They did targeted strikes on military facilities. See for yourself:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46226028

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We’re talking about Israel, not Syria.

Well, sucks to be you then, since many legal experts do see how this rule applies to this case: https://opiniojuris.org/2024/10/15/is-it-cake-on-boobytrappe... https://www.ejiltalk.org/were-the-israeli-pager-and-walkie-t... https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/09/exploding-pa...

This was about as targeted as anti-personnel landmines, but spread out in civilian areas and detonated without any knowledge of their surroundings at the time.

Because mines are untargeted and designed to maim without discrimination as to who they might hurt there is a long running effort to prohibit their use.

Firing a projectile at an individual combatant?

The collateral damage was obvious and predictable. If you know about the potential collateral damage and do it anyway, then it's not targeted, even if you say it's targeted.

For example: say I want to kill someone. I know they live in NYC. So I target them by dropping a nuke on NYC.

Is this a targeted attack? Obviously not. But I said it was targeted! Doesn't work that way.

If you want to target people, you try your best to kill just them. If you're planting bombs in mundane places and setting them off in public, you are not doing that.

I don't know why we feel the need to defend military operatives by essentially claiming they're the stupidest people on Earth and cannot put 2 and 2 together. No no, they can. Meaning, this was intentional.

> and in my opinion that doesn't need justification.

It doesn't, but why does that justify their aggression towards noncombatants? Does it justify the killing of women and children, who then will go on to be culturally reinforced to hate Israel (for obvious reasons)?

Does it justify having a massive nuclear arsenal?

What would the implication of this nitpick be, in your opinion?

Wasn't a consequence of this conclusion that the court ordered Israel to change its behaviour because it has an obligation to prevent genocide?

How did you come up with that tally? Israel has refused to comply with requests from international investigators into the matter, likely because a lot of the casualties were due to IDF actions.

I remember the footage of "that young German woman" but it is to me extremely peripheral and did a lot less of an impression than the thousands of images of destroyed baby bodies I've seen that were caused by the IDF. The criminal actions perpetrated by palestinians on October 7th 2023 were pathetic compared to what the israelis have done for decades.

[dead]

In WWII Germany was the genocidal aggressor, in this case Israel and its backers are the genocidal aggressors.

Punishing a state for genocidal aggression is quite a bit more reasonable than the might is right-ideology you subscribe to.

The palestinians have a right to statehood and self-determination, it's not something they need to be "offered". They also have a right to return to their homelands, and they have a right to oppose occupation, violently if they so choose.

And East Jerusalem and the Gaza strip. I'd also argue that the occupations of Lebanon and Syria are illegal, and that taking control over the Philadelphi corridor was an act of war against Egypt.

If you think such crimes of occupation and aggression are "very much needed", then I'll have to consider you morally impaired beyond the ability to take part in a reasoned discussion.

No, they did not. They also mainly used munitions that fly low and escape the israeli air defenses, which is why most of their targets were close to the border.

Hezbollah is a movement that is many things, among them one of the dominant parties in lebanese parliamentary politics. The name means 'Party of God', which is a hint. They also run hospitals, schools and other social services, as well as financial organisations. Due to the background as a militant mobilisation against israeli aggression they also have several armed factions, which is a very reasonable response to their southern neighbour.

Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders stated that they initiated militant action against Israel to support the palestinians and clearly expected it to shorten the genocidal campaign in the Gaza strip. As we now know, this strategy failed and Hezbollah misjudged the bloodthirst of israeli society as well as the degree of backing it would have from the US and european states. They should not have wasted time on a restrained attrition style campaign and instead acted more forcefully if they wanted to slow or halt the extermination of the palestinians.

As for Nasrallah, he is surely missed by many but he also spent his life expecting and preparing for martyrdom.

Yes. They formed as a militia to protect Lebanon against israeli invasion, because the relevant colonial powers did not allow the lebanese state to build enough of an army to protect its borders.

No it wouldn't, as long as the target is military and you didn't have opportunity to killed him in base it is fine. At most you could complain it is violates proportionality however no car bomb would kill 100 people. Not to mention your analogy is flawed - hezobllah doesn't have any marked bases.

I think it is a valid military strike if a Venezuelan soldier does it on an order. Military targets where a strike are in danger of killing civilians are a hard judgment call. Generally one should never risk targeting civilians. Military law is a complex subject and officers spend quite a lot of time being educated in it. Here is a Swedish defence college course on it. https://www.fhs.se/en/swedish-defence-university/courses/int...

> Suppose a venezuelan living in America just looks up a bunch of US generals addresses online, and then sets all their houses on fire killing them in their sleep in their McMansions in suburbia.

I don't think the analogy is apt. Members of Hezbollah do not occupy a positions of similar relationship to Lebanon as US generals does to the US. As far as I've heard, flag officers and others are escorted by personal security for an attack of any sort, such as the 2009 Ft Hood shooting. [0]

Moving past that, a civilian citizen of Venezuela in the US who performed actions against US military targets would not be a valid military strike since that person would not be an identifiable member or Venezuela's military. It would more akin to a spy or assassin. Below is an excerpt from an article representing a US-centric view of history [1].

