Israel carried out its operation against Hezbollah on Tuesday by hiding explosive material within a new batch of Taiwanese-made pagers imported into Lebanon, according to American and other officials briefed on the operation.
The pagers, which Hezbollah had ordered from Gold Apollo in Taiwan, had been tampered with before they reached Lebanon, according to some of the officials. Most were the company’s AP924 model, though three other Gold Apollo models were also included in the shipment.
The explosive material, as little as one to two ounces, was implanted next to the battery in each pager, two of the officials said. A switch was also embedded that could be triggered remotely to detonate the explosives.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiscriminate_attack
Even if they could somehow prove every single person in possession of those pagers was a combatant, those people were just everywhere spread out in society.
Imagine sitting on a bus and the person next to you you’ve never seen before explodes, and you do too
Those are rooted in actions like bombardments of civilian areas e.g. Dresden, Gaza, etc.
Just because an action has collateral damage, does not make it indiscriminate.
Again, it’s not like Israel isn’t already committing war crimes every day, I’m just not clear if this is one of them.
For example, when the Ukrainian’s assassinated the propagandist in St Petersburg at the cafe, there was collateral damage. Still doesn’t make it a war crime.
I am not comparing the morality of Ukraine to israel, I’m just giving you relevant example from recent history
Just because an action has collateral damage, does not make it indiscriminate.
It’s definitely indiscriminate. They chose to use explosives that will cause large amounts of collateral damage. Even if the idea itself is fine, the 2750 injuries are 100% on them.
I haven’t seen reports of significant collateral damage. I’m sure there was at least some, but that’s different from large amounts of collateral damage. To be considered indiscriminate, I think it would need to have either used larger charges with a bigger blast radius or distribute the pagers more widely in the hopes that Hezbollah agents got them along with the public. From my understanding, which may be flawed, neither of those conditions are true, so while there almost certainly was collateral damage, I don’t currently think it was widespread enough to consider the attack indiscriminate. If you have a source to contradict me, I’m open to reading it.
Fuck Israel’s rampant genocidal war crimes, but I don’t think this counts as one.
