chose to go through with the attack knowing this. That the civilians who would be around them would have no particular reason to fear or suspect this attack, because the vector was a common daily object . It was an attack on…
It wasn't a non-military political goal. It had a military purpose of taking out the communications network and personnel of a group that was actively engaged in combat.
stark constrast to hezbollah's direct attack on civilians:
1. directly targeted civilians 2. direct action (not remote) 3. intentionally brutal (beheadings, rapes)
...what are they, animals?
pager attack is, however scary it looks, rather more "reserved and gentlemen-ly way" of doing things:
1. targeted hezbolla militants (would average civilian use walkietalkie?) 2. indirect action
for anyone saying otherwise, how more "gentlemen-ly" should israel be? do nothing? "talk" with the leaders? waste more precious lives by directly sending troops without any prior action?
I just don't get why people talk negatively about the walkietalkie boomboom campaign -- it's a masterpiece of "trying the most not to kill civilians but doing your job"
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why is it "genocide"? is becoming hezbollah determined at birth? is hezbollah a race? does average civilian use walkie-talkie?
even if hezbollah was a race, after its civilian attack on 2023 (beheading babies, raping and killing even foreigners), I wouldn't even care about what those guys get (also, don't say "humanity" like you represent the whole "humanity")
if you ARE talking about palestinian civilians, I don't think israel can do anything more gentlemen-ly to them other than pager-operation: the other option is carpet bombing and direct invasion (which is a completely another topic)
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I haven't seen a report of 4000 civilians injured. I have seen a report of 4000 people injured across the two attacks, but presumably some fraction of these are targets. 42 killed, of whom Hezbollah said 12 were civilians (later admitting some of the 12 were fighters). Historical average is about half of the wounded or killed in conflicts to be civilians. < 12/42 would be a relatively "good" ratio.
You didn’t see 4,000 because you didn’t look for it. It’s literally in the wikipedia article linked in the thread you’re responding to with multiple associated citations.
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Targeted attacks against military/militia leadership is not terrorism - almost by definition. If it was just random devices exploding, then sure, that could be considered terrorism. But it wasn't random devices, it was communication devices procured by Hezbollah and directly given by Hezbollah to their own members for their own purposes.
The issue is that Israel has no idea where those pagers were at the time of the attack, civilians were directly hurt by the explosions: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/survivors-of-israels-page...
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I haven't seen a report of 4000 civilians injured. I have seen a report of 4000 people injured across the two attacks, but presumably some fraction of these are targets. 42 killed, of whom Hezbollah said 12 were civilians (later admitting some of the 12 were fighters). Historical average is about half of the wounded or killed in conflicts to be civilians. < 12/42 would be a relatively "good" ratio.
You didn’t see 4,000 because you didn’t look for it. It’s literally in the wikipedia article linked in the thread you’re responding to with multiple associated citations.
We're talking about a tiny amount of explosives in each pager. Sure, it could lightly wound a bystander under perfect circumstances, but it's not going to create a big confluence of major injuries. <6 grams of PETN--we're talking about a risk of injury at roughly arm's reach.
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> perfectly lawful Are you a lawyer / expert in conflicts? If not, curious how you arrived at this conclusion.
No, I am not a lawyer. Does that preclude my having an opinion on the value and legality of a military strike? Anyway it seems to me that it was: - highly discriminatory - only Hezbollah commanders received these devices - it's an essential piece of military C2 gear so you'd expect they would keep possession of them at all times - the explosive was small enough to mitigate any risk to bystanders - targeted at combata…