Israel had in fact very clear intelligence that the specific pagers they were detonating were overwhelmingly going to be in the custody of combatants. This was very probably the most precisely targeted large-scale military strike of the last 100 years. That's not a value judgement; it's a descriptive claim.
Twelve civilians killed and 4,000 injured does not indicate a precise attack.
There is no credible figure for the number of combatants killed or injured. The Times of Israel reported that 1,500 fighters were injured. Taking these two data points together, a majority of those injured were civilians rather than combatants.
Where are you getting the claim that this was “probably the most precisely targeted large-scale military strike of the last 100 years”? That is a far-reaching assertion, especially given the lack of sources.
You say this is not a value judgment but a descriptive claim, yet the claim does not appear to be backed by facts.
Right, if in fact 1500 Hezbollah fighters were injured, any claim that over 1500 noncombatants were injured is suspicious. We have video footage of the explosions (along with a directional sense of the wounded vs. KIA count of the strike). It is not plausible that more noncombatants were injured than combatants, given the pagers were strictly military comms devices.
Both the 1500 and 4000 number were confirmed by Lebanon, and no reputable watch organization has credibly disputed them, you're not citing evidence just conjecture on how you believe everything went down due to a relative small bits of information.
> along with a directional sense of the wounded vs. KIA count of the strike
I am not sure what this means.
To add, you're making it impossible to argue anything against your claim. We're discussing how the pagers hurt civilians and if they were properly targetting combatants. You're saying no matter what, since you know the pager was targetting combatants, the evidence that civilians were hurt must be false. Your logic circular.
Do you want some deeply studied anthropological journal article on “The use of pagers in Lebanese society “?
Do you know of any civilians anywhere in the world that currently use pagers?
Who had the pagers and why they had the pagers is almost derivable from first principles at this point, never mind the international journalism on the subject.
I'm not deriving who had the pagers from first principles. They were military pagers, on a military network that Hezbollah fought an actual civil war to establish and maintain, with subverted devices that Hezbollah itself acquired directly. There's a lot of reporting on this. Israel did not booby trap the whole supply of pagers into Lebanon. The Hezbollah combatants carrying these pagers did not acquire them at a Beirut Cellular Retail Outlet.
Another way to say this is that if you have evidence/reporting suggesting that Israel did in fact set explosives in pagers that were broadly available to Lebanese civilians, my argument falls apart.
I think Hezbollah is inexcusably evil, far worse than Israel is, but I'm not particularly interested in defending Israeli governance; I have no commitment to the proposition that Israel doesn't commit atrocities (in fact, I think they commit rather many of them). So I'm fine with my argument collapsing; I'm just waiting for evidence to topple it. The trouble the preceding commenter is having with me is that I can't find a story that squares the circle of the numbers they're trying to present.
It’s almost like explosives… explode, and hit the people and surroundings near them. Shrapnel travels. You’re trying to derive who had the pagers from first principles, yet you don’t seem to understand how a bomb actually works.
(1) We have videos of the explosions and their scale.
(2) We have Hezbollah's own claims about how many of their fighters were actually killed.
(3) We have Hezbollah's own photographs of scores of injured Hezbollah fighters --- people not blown apart from the explosions, further backing a claim that all sides to the conflict are making (far more casualties than KIA).
(4) We know how small the pagers were (indeed, exactly what pagers they were) and what the explosive was.
To the extent Lebanon is reporting higher civilian casualties than Hezbollah fighter casualties, the balance of evidence is that at least one of two things is happening: either Hezbollah is dramatically understating its own casualties, or Lebanon is dramatically overstating civilian casualties.
later
(Or we're just misreading the statistics! Pretty normal outcome for a message board discussion!)
You, reasonably, cautioned against axiomatic reasoning --- I do feel like I'm bringing quite a bit of empiricism into this, though I am rejecting the ratio of casualties we're attributing to Lebanese and Hezbollah reporting --- so let me add a couple more empirical observations:
* We have reporting (Reuters, others) that the pagers were packed with 6 grams of PETN.
