10-year-old Fatima Jaafar Abdullah was killed in pager explosions in Lebanon.

Israel murders another kid again.

93 points

I get going after your ‘enemy,’ but this is even worse than firing randomly into a crowd of Palestinians. They pushed a button not knowing who would die. This is low, even for them.

I can’t even think of a devil’s advocate argument for this.

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74 points
*

I believe the devil’s advocate argument would be that, based on Hezbollah’s internal communications, the Mossad intercepted a shipment of pagers which were being purchased to replace their (potentially compromised) mobile phones, knowing that these were - in theory - being distributed exclusively to Hezbollah operatives. That would make it the most precise military strike of all time.

Everyone who launches a rocket is accepting the possibility of “collateral damage”, but this is surely the most surgical of surgical strikes in history. And yet, yes, they must have accepted the risk of bystander casualties, which just serves to highlight how awful that logic is. It’s definitely not worse than randomly firing into a crowd, though.

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-6 points

It’s literally a war crime to attack people who are not actively participating in combat. That includes people who are members of your enemy’s military.

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25 points

It is a war crime to intentionally attack non-combatants.

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44 points

That includes people who are members of your enemy’s military.

No, members of an enemy’s military are combatants regardless of whether they’re holding a gun or in a firefight at the time. The only exception is personnel such as chaplains and medics.

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-2 points

That would make every crime a war crime going back thousands of years where they would lay siege on villages until the citizens starved

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3 points

That is absolutely not true. An easy example to disprove your argument would be the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. The American Navy was caught completely by surprise. At the end of the war, there were some Japanese tried for war crimes, but not for the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

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14 points

Correct.

Killing civilians isn’t a war crime. Deliberately killing civilians, or not taking reasonable steps to minimize civilian casualties is a war crime.

“Small” explosive that is embedded in something passed to and likely worn by the target is unlikely to be a war crime. If they somehow snuck a 1000lb bomb into one it absolutely would be however.

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16 points

Booby trapping objects associates with daily civilian use is a war crime

These pagers were distributed to doctors and nurses, so I would also argue that they were booby trapping medical supplies, which are protected.

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-2 points

Turns out they weren’t.

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24 points

I feel like people are missing one of the more heinous aspects of this, which is that it injured thousands of people and only managed to kill ~10 of their targets. The outcome of this attack is going to be general terror and potentially hundreds of life altering injuries but very little military advantage.

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-3 points

They injured thousands of their targets, killed a few, and only got very little collateral damage

Nasrallah would shit down his prophet’s throat to get this kind of outcome

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1 point
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The advantage is huge. 1000s of militants are now seriously injured and are no longer battle ready. Many will never be again. Massive success for Israel, and one of the most precision strikes ever used. Now there will be fear from any communication devise exploding, there will be 1000s of man hours wasted taking other stuff apart to check it, and morale will be down as well.

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-1 points

How did something that only killed 10 targets injure thousands, especially when you are considering explosives.

I don’t think I could injure 1000s of civilians with only 10 targets killed with an explosive hidden on their person if I tried.

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48 points

That would make it the most precise military strike of all time.

Pretty sure that honor still goes to the R9X Slap Chop. The pager explosions, on the other hand, injured thousands.

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2 points

I guess I should have qualified that to exclude individual assassinations, otherwise you’d have to include snipers and whatever. I almost don’t believe that “knife missile” is real (quotation marks because the only real knife missiles are Culture technology).

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2 points

I really don’t get it. Other than the “WAOW” factor, this certainly can’t have been a good use of resources for Israel.

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14 points

Fat electrician had a great video on this.

Soo accurate that if the target is in a car you need to know what seat.

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-32 points

Not that I think the Israel is the good guy in this conflict, but your argument is pretty weak.

Pager are designed to be trackable. If you have such deep access to these devices, you know exactly who got called by whom and when.

Yes, there will be collateral damage, but that’s almost a given in any armed conflict.

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-3 points

So which armed conflict in the middle of Beirut are you talking about now?

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6 points

Maybe the guys shooting rockets at Israel?

Don’t play dumber than you are.

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-10 points

YoUrE ArGuMeNt is WeAk

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29 points

If these were one-way pagers,they are not easy to track, as they don’t transmit messages, but only receive and display them.

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-19 points

…and you know which telephone numbers send data to the pager and at which time. That is sufficient to track or identify individuals.

If this is a supply chain attack, the attacker already knows, which pagers are part of the organization they want to target.

What this thread here shows really well, is that the general population vastly underestimates the abilities of intelligence agencies and technology in general.

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0 points
Deleted by creator
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-23 points

Reported as a biased source and MBFC backs that up… when talking about Turkish issues, they are very pro government.

