I believe this attack is particularly egregious.
By all accounts, this was an incredibly precise attack, harming thousands of terrorists and very few civilians who likely chose knowingly to be in the immediate vicinity of terrorists.
That is absolutely not what I read. Furthermore, it is not a crime to live near bad people and expecting people to just leave their homes, which may have been in their family for generations, because of who their neighbors are is unreasonable. On top of that, how could they have possibly guaranteed every person with an exploding pager would be away from innocent people?
It also normalizes this sort of attack. That is not a good thing for the world.
The explosives were small enough to - by design - harm the bearer of the terrorist network communication device without having a large scale area effect. I understand that this is a civilian device in the strictest sense. However, they were purchased by a terror organization actively conducting international terror attacks. They were distributed for the exclusive use by members of the terrorist group to conduct official communications.
I don’t live in Lebanon so I don’t know what civilian life is like there. I do live in an area with significant cartel presence. People know when they are in a cartel area, where they are safe, and when they are at greater risk. No, it is not a crime to live and operate near cartel members. It is a calculated risk that some people are willing to take, while others are not. It is certainly a tragedy that any civilians would be harmed. It is also naive to assume that it was not a known risk for many of them.
I haven’t been able to find any reporting on precise numbers, but please share. I may well be mistaken. My understanding is that the civilian casualties in this attack were one per hundreds or even a thousand. If there were more civilians harmed than terrorists, that would certainly change my perspective.
Amnesty says:
injured more than 2,931 people and killed at least 37, including at least four civilians
Also:
Amnesty International’s Evidence Lab analyzed 12 videos showing the pagers exploding in crowded civilian areas, such as residential streets and grocery stores, as well as in people’s homes. A verified video of the skyline of Beirut show large smoke plums over at least 10 locations in residential areas.
There is simply no excuse for executing this operation while those pagers are in places like grocery stores.
I appreciate you sharing this. It looks like it doesn’t really answer the question, unfortunately. As I’ve said, any civilian casualties are a tragedy. They’re also an inevitability of war. Amnesty has identified four deaths, and about a dozen out of several thousand detonations that endangered civilians. If that is the extent of civilian endangerment, it seems remarkably precise for this type of war. I’m pretty sure if they tried to do the same with ground troops or air strikes, the civilian casualties would have been much higher.