* 6 grams of PETN produces ~35kJ of explosive force.
* That's about 7x more powerful than a cherry bomb, or about 2% of the explosive force of a standard fragmentation grenade.
Later
In considering that yield statistic bear in mind also that the lethality of an M67 (lethal within 5m, casualties within 15m, well studied) is mostly a function of its construction --- its explosive charge, 50x greater than that of 6g of PETN, is designed specifically to propel fragments of a hardened steel case out through its blast radius.
The pagers were just pagers, with the explosive payload specifically designed not to have metal components (which would have been detectable by Hezbollah.)
I think we have in fact pretty strong reporting that at least 2 children were killed, and while the explosions and payload were nowhere nearly as devastating as a grenade, they were still much bigger than a firework mortar (which themselves have killed children).
I think a stronger argument is that in the aggregate, the devices overwhelmingly targeted combatants.
I'm sure those exist --- it has never been my claim there there were zero or even just few civilian casualties --- but the videos I've seen had people standing next to the person carrying the pager walking away, startled but apparently unharmed. The explosions were quite small (I quantified them downthread from what Reuters reported).
Please provide links to these videos because every video I saw showed only the person holding the pager getting hurt. They only had 6 grams of explosives.
Do you have any sources at all for your assertion “This was very probably the most precisely targeted large-scale military strike of the last 100 years”? It is hard to engage with your statement in any reasonable fashion without knowing where you are getting your information.
Here is an excellent and HN-worthy writeup of the argument for legality, and the counterargument that it was an improper booby trap.[1] It seems to me most of the polarizarion on this board could have been avoided had the original article recognized (as does the one linked here) "that the legality or illegality of the pagers attack can only be determined on the basis of a detailed factual analysis and that the relevant facts are still not fully known."
I disagree with @dang's decision to leave the original link up, as it is nearly valuless in framing this discussion.
> I disagree with @dang's decision to leave the original link up, as it is nearly valuless in framing this discussion
I'm open to replacing it with a better link, but the one you've listed here (even though it's a much more in-depth article) isn't about this specific topic.
No, they're basically the same, and this Substack has some additional primary source material the MEE piece doesn't (MEE and this Substack have approximately the same editorial slant).
For whatever it's worth I think it's fine that the resource posted in that comment just makes it an especially valuable comment, without altering the story itself.
Just start from the premise that Israel targeted exclusively handheld military comms devices that would in ordinary practice only be in the custody of Hezbollah combatants, and from the additional premise that the explosions in the strikes were relatively small, so small that the overwhelming majority of the Hezbollah casualties were wounded and not KIA. Then try to make another story make sense.
We have significant evidence for both these premises!
This is not an argument that the strike incurred no civilian casualty, that no child of a Hezbollah combatant was in close proximity when one of the bombs went off, anything like that. It's rather a sanity check on arguments based on statistical claims about the casualties. There might have been quite a lot of civilian casualties! But for there to have been significantly more of them than combatant casualties, I would argue that you have to break one of my two premises.
Premise 1:
The pagers were military devices, but based on what we know about them, it is impossible to assert that all were in the custody of Hezbollah combatants at the moment they exploded. One would need to prove that the pagers were physically on the combatants’ persons—and not, for example, sitting on a coffee table or elsewhere—at the time of detonation.
Premise 2:
The physical location of the pagers directly affects the pattern of civilian injuries. Hospitals reported that many of the injured were civilians, including children, women, and non-combatants who were at home, at work, or in public areas. Even pro-Israel outlets, such as the Times of Israel, reported the same distribution of casualties.
Footage from Reuters, Al Jazeera, AP, and local Lebanese reporters shows numerous injured civilians with bandaged hands and faces, including people hurt inside homes, markets, farms, and workplaces, as well as children with hand and facial burns.