As this doesn’t readily involve the Turkish government, I’ll allow it.

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30 points

“MBFC” is basically a single dude’s opinion, containing a shitton of bias. Using it to verify credibility of anything is wrong.

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-16 points

If you have a better solution involving an API we can use for free, I’m open.

I see no issue with the MBFC assessment on this source.

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10 points
*

LOL this is the hilarious response of
“Oh yeah?! Don’t have anything better than putting a biased source of credibility attached to every article for no reason other than for people to use to dismiss articles and not read them?!
Well too bad removing it isn’t an option! Find me a different one cause it makes me feel good!”
said the minority.

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13 points

Lots of people said openly “we’d rather not have it at all”. The bot gets downvoted every thread with comments criticizing it. It doesn’t need to exist and is openly harmful.

I understand someone put a lot of work into it, but it simply doesn’t work for what it needs to do. Unless you want to be spreading misinformation, then it works perfectly.

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-17 points

Lmfao this attack is aimed at nailing terrorists. Well lookie there. Lemmy you never let me down

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22 points

I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. Is it OK for a nation state to plant bombs in suspected opponents and then explode them at random without respect for collateral damage? If Russians did the same to Americans, you’d be all “fair play, mate”?

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1 point
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If Russians did the same to Americans, you’d be all “fair play, mate”?

At wartime, sure. Using explosives on enemy combatants outside of military-exclusive areas is not inherently a war crime.

Israel is in the wrong here because it’s part and parcel of their continuing strategy of escalation in service to Netanyahu’s forever war so he can stay in power, and the collateral damage is thus pointless from any perspective except that of keeping an authoritarian in power.

They’re not in the wrong because they chose explosives as their choice of attack against Hezbollah. Unless it comes out that their distribution of rigged pagers was utterly untargeted or something of the sort. Which I would not discount the possibility of, considering Israel’s history, but doesn’t seem to be the case according to what’s come out so far.

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1 point
Deleted by creator
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0 points

If there were an anti-Russian militia that set up shop in America and occasionally attacked Russia and Russia figured out a way to target many members of this militia and a few innocent bystanders were also injured or killed, the rest of the world would say “yeah… that is what you get” and Americans would say “Why are we allowing these armed assholes to set up shop in America and attack Russia?”

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5 points

You really believe this is is how it would play out? Astounding…

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2 points
*

Lol, if there was an anti-anybody militia that sometimes acted against other states within the US. The US would raid their complex, set it on fire, and shoot people trying to escape.

Then, the government would blame the children and other non-combatants’ deaths on the militia. The public then will watch documentaries made on the subject over dinner.

Pager bombs aimed at extremists are not an American concern. Even if there was a level of non-combatant causilities. If anything, it’s a fun news blip of the week and will be forgotten in less than a month.

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94 points

If iPhones had explosives planted in them straight out of the factory and would’ve went off in New York all at the same time, injuring thousands and endangering people around them, the 24/7 news cycle would’ve already called for total annihilation and what not.

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-20 points
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Removed by mod
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59 points
*

10 year old girl clearly was in a right wing terrorist group.

Wide range bombings like this are not a military tactic aimed at neutralizing a threat. This is literally what terrorists do to cause terror.

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-33 points

Distributing bombs to terrorists is about as exact as you can get. It’s not on Israel if a terrorist lets their kids play with their tools.

Israel could have leveled a block in Lebanon like they do in Gaza, but they didn’t.

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6 points

10 year old girl clearly was in a right wing terrorist group.

This is what Israelis actually believe

In an episode of Two Nice Jewish Boys, which aired three weeks ago, host Weinstein said: “If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow. I would press it in a second.”

He claimed that “most Israelis” would do the same.

Meningher added that they would also want to wipe out Palestinians in “the territories.”

“Because that’s the reality we live in, it’s us or them, and it has to be them,” Weinstein said.

He added that Israelis want “full-scale war.”

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6 points

Indeed. I’m paging Nasrallah right now that he should update his manifesto

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4 points

Oh, wait…

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7 points

Oh man, the bill to go to war with China would have been ratified in milliseconds.

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44 points

Israel continues doing bad things. Not much of a shock.

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2 points

this is considerably more targeted at the actual bad guys than their usual MO of bulldozing palastinian neighborhoods though so… an improvement?

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6 points

There’s no proof of that and I’m not trusting mossad lies.

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18 points

‘hey at least it’s not genocide, it’s just *lite’ terrorism

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39 points

Still needs to be called out each time it happens.

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8 points

Frustrating to do another long-form argument of “actually, when you distribute a bunch of explosives and set them off in crowded areas, you’re not fighting terrorism but doing terrorism”

For some reason people struggle to believe flinging hand grenades into a crowd is bad public policy when a US ally does it.

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