Innocents getting killed, including the 9 year old being reportedly killed. How many of those 2000 plus injured were Hezbollah?
Maybe it’s with the cost. But please don’t claim that there are no negatives.
Really? Do the math above, it’s between 75 and 100 pounds of explosives. Instead of carpet bombing Beirut they put explosives in pagers that Hezbollah just obtained for communication of terrorist plans. That’s
pretty frigging precise targeting. Lest you forget Hezbollah is listed as a terrorist organization by the US EU etc. And the fear is sown in Hezbollah, not innocents. If Israel had done this indiscriminately with cell phones you’d have a leg to stand on, but in this case you do not.
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I’ll wager over 95% of the seriously injured were not innocents. Watch the videos of the bombs going off, they aren’t that powerful.
Yes the girl dying is horrible, however how many deaths was her father responsible for? Had he not been a terrorist she would not have been close to the pager.
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Side effect of this may also be that people will be afraid of being near a known Hezbollah person. He may just be a walking bomb.
That gave me an amazing mental image; thanks for the laugh.
This does not meet that test. this was quite specific. it appears the IDF enabled / knew about / facilitated or somehow involved themselves in the upgrade of the comms used. they appear to have not only know that a new system would be rolled out across the organisation but what would be bought, where it would be manufactured and they somehow at some point in the supply chain inserted the explosives and waited.
it was not targeted against non combatants or civilians though obviously one of more were killed / injured.
I have far more problems with the actions in Gaza than the fact that they somehow inserted themselves in to an internal discussion about comms upgrades in the group and managed to get new pagers delivered to members.
I think the more interesting thing is, if they loaded a ton of pagers and only set off ones heading to lebanon or whether it happened after it left the factory. I wonder if people are wandering around with pagers with unexploded explosive in them.
I think this was a brilliant targeted attack against Hezbollah.
There will of course be some collateral damage but as these pagers were used by operatives to communicate, then the chances of collateral damage are very low. As per usual, it will be incredibly difficult to believe any accurate figures that come out of Lebanon as to what the “collateral” injured numbers are.
The psychological impact of this attack will be massive. I struggle to think of anything in recent history that compares to this in terms of the number affected over a large geographical area, the complete surprise nature of the attach, the damage done to the communication networks and the massive psychological blow this will have on Hezbollah.
Ignoring any potential criticisms re ethics and collateral damage for a minute, this is a very very ingenious attack. We have seen many rather isolated ingenious attacks over the years from all sides, but nothing on a scale such as this.
It likely appears I am condoning the attack, I am trying to avoid going down that rabbit hole. I am more looking at the ingenuity, planning and implications of such an attack and hence why I am quite in awe of what they could achieve.
Would assume message got out that the bomb material was in the battery, so just swap out batteries and keep on moving.
The jury is still out on who the injured and dead are. But it appears that many civilians were hurt in this operation.
My point is that, based on the totality of the actions of Israel in recent times, the differences between Israel’s behavior and that of its enemies grows less and less with each passing day.
you are right that this is a height for anti-semitism over the last half-century. but this anti-semitism isn’t spontaneous. it arose as a result of israel’s over-response in gaza. this places israel in a more fragile state, because it pits against israel the govts it needs more than the hezbollah it fears. this is why this particular strike - as brilliant, ingenious, clever and incapacitating as it was - might have strategic consequences. i awake this morning to, in the NYT, Israel’s Pager Attack Has No Clear Strategic Goal, Analysts Say. apparently i’m not the only one with some concerns about the strategic implications. if it were me, and i was israel, i’d have flipped the switch and did what it did yesterday. but i am not dumb enough to think i’ve ended a war in my north. like ukraine’s venture into russian territory, a tactical victory does not always translate to a strategic one. i hope this is a big win for israel. i hope this helps achieve a cease fire and the return of 60,000 displaced israelis in the north. i hope this deals a blow to hezbollah’s recruiting. but as with ukraine’s russia gambit it could yet backfire in unintended ways. my friend, neither one of us yet knows.
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You and Windy are making an assumption that Israel had a high degree of confidence that the pagers would end up only being used by Hezbollah. We don’t know how tight of a control they had on the distribution of these things, but I doubt there was a Mossad operative at the final step making sure that only the bad guys got the bad pagers.
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i am making no assumptions - I do not know and clearly it had a wider impact. They clearly had some indication that it would end up in specific hands or we’d not have the confirmed deaths of specific individuals (and at least one of their children as collateral)
IMO, this was a historic event, and like drone use now, is a game changer throughout the world as it blew the lid off Pandora’s already opened box of kinetic Cyber Warfare. Israel’s strategic gain is that this goes straight to Iran now and how they respond. Iran is now on the back foot unsure of how deep the covert activity is inside their territory. Israel gained a decided edge.
The general public citizenry in Lebanon and Israel do not want open warfare, more so than exists now with daily rockets and counters. Hezbollah cannot go to full on war without the backing of Iran. This attack placed the ball decidedly in Iran’s lap and they can’t help but be unsettled.
The politics inside Israel played in too. The IDF leader needs to keep his job.
That and the fact that someone was killed in Iran with a bomb set months before just waiting for them to have a sleepover
They’ll feel uncertain of what’s next after this
Am I the only one here thinking that Israel missed a golden chance? If they are able to infiltrate the supply chain why not ‘bug’ the phones/pagers so that they can gather intel and use that to a greater advantage?
I believe it was Reuters, but one news agency noted that Israel had to move the timing up because they were afraid that it would be discovered before they detonated them.
If you don’t trust your pagers then you always have your trusty walkie talkies.
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You guys need to define antisemitism.
I don’t think it’s at it’s peak or even close. Just because I disagree with a lot of what the Israeli government does does not make me anti-semetic. Windy seems to think that if you do not support the Israeli government then you are.
My feelings toward Jewish people are pretty neutral. My feelings regarding Benjamin Netanyahu are extremely negative.
The US government has a definition
https://www.state.gov/defining-antisemitism/
Included in that discussion is what isn’t antisemitism:
However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.