IDF: Whoops, tee hee.
Well they’re still blowing up kids with these things so idk if it’s the most brilliant targeting technique
Compared to dumping white phosphorus over hospitals and refugee camps, killing 2 (?) children during an attack that targeted hundreds/thousands is many orders of magnitude more precise. I hate dead innocents as much as anyone, but you gotta admit the pagers were effective and included way less collateral damage than the methods Isreal has employed in recent history.
The point of the post isn’t to praise the pagers attack. It’s to point out that Isreal is capable of causing less collateral damage in Gaza but chooses not to.
It’s to point out that Isreal is capable of causing less collateral damage in Gaza but chooses not to.
That comes down to how often Hamas orders things that can reasonably have small bombs put inside them on a large scale and that Hamas are expected to have on their person’s most of the time, how secure their supply lines are, how paranoid they are about looking for that kind of thing, that sort of thing. It involves a lot more moving parts and rare opportunities than just dropping some bombs.
but you gotta admit the pagers were effective and included way less collateral damage than the methods Isreal has employed in recent history.
Do you admit that mass gas chambers are an effective way to kill people ?
If my goal was to kill exclusively enemy combatants and leave all civilians alone, it would be pretty effective to round them up and gas them, yes. I’d rather do that than indiscriminate fire.
You do realise targets in Gaza and targets in Lebanon are not the same? On one hand you have fighters shielding themselves behind civilians and dont even know what a pager is and why they would use it, on the other hand you have political and operative leaders on these fighters that need these pagers to stay low profile and untaped…
On one hand you have fighters shielding themselves behind civilians
You’re right, this is disgusting…
And this is too. Do these people have no morals? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/6/23/human-shielding-in-action-israeli-forces-strap-palestinian-man-to-jeep
That’s not really true unless you believe IDF propaganda
Security
Israel does justify the settlements and military bases in the West Bank in the name of Security. However, the reality of the settlements on-the-ground has been the cause of violent resistance and a significant obstacle to peace, as it has been for decades.
This type of settlement, where the native population gets ‘Transferred’ to make room for the settlers, is a long standing practice. See: The Concept of Transfer 1882-1948, the Transfer Committee, and the JNF which led to Forced Displacement of 100,000 Palestinians throughout the mandate, before the mass ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948: Plan Dalet, Declassified Massacres of 1948, and Details of Plan C (May 1946) and Plan D (March 1948) . Further, declassified Israeli documents show that the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip were deliberately planned before being executed in 1967: Haaretz, Forward; while the peace process was exploited to continue de-facto annexation of the West Bank via Settlements (Oslo Accord Sources: MEE, NYT, Haaretz, AJ). The settlements are maintained through a violent apartheid that routinely employs violence towards Palestinians and denies human rights like water access, civil rights, etc. This kind of control gives rise to violent resistance to the Apartheid occupation, jeopardizing the safety of Israeli civilians.
The settlements represent land-grabbing, and land-grabbing and peace-making don’t go together, it is one or the other. By its actions, if not always in its rhetoric, Israel has opted for land-grabbing and as we speak Israel is expanding settlements. So, Israel has been systematically destroying the basis for a viable Palestinian state and this is the declared objective of the Likud and Netanyahu who used to pretend to accept a two-state solution. In the lead up to the last election, he said there will be no Palestinian state on his watch. The expansion of settlements and the wall mean that there cannot be a viable Palestinian state with territorial contiguity. The most that the Palestinians can hope for is Bantustans, a series of enclaves surrounded by Israeli settlements and Israeli military bases.
- Avi Shlaim
How Avi Shlaim moved from two-state solution to one-state solution
‘One state is a game changer’: A conversation with Ilan Pappe
State violence – official and otherwise – is part and parcel of Israel’s apartheid regime, which aims to create a Jewish-only space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The regime treats land as a resource designed to serve the Jewish public, and accordingly uses it almost exclusively to develop and expand existing Jewish residential communities and to build new ones. At the same time, the regime fragments Palestinian space, dispossesses Palestinians of their land and relegates them to living in small, over-populated enclaves.
