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I think it's probable that these bombs were better targeted than the average drone strike. The chain of command observably sucks at identifying and designating targets, and often resulted in significant collateral damage. I care about striking particular people at particular places because I want harm to bystanders minimized. These bombs seem likely to have done a very good job of minimizing harm to bystanders.
This would concern me if they had been randomly airdropped by a helicopter. It would concern me if Israel simply put charges in every pager in the country, and then detonated them all. But the story at the moment is that they compromised Hezbollah's pager supply specifically, which means that anyone harmed by one of these pagers is overwhelmingly likely to either be a member of Hezbollah, or was gifted a pager by a member of Hezbollah. Maybe that impression is mistaken, in which case I'll happily agree that my assessment is invalid. But if it is accurate, I think my assessment stands.
I don't particularly think that schools, hospitals, diplomatic facilities, or indeed crowded markets are intrinsically off-limits to war. They are vulnerable and valuable, and efforts should be made to minimize harm to or within them... But if the above holds, then the reason these areas were bombed is because an active member of Hezbollah entered them. Further, the places themselves were not harmed in any significant way. If the Iranian diplomat was injured, it sorta raises the question of how he got within area effect of a bomb this small, likely being held by a Hezbollah operative. My sympathy is limited.
Could you unpack the word "accountability" in this sentence? What "accountability" applied for drone strikes, and how does it differ from the accountability applying here? Some agent of a government did both. If either kills innocents, there's going to be negative consequences, but probably not serious ones. What's your model here?
That the market structures, contents, or occupants generally were harmed by the physical effects of overpressure or fragmentation, which are the central examples of "harm" caused by a "bomb". Here's some examples of the destruction caused by central examples of "bombs" in a market.
War tends to cause disruption, panic and potentially injury to bystanders, as well as fear and instability. If you don't want that, avoid war.
If you think the people hit weren't actually Hezbollah, say that. I'm willing to believe it if there's reasonable amounts of evidence.
If you think the people hit were Hezbollah but this method of hitting them was inappropriate, I'm curious as to what a more appropriate method would be better. This method seems on the order of individual bullets from a sniper, which is pretty damn selective.
Depends how they inserted the pagers. Did they rig a specific batch bought by the Hezbollah office supplies department? Or did they send them to a reseller "known to supply to Hezbollah"?
If it was done the second way a lot of these could have been sold to totally random people.
It's also possible that the pagers were sold much more widely but only the ones that were eventually pinned to Hezbollah agents were triggered today.
Yeah, my guess is that it's probably an "and" operator. The old joke about US cyber attacks is that you can always tell when it's the US, because the code looks like it's written by lawyers. Israel is not terribly far behind on that front; they're still pretty sensitive to collateral damage. My guess would be that they were both pretty confident that this supply chain was serving Hezbollah, specifically, but they also had a cyber vulnerability. They must have had some sort of cyber vulnerability, since they were able to trigger them remotely. This access, combined with other SIGINT methods, probably allowed them to have a second filter, identifying all of the devices that had a second indicator of being used by Hezbollah, specifically, and they only triggered these ones.
The tradeoffs for this plan would be that you would essentially be leaving some "unexploded ordnance" out in the wild. A mitigating factor would be that it's highly likely that there's been enough publicity that if anyone else has one of these things unexploded, they're probably highly likely to "do your EOD for you". That said, if there are any left, it is also possible for Hezbollah to try to stage some PR stunt/false flag by killing some innocent person with it and claiming that Israel still did it (or was at least negligent in creating the circumstances, yadda yadda...).
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Entirely true. I'm happy to see evidence either way.
Allegedly, the specific pagers were purchased through a single kinda-sketchy reseller:
I'd expect there's serious problems trying to separate sales from Hezbollah from non-military sales in Lebanon, and the total sales number probably means a lot more individual items than it looks at first, but this doesn't look like the sort of outfit that does a company that has the capacity to do many 3-10k batches of assembly at this scale.
Of course, that assumes they were compromised by BAC. A compromise further up the supply chain would be much less targeted, one downstream would probably be much more.
Thanks, I'd heard rumors that was the case, but no evidence.
They need to take lessons from Hamas and intertwine their procurement with humanitarian groups. Mossad can't make your stuff explode if it was bought by the red cross and half the pagers went to the Charity Home For Puppies and Photogenic Orphaned Children Who Don't Want Their Dicks Blown Off
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