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Do you have any sources at all for your assertion “This was very probably the most precisely targeted large-scale military strike of the last 100 years”? It is

by oa335 10mo ago

Do you have any sources at all for your assertion “This was very probably the most precisely targeted large-scale military strike of the last 100 years”? It is hard to engage with your statement in any reasonable fashion without knowing where you are getting your information.

tptacek 10mo ago
Just start from the premise that Israel targeted exclusively handheld military comms devices that would in ordinary practice only be in the custody of Hezbollah combatants, and from the additional premise that the explosions in the strikes were relatively small, so small that the overwhelming majority of the Hezbollah casualties were wounded and not KIA. Then try to make another story make sense. We have significant evidence for both these premises! This is not an argument that the strike incurred no civilian casualty, that no child of a Hezbollah combatant was in close proximity when one of the bombs went off, anything like that. It's rather a sanity check on arguments based on statistical claims about the casualties. There might have been quite a lot of civilian casualties! But for there to have been significantly more of them than combatant casualties, I would argue that you have to break one of my two premises.
- jackling 10mo ago
  Premise 1: The pagers were military devices, but based on what we know about them, it is impossible to assert that all were in the custody of Hezbollah combatants at the moment they exploded. One would need to prove that the pagers were physically on the combatants’ persons—and not, for example, sitting on a coffee table or elsewhere—at the time of detonation. Premise 2: The physical location of the pagers directly affects the pattern of civilian injuries. Hospitals reported that many of the injured were civilians, including children, women, and non-combatants who were at home, at work, or in public areas. Even pro-Israel outlets, such as the Times of Israel, reported the same distribution of casualties. Footage from Reuters, Al Jazeera, AP, and local Lebanese reporters shows numerous injured civilians with bandaged hands and faces, including people hurt inside homes, markets, farms, and workplaces, as well as children with hand and facial burns. Now I would pose the question to you, why is your (likely novice) understanding of explosives and the footage you seen enough to overwrite the opinions of the hospitals and government of Lebanon?
  - tptacek 10mo ago
    Premise 1: I accept that they could have been on coffee tables! The problem isn't that I'm sure every pager was in a combatant pocket; it's that they were microcharges (we have videographic evidence!), and unless most of the pagers were for whatever reason not on hand to a combatant but rather for some reason close to a civilian, the Lebanese civilian/combatant casualty figures can't be made to make sense. Premise 2 just repeats Premise 1, from what I can tell. The footage argument doesn't rebut any claim I made. You're treating this as if it's an argument that the pager strike was clean, or even morally justifiable; I have made neither claim.
  - UltraSane 10mo ago
    Israel was able to monitor communications on the pagers for years and this allowed them to be quite certain of who they were targeting. "Footage from Reuters, Al Jazeera, AP, and local Lebanese reporters shows numerous injured civilians" How do you know they were civilians?
    - jackling 10mo ago
      How do YOU know they were terrorist? What would you call people who were around the individual with that pagers?
      - tptacek 10mo ago
        Mostly, "uninjured".
        jackling 10mo ago
        So, we established that there were injuries among people surrounding those with the pagers. Therefore, the parent comment’s claim was false — the explosions could hurt people nearby and weren’t small enough to affect only the combatant. My other points still stand, but it’s strange to me that the argument seems to go (not necessarily from you, but from other commenters above): The explosions were too small to hurt others, so the reported number of civilians injured must be false. We see that the explosions did hurt civilians. Well, only a small fraction — the numbers must still be false. Can you see how this is moving the goalposts? The argument shifted from “the explosives were so precise that Israel must have known exactly who was targeted, and those injured were combatants,” to, in the grandparent comment: How do you know they were civilians? Now we see that civilians were present and injured. Perhaps you're correct that the videos show only a small number, but the videos still confirm the core point: civilians were harmed. @tptacek, I don’t have a problem discussing this with you, but each thread you respond to splits off into new points I have to address. It feels like arguing with two people making contradictory claims. I’ll leave you with this: the videos show only a minority of the pager detonations. Civilian injuries are most reliably known by Lebanese hospitals and government sources. The idea of detonating explosives in civilian-populated areas without knowing who is immediately around those devices is deeply problematic. And there is no way Israel could have known who would be harmed with any reasonable certainty; the reported numbers only reinforce that fact.
unyttigfjelltol 10mo ago
Here is an excellent and HN-worthy writeup of the argument for legality, and the counterargument that it was an improper booby trap.[1] It seems to me most of the polarizarion on this board could have been avoided had the original article recognized (as does the one linked here) "that the legality or illegality of the pagers attack can only be determined on the basis of a detailed factual analysis and that the relevant facts are still not fully known." I disagree with @dang's decision to leave the original link up, as it is nearly valuless in framing this discussion. [1] https://lieber.westpoint.edu/well-it-depends-explosive-pagers-attack-revisited/ https://lieber.westpoint.edu/well-it-depends-explosive-pager...
- tptacek 10mo ago
  This is really good. (As you say, it's mostly framing the question, rather than settling on a final disposition).
- dang 10mo ago
  > I disagree with @dang's decision to leave the original link up, as it is nearly valuless in framing this discussion I'm open to replacing it with a better link, but the one you've listed here (even though it's a much more in-depth article) isn't about this specific topic. I found https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-used-palantir-its-2024-lebanon-pager-attack https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-used-palantir-its-... by googling. Is it better than OP?
  - tptacek 10mo ago
    No, they're basically the same, and this Substack has some additional primary source material the MEE piece doesn't (MEE and this Substack have approximately the same editorial slant). For whatever it's worth I think it's fine that the resource posted in that comment just makes it an especially valuable comment, without altering the story itself.