The apartheid regime is based on organized, systemic violence against Palestinians, which is carried out by numerous agents: the government, the military, the Civil Administration, the Supreme Court, the Israel Police, the Israel Security Agency, the Israel Prison Service, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, and others. Settlers are another item on this list, and the state incorporates their violence into its own official acts of violence. Settler violence sometimes precedes instances of official violence by Israeli authorities, and at other times is incorporated into them. Like state violence, settler violence is organized, institutionalized, well-equipped and implemented in order to achieve a defined strategic goal.
Civilian Deaths and Human Shields:
Israel does deliberately targets civilian areas. From in general with the Dahiya Doctrine to multiple systems deployed in Gaza to do so: ‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza, Lavender, and Where’s Daddy. When it comes to Israeli Soldiers and Civilians, there is also the use of the Hannibal Directive, which was also used on Oct 7th.
Hundreds of Genocide Scholars have described this ethnic cleansing campaign as genocide because of the deliberate targeting of children/civilians and expressed intent by Israeli officials: “A Textbook Case of Genocide”: Israeli Holocaust Scholar Raz Segal Decries Israel’s Assault on Gaza, 800+ Legal Scholars Say Israel May Be Perpetrating ‘Crime of Genocide’ in Gaza , Law for Palestine Releases Database with 500+ Instances of Israeli Incitement to Genocide – Continuously Updated.
On the subject of Human Shields, there are some independent reports for past conflicts of Hamas jeopardizing the safety of civilians via Rocket fire in dense urban areas, two instances during Oct 7th, but no independent verification since then so far. None of which absolve Israel of the crime of targeting civilians under international law:
Intentionally utilizing the presence of civilians or other protected persons to render certain areas immune from military attack is prohibited under international law. Amnesty International was not able to establish whether or not the fighters’ presence in the camps was intended to shield themselves from military attacks. However, under international humanitarian law, even if one party uses “human shields”, or is otherwise unlawfully endangering civilians, this does not absolve the opposing party from complying with its obligations to distinguish between military objectives and civilians or civilian objects, to refrain from carrying out indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks, and to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and civilian objects.
Additionally, there is extensive independent verification of Israel using Palestinians as Human Shields: IDF uses Human Shields, including Children (2013 Report), and in the latest war Israel “Systematically” Uses Gaza Children as Human Shields, Rights Group Finds
It’s an Obama type technique. Sure, you might blow up a few innocents, but the rate of eliminated enemies vs killed innocents is better than in traditional warfare, so a numbers guy would always go for that one.
Leaked official documents show that that wasn’t really the case as the public was led to believe
Quotes
The White House and Pentagon boast that the targeted killing program is precise and that civilian deaths are minimal. However, documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalia, where the U.S. has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse.
The documents show that the military designated people it killed in targeted strikes as EKIA — “enemy killed in action” — even if they were not the intended targets of the strike. Unless evidence posthumously emerged to prove the males killed were not terrorists or “unlawful enemy combatants,” EKIA remained their designation, according to the source. That process, he said, “is insane. But we’ve made ourselves comfortable with that. The intelligence community, JSOC, the CIA, and everybody that helps support and prop up these programs, they’re comfortable with that idea.”
The source described official U.S. government statements minimizing the number of civilian casualties inflicted by drone strikes as “exaggerating at best, if not outright lies.”
i think they killed like, 12 people, and injured somewhere between 1-2 thousand more, probably some civilians in there, but these are military pagers to my knowledge so it’d be weird for it to hurt a bunch of random people, but it’s possible.
if you include the radio attack i think it’s like another 40 dead, and like 500 injured? Don’t quote me on it.