Now I would pose the question to you, why is your (likely novice) understanding of explosives and the footage you seen enough to overwrite the opinions of the hospitals and government of Lebanon?
Premise 1: I accept that they could have been on coffee tables! The problem isn't that I'm sure every pager was in a combatant pocket; it's that they were microcharges (we have videographic evidence!), and unless most of the pagers were for whatever reason not on hand to a combatant but rather for some reason close to a civilian, the Lebanese civilian/combatant casualty figures can't be made to make sense.
Premise 2 just repeats Premise 1, from what I can tell.
The footage argument doesn't rebut any claim I made. You're treating this as if it's an argument that the pager strike was clean, or even morally justifiable; I have made neither claim.
So, we established that there were injuries among people surrounding those with the pagers. Therefore, the parent comment’s claim was false — the explosions could hurt people nearby and weren’t small enough to affect only the combatant.
My other points still stand, but it’s strange to me that the argument seems to go (not necessarily from you, but from other commenters above):
The explosions were too small to hurt others, so the reported number of civilians injured must be false.
We see that the explosions did hurt civilians.
Well, only a small fraction — the numbers must still be false.
Can you see how this is moving the goalposts? The argument shifted from “the explosives were so precise that Israel must have known exactly who was targeted, and those injured were combatants,” to, in the grandparent comment:
How do you know they were civilians?
Now we see that civilians were present and injured. Perhaps you're correct that the videos show only a small number, but the videos still confirm the core point: civilians were harmed.
@tptacek, I don’t have a problem discussing this with you, but each thread you respond to splits off into new points I have to address. It feels like arguing with two people making contradictory claims.
I’ll leave you with this: the videos show only a minority of the pager detonations. Civilian injuries are most reliably known by Lebanese hospitals and government sources. The idea of detonating explosives in civilian-populated areas without knowing who is immediately around those devices is deeply problematic. And there is no way Israel could have known who would be harmed with any reasonable certainty; the reported numbers only reinforce that fact.
Sources show, the source commenter I was discussing with in this thread agreed, why are you challenging this that were established in the thread? Why are you insisting that we don't use the context in the thread to continue discussion?
He never provided any evidence. Every video of a pager explosion I saw showed it only injuring the person holding it. The amount of explosives in the pagers was so small it would be unlikely for it to harm bystanders much if at all.
I'm not moving the goalposts. Instead, what I'm pretty sure is happening is that you see this as an argument about whether the strike was good or justified. I don't. I'm not interested in that question, which will never, ever be resolved on a message board. I'm just interested in getting the clearest picture of what actually did happen.
Most of this comment is you arguing points that I don't disagree with. The one place we're clearly not aligned is your belief that there were more civilian casualties (or even a comparable number of civilian casualties) than combatant casualties. I've argued, at length and with specific details, as to why that doesn't seem possible, regardless of what Lebanon or Hezbollah reports. If you want to keep hashing this out, that's probably the place where there's something to actually discuss.
They weren't terrorists they were Hezbollah members during a time when Hezbollah was shooting thousands of missiles at Israel that forced 60,000 people to evacuate. This made them fair targets. The pagers contained about grams of explosives which only injured the person holding it.
Premise 2 is false. The vast majority of the injured were Hezbollah terrorists. You say The Times of Israel reported "many of the injured were civilians, including children, women, and non-combatant" - show me a source, please.
It's also false that footage shows numerous injured civilians with bandaged hands and faces. Again, show a credible source and explain how this happened to them.
Cmon man, there are sources pasted all over this thread from my discussion with OP. I'm not going to post the same source that was already discussed with him, why would I waste my time to do so?
OP did split this chain, but a sibling comment has the sources you want.
EDIT: Getting downvoted because I didn't want to paste the same source N times. Nice.
They knew who purchased those devices. Did they know that at the moment of detonation only military personnel had those devices on them? Military propaganda of course will nod at “intelligence” to defend any actions in public, as there is no way to prove these statements.