by oa335 10mo ago

tptacek 10mo ago

Just start from the premise that Israel targeted exclusively handheld military comms devices that would in ordinary practice only be in the custody of Hezbollah combatants, and from the additional premise that the explosions in the strikes were relatively small, so small that the overwhelming majority of the Hezbollah casualties were wounded and not KIA. Then try to make another story make sense. We have significant evidence for both these premises! This is not an argument that the strike incurred no civilian casualty, that no child of a Hezbollah combatant was in close proximity when one of the bombs went off, anything like that. It's rather a sanity check on arguments based on statistical claims about the casualties. There might have been quite a lot of civilian casualties! But for there to have been significantly more of them than combatant casualties, I would argue that you have to break one of my two premises.

jackling 10mo ago
Premise 1: The pagers were military devices, but based on what we know about them, it is impossible to assert that all were in the custody of Hezbollah combatants at the moment they exploded. One would need to prove that the pagers were physically on the combatants’ persons—and not, for example, sitting on a coffee table or elsewhere—at the time of detonation. Premise 2: The physical location of the pagers directly affects the pattern of civilian injuries. Hospitals reported that many of the injured were civilians, including children, women, and non-combatants who were at home, at work, or in public areas. Even pro-Israel outlets, such as the Times of Israel, reported the same distribution of casualties. Footage from Reuters, Al Jazeera, AP, and local Lebanese reporters shows numerous injured civilians with bandaged hands and faces, including people hurt inside homes, markets, farms, and workplaces, as well as children with hand and facial burns. Now I would pose the question to you, why is your (likely novice) understanding of explosives and the footage you seen enough to overwrite the opinions of the hospitals and government of Lebanon?
- tptacek 10mo ago
  Premise 1: I accept that they could have been on coffee tables! The problem isn't that I'm sure every pager was in a combatant pocket; it's that they were microcharges (we have videographic evidence!), and unless most of the pagers were for whatever reason not on hand to a combatant but rather for some reason close to a civilian, the Lebanese civilian/combatant casualty figures can't be made to make sense. Premise 2 just repeats Premise 1, from what I can tell. The footage argument doesn't rebut any claim I made. You're treating this as if it's an argument that the pager strike was clean, or even morally justifiable; I have made neither claim.
- UltraSane 10mo ago
  Israel was able to monitor communications on the pagers for years and this allowed them to be quite certain of who they were targeting. "Footage from Reuters, Al Jazeera, AP, and local Lebanese reporters shows numerous injured civilians" How do you know they were civilians?
  - jackling 10mo ago
    How do YOU know they were terrorist? What would you call people who were around the individual with that pagers?
    - tptacek 10mo ago
      Mostly, "uninjured".
      - jackling 10mo ago
        So, we established that there were injuries among people surrounding those with the pagers. Therefore, the parent comment’s claim was false — the explosions could hurt people nearby and weren’t small enough to affect only the combatant. My other points still stand, but it’s strange to me that the argument seems to go (not necessarily from you, but from other commenters above): The explosions were too small to hurt others, so the reported number of civilians injured must be false. We see that the explosions did hurt civilians. Well, only a small fraction — the numbers must still be false. Can you see how this is moving the goalposts? The argument shifted from “the explosives were so precise that Israel must have known exactly who was targeted, and those injured were combatants,” to, in the grandparent comment: How do you know they were civilians? Now we see that civilians were present and injured. Perhaps you're correct that the videos show only a small number, but the videos still confirm the core point: civilians were harmed. @tptacek, I don’t have a problem discussing this with you, but each thread you respond to splits off into new points I have to address. It feels like arguing with two people making contradictory claims. I’ll leave you with this: the videos show only a minority of the pager detonations. Civilian injuries are most reliably known by Lebanese hospitals and government sources. The idea of detonating explosives in civilian-populated areas without knowing who is immediately around those devices is deeply problematic. And there is no way Israel could have known who would be harmed with any reasonable certainty; the reported numbers only reinforce that fact.

unyttigfjelltol 10mo ago

Here is an excellent and HN-worthy writeup of the argument for legality, and the counterargument that it was an improper booby trap.[1] It seems to me most of the polarizarion on this board could have been avoided had the original article recognized (as does the one linked here) "that the legality or illegality of the pagers attack can only be determined on the basis of a detailed factual analysis and that the relevant facts are still not fully known." I disagree with @dang's decision to leave the original link up, as it is nearly valuless in framing this discussion. [1] https://lieber.westpoint.edu/well-it-depends-explosive-pagers-attack-revisited/ https://lieber.westpoint.edu/well-it-depends-explosive-pager...

tptacek 10mo ago
This is really good. (As you say, it's mostly framing the question, rather than settling on a final disposition).
dang 10mo ago
> I disagree with @dang's decision to leave the original link up, as it is nearly valuless in framing this discussion I'm open to replacing it with a better link, but the one you've listed here (even though it's a much more in-depth article) isn't about this specific topic. I found https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-used-palantir-its-2024-lebanon-pager-attack https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-used-palantir-its-... by googling. Is it better than OP?
- tptacek 10mo ago
  No, they're basically the same, and this Substack has some additional primary source material the MEE piece doesn't (MEE and this Substack have approximately the same editorial slant). For whatever it's worth I think it's fine that the resource posted in that comment just makes it an especially valuable comment, without altering the story itself.