Is this not explicitly a massive violation of international law and war crime?
Yes it is, and not because of whether the attacks were targeted.
This is a US West Point essay BTW.
I mean no shock that he would carry out a plan to kill people indiscriminately. What I wonder is if he could get the devices into their hands to carry out this attack, what else have they sold to Hezbollah?
Interesting he feels clear to admit this after Trump is elected.
The Kamala administration was going to sanction them for being related to this event.
How can Israel be so precise and effective when they attack Lebanon, but in Gaza they have to kill mostly civilians to get to Hamas
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device_attacks#International_law
Ends don’t justify means, indiscriminate attacks risking civilian lives is a war crime by international law. Simultaneously exploding thousands of pagers where you have no way of assuring who possesses the pagers and where it explodes is indiscriminate as explained by many experts on the topic. Wishful thinking does not change anything.
It wasn’t precise. It was explosives in pagers and radios that went off in public and crowded places.
Have you seen the videos of said explosions in crowded places? Single people drop and the people around them seem more or less unaffected.
As of 22 September 2024, the death toll from the attacks was 42,[7] including at least 12 civilian deaths.[107] More than 3,500 people were injured.[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device_attacks#Casualties
Two of those civilians were children. Two others were healthcare workers.
Do you have any info on this? I couldn’t find any info on the target Vs civilian rate of the attqck. Not even how many were targeted. Only some media coverage of single civilian stories and innocent children getting hit. I assume this is inevitable in a large scale operation like this. But, from the videos available, it seemed like the explosives had very limited radius, where even people standing next to the targets were not hit or even knocked over!
Compare that to flattening entire cities, to get to the targets, i’d call it pretty precise!
It was more precise in the way that the explosions were smaller. The targets were not precise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device_attacks
As of 22 September 2024, the death toll from the attacks was 42,[7] including at least 12 civilian deaths.[107] More than 3,500 people were injured.[7]
at least 12 people were killed in the first wave of attacks,[1] including civilians such as two health workers,[108][26][109] a 9-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy.[110][111][112] The adult son of Ali Ammar, a Hezbollah member of Parliament was killed;[107] Prime Minister Najib Mikati visited southern Beirut to pay his respects.[24] More than 2,750 people were wounded.[113] In the second wave on 18 September, at least 30 people were killed and 750 others were injured.[5][16] One eye doctor at Mount Lebanon University Hospital reported that a number of those injured showed signs of something being blown up directly in their face, with some losing one or both eyes, while others had shrapnel in their brains.[114][115] The Lebanese health ministry reported that 300 people had lost both eyes and 500 people had lost one eye as a result of the pager attacks.[116] Other doctors saw severe hand, waist and facial injuries, reporting patients with fingers torn, hands amputated, eyes popped out of the socket and facial lacerations.[117]
Health Minister Firass Abiad said the vast majority of those being treated in emergency rooms were in civilian clothing and their Hezbollah affiliation was unclear.[118] He added the casualties included elderly people as well as young children. According to the Health Ministry, healthcare workers were also injured and it advised all healthcare workers to discard their pagers.[119][120] On 26 September, Abdallah Bou Habib, Lebanon’s Foreign Minister, confirmed that most of those carrying pagers were not fighters, rather civilians like administrators.[121] Qassim Qassir, a Lebanese expert on Hezbollah,[d] said the attacks mostly struck civilian workers, leaving its military wing largely unaffected.
But, from the videos available, it seemed like the explosives had very limited radius, where even people standing next to the targets were not hit or even knocked over!
It’s not about being knocked over; these explosions created shrapnel and that shrapnel created tons of injuries. We don’t have numbers because nobody bothered to count, but these were still bombs. There was no way they were not going to harm hundreds if not thousands of innocent civilians.
Yeah I’d argue it was the most precisely targeted attack possible on such a scale.
But of course - since it’s Israel people use every angle possible to criticise it.
