News

I think the NYT podcast used the word 'aimed an attack at Hezbollah' which is certainly a choice to describe a bombing requiring no aim

I mean... yeah, I do believe their bombing of Gaza is also extremely targeted.

It's just a question of who you target.

And even if it hadn't been as indiscriminate as it was, imagine the terror everyone around them must have (and likely continue to) experienced after seeing the person standing next to them in the grocery store suddenly have their goddamn legs blown off.

This is exactly how you create millions of more "terrorists," and Israel knows exactly what they are doing. Just another generation who (understandably) wants to enact revenge with whatever means they may have, so Israel can give a plausible excuse to obliterate them with Western munitions.

Rinse and repeat.

I can understand why the people who performed the attack consider it to be "extremely targeted". All accounts that I have read say that these pagers were used directly by Hezbollah as an alternative to cell phones, which they believe the IDF have the ability to track. I haven't seen any reputable source claiming that these pagers were in use by the general population. So they consider these attacks targeted at Hezbollah, because only Hezbollah members should have had them.

They were not intending to target children or other civilians, but of course when something goes off at a random time like this there is no guarantee that only the targets are in possession of these devices.

However, I think the attack will end up actually harming Israeli security, for two reasons:

First of all, they put too much explosive stuff in it. If it were a smaller explosion (or even just a short circuit leading to device failure), fewer people would have been hurt, and they would have more claim to say they were targeting communications infrastructure. But if the explosions were smaller, the attack would not have gotten into the news. I think they made the explosions larger than necessary just to make headlines, without regard to collateral damage. I think that's the part that would get any other country into hot water as a war crime.

But more importantly, they have proven to Hezbollah that Israel cannot track these closed pager networks, otherwise they would not have needed to blow them up! So now Hezbollah has learned to open up every pager before deploying, and once they source more devices they have their secure network back.

So in a few months, Israelis will be in a less secure position than they were before the attack, just because some of their leaders wanted to make headlines.

A targeted strike should not have this much collateral damage.