Hezbollah was using commercial grade pagers because they’re a militia. The purpose of pagers are to contact them when their off duty. Many of these pagers blew up in homes, grocery stores, and other public places. Many civilians were killed and most people injured were bystanders.
from what i can recall, and from the stats i’ve seen, these “explosions” seem more like “really bad pocket fires” more than anything to me, i could see it injuring people. Maybe two or three standing immediately nearby other people.
But considering this attack has only like 12 confirmed dead civilians or something, “many” seems a little excessive. I could see a few hundred getting injured though. Possibly a few cars/homes burning down. That might cause a few more.
ok so, did a bit of a check here, 12 civilians died. That’s where that number came from. 40 people died total, i think. At least that’s what wikipedia tells me. I don’t think it ever mentions how many civilians were injured directly, but assuming it follows the deaths, it’s somewhere between probably 500 and 1000 i would guess.
This says 37 dead, of whom Hezbollah have stated 31 were their fighters.
Hezbollah is a political party with 18 parliamentary seats and thousands of public service workers on their payroll.
Saying these were “fighters” is akin to bombing an UNRWA center and claiming you killed 31 Hamas Terrorists.
That’s a pretty clean ratio actually, considering the nature of Hesbollah.
these are military pagers
They were a shipment for general consumption that went to a dealer near the Iranian embassy.
The target was the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, and virtually everyone else was just collateral damage.
They were a shipment for general consumption that went to a dealer near the Iranian embassy.
yeah, that’s generally how products work. Even in the US military the government just walks up to a company and goes "can you make this? And if they say yes they pay them money, or times of war just go “hey i need you to make this”
the only difference here is that it’s not quite a formally established military, so it’s using off the shelf components and products, which is pretty common for these smaller groups.
although depending on the dealer, that dealer may have been the source of intrusion, so there’s that.
The target was the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, and virtually everyone else was just collateral damage.
targeting one specific guy through the most broad means possible seems, weird. I doubt this was a highly specific attack. It would be a very, very odd way to do it, but then again this conflict has been nothing but odd, so i can’t really put it past them lol.
Regardless, i doubt they solely intended to target that one guy. While everyone else is technically collateral, it’s probably considered to be beneficial to the cause. At least by israel.
No, it’s not. This was a very tactical way of striking an enemy that hides behind women and children.
This was a very tactical
Flinging a hand grenade into a crowd several thousand times over
But it’s okay because the crowd was full of Arabs aka Terrorists
There’s a big difference between dropping bombs and small pagers exploding. I watched a lot of those videos, and almost no one except the targets were injured.
It’s really sad that anyone else got injured at all, but damn, I’m glad they were able to be so destructive without injuring the thousands upon thousands that have been dying up until now. Or are you just upset that you can’t claim genocide for this attack?
Can you confidently say you know the exact chain of custody of your cell phone?
Some killer gets a pager he doesn’t need, sells it to someone to make some cash, who gives it to their kid. Annnnd boom.
No. Can you? How does OP know this about 1000 civilians? Don’t get me wrong. Fuck the Israeli government and it’s indiscriminate murder, but also fuck the lies. Speak truth.
It took them years to prepare that operation. It was against Hezbollah, not Hamas, because they saw them as the bigger threat.
The war in Gazah is barbaric, but the sensible immediate alternative would have been a very targeted operation to find and rescue the hostages, not something like this.
The idf keep killing their hostages in what seem like very purposeful attempts to do so.
Maybe they should have chose to make something other than an omelette then…
And it required Hezbollah to have no concept of logistic security. Maybe Hamas is not as amateurish as Hezbollah in that regard.
Historically Hamas has been the amateurs and Hezbollah the pros. Hezbollah has actual victories against the IDF. Hamas’ military success last October was completely unprecedented. Its generally believed that Hezbollah trained Hamas into the fighting force it is now. And since Iran trained Hezbollah you get people claiming Hamas is an Iranian puppet.
There is no accident.
