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3 killed but thousands inoperative and hospitals flooded - I would expect an immediate armed escalation
by ddalex 2y ago
3 killed but thousands inoperative and hospitals flooded - I would expect an immediate armed escalation
- frabbit 2y ago[flagged]
- rbanffy 2y agoWe should avoid using the name of the country as a proxy for its current government. The people has nothing to do with this - this is all planned and executed under the auspices of the current prime minister and his associates. Even though the people largely supports their agenda, an action that targets three people but affects 2,700 people as collateral damage would not pass by their parliament.
- wkat4242 2y agoThe people voted for this government. I do think we can hold Israel as a country responsible. But what we can't do is blame Jewish or even Israeli people in general. Though I don't see anyone doing this. The current government is always quick to draw the antisemitism card when being criticised but I never see anyone actually doing that.
- CaptainNegative 2y agoWhy would you assume this targeted three people? I assume the most likely scenario is that the attackers targeted as many Hezbollah members as they could, and were extremely successful at it.
- rbanffy 2y agoThat's a very good point - if the goal was to disable comms and incapacitate as many targets as possible, then collateral damage numbers are much lower. It's unknown how many were family members of targeted individuals, and whatever the number actually is, it'll be misreported.
- tptacek 2y agoWhy would the family members of a Hezbollah operative be carrying a pager tuned to Hezbollah's private communications network? A reminder that Hezbollah operates a parallel phone system, and is in many ways more sophisticated and organized than the de jure government of Lebanon, whose military forces Hezbollah outnumbers.
- seadan83 2y agoThe family member would not necessarily need to be carrying the pager, just near it. Picture a child standing next to adult, pager on hip would be next to the kids head. Pagers are not always worn too, could be on top of a table, etc..
- tptacek 2y agoRight. Yes. That's more than plausible. I have no reason to dispute the accounts of bystander casualties.
- runarberg 2y ago[flagged]
- sitkack 2y ago[flagged]
- tptacek 2y agoFirst a style point: I don't think you get very far with things like "the only conclusion we can draw is that I'm right". I know I never sound like it, but the one thing I can confidently state in these kinds of discussions is that nothing is unambiguous. When it comes to conflict in the Middle East, if I have to be potentially wrong about things, so do you! As I've remarked several times on this thread, the standard I'm using for this attack isn't one in which no innocents (or even innocent children) are harmed or killed. I don't like war and would happily confiscate every firearm in North America, but that standard is one no active military in the world meets. Rather: the "state of the art" in targeted strikes is air-to-ground weaponry, which routinely kills civilian bystanders at ratios far exceeding 1:1. Here, my guess is that the ratio is something far south of 1:100, making this strike --- I think? --- unprecedented in precision in the last 100 years of warfare. We'll learn more as the day goes on, and if/when I'm wrong, I'll certainly say so. "Terrorism" has nothing whatsoever to do with my thinking on this. Hezbollah is a large, sophisticated, organized, well-supplied combatant force, a military peer to its neighbors, and it is in open armed conflict with Israel.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- thisoneworks 2y agoSince when did naming a country for their military action signify the opinion or inclination of the majority of civic population? When newspapers report on "country A did X" it almost always means their government did X. So I'm not sure what point you're trying to make
- rbanffy 2y agoYou are lumping together a population that doesn't necessarily agree with the actions. It creates negative attitudes towards citizens of that country (or people who look like citizens of that country).
- rightbyte 2y agoIt is some sort of dehumanization. Since it got into fashion, I've noticed some colleges started to refer to companies in China as 'China'. Like as if they are dealing with Xi when procuring washers.
- anigbrowl 2y agoWe should avoid using the name of the country as a proxy for its current government I understand your point but synecdoche is the oil on the gears of discourse. This required a lot of people's involvement, from those issuing the orders to technicians at the bottom of the chain of command. It's not Netanyahu's cabinet that did the work of placing explosive charges in thousands of compact devices and then repackaged and shrinkwrapped them. Obviously once could refer to the 'Netanyahu regime' or some other more specific term, but then someone else would complain that this was a mendacious mischaracterization of the country's political system or suchlike. To the extent that civilians there don't with to be identified with their political leadership or take on the moral responsibility for its decisions, they'd better step up their efforts to topple the government by means of a general strike or some other time-honored method.
- sitkack 2y ago[flagged]
- vt85 2y ago[dead]
- cloudwonderer 2y agoIsrael is desperate to provoke? Hezbollah is bombing Israel since the October 7th attack. 300,000 refugees inside Israel because of this bombing. Who is provoking who ?
