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Hezbollah pagers aren't randomly lying around though, they're normally attached to Hezbollah members. These were also much smaller than any anti personnel mine.

This was far more targeted than, say, any artillery strike that a commander could possibly order. Targeted doesn't mean it's impossible to harm something else. That's possible with any weapon, and far more likely with larger munitions like artillery shells.





Hezbollah members include medical personnel, teachers, politicians and so on. It is a much larger group of organisations than the armed factions.

I'm not sure what you're after. What the israelis did would have been a worse crime if it actually was targeted. Is that your point?


It's not clear that Israel just set off all Hezbollah issued beepers; we don't know what methodology they used. We can guess based on reported casualties, but we don't know which casualties were involved with Hezbollah's military operations.

> What the israelis did would have been a worse crime if it actually was targeted.

It was certainly targeted, it just also had collateral damage, i.e. harm to non-targets.

What you have Israel do instead? Suppose they struck Hezbollah fighters with conventional artillery. They're not sitting around in open fields, so there still would have been collateral damage.

Would you again maintain that the strikes were "untargeted" because there was collateral damage? By this unusual definition, it seems impossible to do a "targeted" strike at least in any urban environment.


Israel should obviously have ended the occupations, payed reparations and prepared for the return of refugees.

The IDF doesn't give a shit about "collateral damage". They mainly attack civilian targets. That's the purpose of the organisation, to make life for indigenous populations in the vicinity of the state of Israel impossible. Destroy their agriculture and water sources, murder their children, displace them, destroy their homes, occupy the land, pretend to be a victim if someone fights back. Then sign some contracts every now and then and don't abide by them while claiming that the other party is the one who doesn't.

This has been ongoing for about a century, it was how the Haganah, Irgun, Stern gang operated. This is why the IDF has such a bad army, they aren't trained for combat and hardly ever have to experience it. Instead they're used for genocidal atrocities against unarmed civilians.


Ended the occupations meaning what, never enter Lebanon? What do you think Israel should have done about Hezbollah’s terrorism, just tolerate it and never let Israelis return to their homes in the north?

Apart from that it seems like you’re just switching topics to a variety of other accusations. We were talking about a particular operation which you claimed was “untargeted”, yet you haven’t suggested any better alternative (besides being nicer to terrorists in hopes that they stop?). In reality the operation had far less collateral damage than what’s possible with any conventional alternative.


Using force to halt or slow a genocide is not terrorism. And yes, Israel ought to retreat from lebanese as well as syrian and palestinian territory, stop it's cross-border attacks, allow displaced people to return to their homes and pay reparations.

The alternative is exactly that, to stop doing apartheid and occupation and allow justice to prevail.


There’s no question that Hezbollah’s bombardment was terrorism. It would be absurd to claim that they were targeting military assets when they routinely use unguided rockets which aren’t capable of doing so. Israel had every right to enter Lebanon in response.

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Suppose we believe all captions in your links, so for example we'll assume that guy in shorts and flip flops was some sort of “spy balloon manager.”

It wouldn’t matter, because once you perform terrorist attacks, you’re still a terrorist even if you also attack valid targets sometimes. Same as Hamas, which is still a terrorist org despite attacking some IDF bases.

Even Amnesty has acknowledged Hezbollah’s routine use of unguided rockets, which can’t possibly target military assets but are just lobbed in the general direction of population centers. That makes them terrorists, regardless of what else they do.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/israel-hezbol...


Resistance to occupation and attack isn't "terrorism", that word has no meaning anymore.

Could you quote from that article where Amnesty makes a statement calling actions by armed factions of Hezbollah terrorism?

I didn't say that Amnesty used the term. If bombardment of population centers, with no targeting of military assets, isn't terrorism than what is?

Yeah, why don't they do that? And why do you?

My suspicion is that you expect it to short circuit the conversation, and that no one is willing to side with terrorism or affiliate themselves with it in any way, which would give you a degree of power over the conversation.

It's a weasely word, and has about zero relevance in criminal law regarding warfare, it being a political designation mainly used by states that meet resistance to colonisation and the like.

Yeah, sure, Hezbollah has committed war crimes. So what? They look like a pathetic little rounding error beside the usian and israeli war crimes over the past decades, or even just the last year or so. Like Hamas I'm sure Hezbollah would gladly send people to the Hague for prosecution if Israel did too.

So tell us, why is this designation so important to you? Is it because you lack arguments? Is it because you're lazy and just want to waste other people's time?


While there isn't one standard definition of terrorism, Hezbollah's untargeted bombardment of Israeli towns qualifies under pretty much any definition.

You seemed happy to use the term against Israel [1], claiming an operation which specifically targeted Hezbollah operatives was somehow terrorism. Why do you suddenly have a blanket objection to a term that you were just using yourself?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46243118


You're repeating yourself.

Under what definition would the targeting of villages where the IDF is operating qualify? Why are you back to lying about the pager attacks being "targeted", even though they clearly were not, and even if they were, that would make the israeli crime a lot worse?

I used it as a rhetorical device, and as is obvious above and elsewhere, it's not something I'm monotonically trying to rub in as part of an astroturfing campaign.




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