“Press with both hands”

…just when you thought this timeline couldn’t get much weirder.

    • DdCno1@beehaw.org
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      5 days ago

      What exactly makes an attack on devices that were exclusively used by members of Hezbollah a war crime?

      • Steve@startrek.website
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        5 days ago

        Incorrect premise. A pager is an ordinary consumer electronic device that can and did find its way into innocent hands.

        • DdCno1@beehaw.org
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          5 days ago

          Not this one. Israel created a shell company that sold these particular pagers only to Hezbollah (reportedly at a profit). Neither did Hezbollah buy these in random shops nor were they ever distributed to random shops. The network they used was also exclusively created by and for Hezbollah, not any civilians, so even if civilians had wanted to use these devices, they would not have been able to. Hezbollah bought them in bulk and distributed them to their members, believing they would be a safe way to communicate without tracking, since most pagers are one-way devices.

          • Megaman_EXE@beehaw.org
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            5 days ago

            I mean, I wasn’t there, but I read that it did hurt some people who weren’t directly associated with the group. Some children and a medic, apparently?

            • DdCno1@beehaw.org
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              5 days ago

              Honestly, this is the most insulting accusation you could make. Is my writing style really this awful?

              I’m not. This user name is decades old. I think I first started using it around 2003-2005. If you’re willing to dig, you can find things written under it aeons ago.

        • DdCno1@beehaw.org
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          5 days ago

          They were not indiscriminate. Words have meanings. Only pagers owned by Hezbollah fighters had explosives in them. Compared to any other military action of this scale in history, the number of civilian casualties, while still tragic at an individual level, was unfathomably small.

            • DdCno1@beehaw.org
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              5 days ago

              Since we are not living in a perfect world, there are no perfect solutions for anything. I don’t envy people how have to make decisions like this one. It was the least terrible option, which is the best thing anyone can realistically hope for.

              If you’re seriously expecting even a country as advanced as Israel to be able to pull of something like this without ever endangering a single civilian, then you’re either hopelessly naive - or you don’t want Israel to defend itself at all. I can excuse the former, but not the latter. Hezbollah attacked without provocation and they attacked first. It is impossible to justify this and Israel had every right to fight back against a threat this severe.

              • _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                5 days ago

                Hezbollah had provocation, namely 75 years of oppression by the Israelis. They also did not attack first. This wasn’t Israel defending themselves, this was them once again attacking someone who stood up to them without a care about collateral deaths, which is their normal. You call them terrorists, but what I see in Hezbollah and Hamas are the lone defenders of a people the West is trying their absolute best to quietly genocide.

                I don’t really care if you can “excuse” me for saying so. I don’t really care what a genocide-promoting Zionist thinks, because quite frankly, the ideology is no different in its methods than Nazism, and I also don’t give a shit what Nazis think either. Israel picked this fight, and they deserve whatever comes their way.

                • DdCno1@beehaw.org
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                  5 days ago

                  You’re openly defending terrorists who are the furthest from freedom fighters imaginable. I have seen what these terrorists to do children. Hell, I’ve seen them shoot a family dog who was happily greeting them, before they murdered the family it belonged to. Have you?

                  • _cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                    5 days ago

                    I watched the videos of the things Israeli soldiers are doing to civilians in Palestine, so yes. I’ve seen what terrorists do to innocents. As an American, the absolute best thing that could happen for the world is my government be toppled, and the hegemony and cycle of terrorism we’re perpetuating in the Middle East stopped once and for all.

          • Kwakigra@beehaw.org
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            5 days ago

            Indiscriminate is the correct word. They were detonated all at the same time regardless of where their targets location at the time. Civilians were killed, including children.

            • DdCno1@beehaw.org
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              5 days ago

              I’ve seen surveillance camera footage of the explosions. They were so small and targeted that tomatoes on fruit stands mere centimeters next to the targets remained unspoiled. The shaped charges produced highly directed blasts designed to only injure a single person - and in the vast majority of cases, that’s exactly what happened. Hezbollah could only claim that two children were killed, both children of Hezbollah members. That’s tragic, since they are not responsible for the sins of their parents, but out of over 3500 explosions, that is an unbelievably small number of innocents. Footage of hospitals and the carnage in the streets meanwhile only - and I mean only - showed men of fighting age and slightly older men (like the Iranian ambassador) among those wounded by the explosions. Seriously, I was extremely curious of who was affected by the blasts and I could not find any photos or videos that showed victims of other demographics. It was rooms and corridors filled with fit young men.

              The one thing that affected innocents the most was that these wounded terrorists overwhelmed the Lebanese healthcare system for a short while and that thus civilians were often denied care in the aftermath of the attack. Another minor thing was panic about civilians about electronic devices in general, with people fearing that any device could be remotely detonated, but this was of course unfounded, since only pagers (and, a day later, walkie-talkies) prepared with explosives exploded.

              This attack crippled Hezbollah, vastly reducing the threat they are posing to the entire region, not just Israel. Without the pager attack, Syria would not have been liberated from the butcher Assad, since the terror group was vital in keeping armed opposition down and preserving Iran’s foothold in the country. That’s a good thing.