- DSingularity 2y ago[flagged]
- cloudwonderer 2y agoHow is what you wrote about that Israel is desperate to provoke is related to Gaza ? Israel is defending itself against Hamas, Hezbollah and other Iranian allies since October 7th 2023. Why would Israel provoke Hezbollah? What's the point of it ?
- darkr 2y ago[flagged]
- minkles 2y agoTheir comms and command infra is now hosed and all the operatives concentrated in hospitals. They are dead in the water.
- s1artibartfast 2y agoHezbollah has more than 100,000 fighters, so this would be what, one or two percent injured. Everyone has cell phones that they can use in addition to the pager, so I don't think it's very accurate to say the communications are hosed either
- cynicalsecurity 2y ago[flagged]
- bguebert 2y agoHezbollah has been warning its members not to use cell phones because they get targeted by using them too. Seems like the pagers were supposed to be the workaround for that. https://www.ynetnews.com/article/sya00qlswa https://www.ynetnews.com/article/sya00qlswa
- londons_explore 2y agoWhich is dumb, because pagers are just as trackable as phones.
- tptacek 2y agoApparently not these ones.
- toyg 2y agoThey might have watched The Wire: you page Alice, and she uses a public phone to call you. Undetectable unless you wire all public phones in the city, or someone is dumb enough to always use the same phone (which is what happens in the series; they eventually switch to burner mobiles).
- s1artibartfast 2y agoHow would this be an escalation trigger after a year of missiles and airstrikes with 1000 Hezbollah dead and 100k civilians displaced on each side?
- ethbr1 2y agoFace saving. It's easier to put a PR spin on something only a few people actually saw. It's going to be hard to convince their rank-and-file this isn't a bit deal and deserving of retribution.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 2y agoA missile is a demonstration of military force. Everyone in the region knows Israel is capable of blowing up a building. This is a "we've got you hopelessly compromised as an organization" sort of demonstration that's far more humiliating. For a similar example, see the US response to 9/11 - two decades of war, taking shoes off at airports, etc. - versus the US response to COVID, which killed a 9/11 worth every couple of days, but resulted in a "but I don't wanna wear a mask" response.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 2y ago> It's easy to sit online and make bold and vague claims like there will be armed escalation in retaliation. I mean, that's the pretty standard response in this conflict. Permanent tit-for-tat, back-and-forth, for decades/millennia depending on how broadly you count things. For a concrete example, Iran's April strikes. > What do you think constitutes a major escalation? Terror attacks on Israeli assets abroad - I'd be keeping embassies/consulates on alert - and rocket strikes against Israel. At least enough to try to save face, although the Iranian strikes offer a "good luck" for that. > I would happily bet against a ground invasion. By Hezbollah? Well, yeah.
- dotancohen 2y agoHezbollah has been escalating their armed attacks against Israel for almost an entire year, parallel with the war in Gaza. Every day tens of rockets hit Israel, almost the entire north of Israel is evacuated of civilians. I realize that this is not widely known, attacks against Israel receive far less attention in the news than do Israeli retaliations.
- ceejayoz 2y agoAs tends to be the case with this sort of complaint, it absolutely makes the news. Quick sampling of examples: https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20240908-hezbollah-fires-rockets-israel-strikes-after-attack-kills-lebanon-emergency-workers https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20240908-hezbollah-f... https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/4/hezbollah-fires-retaliatory-200-rockets-towards-israel https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/4/hezbollah-fires-reta... https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw9y7wqn8j5o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw9y7wqn8j5o https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-israel-hezbollah-hamas-rockets-kibbutz-aacd476e74ef8db2791dca485a349763 https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-israel-hezbollah-hamas-ro... It doesn't make a big splash in the news because it tends to be severely ineffectual, but it has been pretty widely and continuously covered.
- dotancohen 2y agoYes, there are blurbs about it if you know where to look and are already familiar with the situation. But a small blurb once about Israel being attacked is drowned out by the literally thousands of articles about Israeli actions, which mention time and again every small detail or infringement.
- kelnos 2y agoI don't agree; I think you're pushing some vague nonsense media conspiracy here. I haven't been following the war that closely, but I hear about Hezbollah attacks fairly regularly. I'm very critical of Israel right now, but it's not even remotely unknown that they're facing attacks from multiple fronts.
- 2y ago
- wkat4242 2y agoI don't think it takes much to 'flood' a hospital in Lebanon though. They country has been a mess since the big explosion. They barely have power.
- golemiprague 2y ago[dead]