  But the right to kill one’s enemy during war was not considered wholly 
  unregulated. During the 16th century, Balthazar Ayala agreed with Saint 
  Augustine’s contention that it “is indifferent from the standpoint of justice 
  whether trickery be used” in killing the enemy, but then distinguished 
  trickery from “fraud and snares” (The Law and Duties of War and Military 
  Discipline). Similarly, Alberico Gentili, writing in the next century, found 
  treachery “so contrary to the law of God and of Nature, that although I may 
  kill a man, I may not do so by treachery.” He warned that treacherous killing 
  would invite reprisal (Three Books on the Law of War). And Hugo Grotius 
  likewise explained that “a distinction must be made between assassins who 
  violate an express or tacit obligation of good faith, as subjects resorting 
  to violence against a king, vassals against a lord, soldiers against him whom 
  they serve, those also who have been received as suppliants or strangers or 
  deserters, against those who have received them; and such as are held by no 
  bond of good faith” (On the Law of War and Peace).
  

1. https://lieber.westpoint.edu/assassination-law-of-war/

Edit: /Hamas/Hezbollah/

I'm pretty sure even that is allowed, yes.

Obviously he must wear a uniform while actually conducting the attack though.

Are you implying military personnel aren't a legitimate target in a war?

I'd understand if you were arguing against using excessive force, eg using thermobaric weapons in residential neighborhoods against an individual target, but there hardly exists a more targeted method than the pager attack / arson of specific houses.

That would be fine, it's war, and Venzeula would have to deal with the consequences also

That's a valid military strike, period.

>The Geneva Convention ought to have something to say about how a general may and may not be attacked.

Except nobody in power actually gives a damn about the Geneva convention or the "laws of war" being thrown around in this topic.

Those laws were made up so that victorious powers can bully smaller countries when they lose a war, but superpower nations themselves don't have to abide by them because there's nobody more powerful than them to hold them accountable when they break those rules. Because laws aren't real, it's only the enforcement that is real.

Like the US also doesn't care about the Geneva Convention with all its warmongering and crimes against humanity in the middle east, and the torturing in Guantanamo Bay, and the likes of George Bush and Tony Blair will never see a day at the ICJ. Hell, not even US marines accused of using civilians for target practices in Afghanistan got to see a day at the Hague because the US said they'd invade the Hague if that happened. Russia also doesn't care about the Geneva convention and Putin won't see a day at the Hague. Israel doesn't give a crap about the geneva convention when bombing Palestinian hospitals, and Netanyahu won't see a day at the Hague. And if China invaded Taiwan, they won't care about the Geneva convention and Xi Jinping will never see the Hague. Trump can invade Venezuela tomorrow, and same, nothing will happen to him or the US.

THAT IS THE REALITY, that is how the world really works, dominance by the strong, subservience of the weak, everything else about laws, fairness, morality, etc only works in Tolkien tales and internet arguments, not in major international conflicts.

Edit: to the downvoters, could you also explain what part of what I said was wrong?

While I'm only adding to the choir of people telling you "of course," since I'm directly the person you're responding to it still feels worth saying: yes, of course, if America and Venezuela went to war, it's completely legal for Venezuela to attempt to kill the U.S. President.

As an American, I certainly hope they would fail. But do I think it's legal? Yes: it's a targeted strike on the leader of an enemy country they'd theoretically be at war with. Do I think it's wise? Well — no, Venezuela has a much smaller military, and assassinating the U.S. President would trigger a massive war that would devastate Venezuela for decades while modestly inconveniencing American taxpayers. But legal? Yes.

They could do that now and it might be legal under international laws of war.

We've massed forces for an attack, attacked their ships, violated their airspace with combat aircraft (that's today), and extensively and publicly threatened them. They'd be in their legal rights to strike preemptively, including possibly a decapitation strike (this is why the Dubya administration kept repeating the term "preemptive strike", even though it was obviously nowhere near applying in the case of Iraq—it was a way of asserting its legal basis)

[edit] As thereisnospork points out in a sibling comment, however, this doesn't mean it'd be a good idea.

If US and Venezuela are in a state of war, then the head of the US Armed Forces is a legitimate target.

Not sure why you have doubts about this.

The US and Israel do the equivalent of that and have been for years. An assassination is an assassination. The weapon makes little difference.

I mean of course they could, and should[0] how is that a question?

[0] Shouldn't - classic example of a tactical win being a strategic blunder. Killing the American president and would solidify American public support for the war - which would probably be undesirable in the balance.

Right, if in fact 1500 Hezbollah fighters were injured, any claim that over 1500 noncombatants were injured is suspicious. We have video footage of the explosions (along with a directional sense of the wounded vs. KIA count of the strike). It is not plausible that more noncombatants were injured than combatants, given the pagers were strictly military comms devices.

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-pager...

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.

> did, in effect, target civilians.

That's ridiculous

> If you attack a military target that is surrounded by civilians, and that attack injures or kills those civilians, then those civilians were also targeted.

They are not targeted.

You could say that depending on number of innocent casualties or the likely number the attacked could be reckless and/or disproportionate in attacking in a way that was likely to cause such injuries. In certain cases you could claim they broke the laws of war although the laws of war are practical (they're not meant to prevent all deaths of civilians, the countries who agreed to them didn't intentionally make it impossible to fight including in defense).

And even if something is not a war crime you could still claim it might be immoral but that is a more complex argument.

Sure you do. Just like MAGA voters who are suffering from the decisions from their vote "didn't vote for this". Except you explicitly did. Zionism necessarily removes land and homes from people to carve out a "safe space" for Jews without any consideration for the generations you're fucking over. Just like you conveniently ignore the decades of "settlers" taking over other people's land. Just like you ignore the destruction of Palestinian wells and hospitals. Just like you ignore the rape of prisoners and the celebration among Zionists for it. It's a nasty belief system that puts Jews above other humans. It is explicitly bigoted and xenophobic and it is proudly announced and broadcast throughout Israeli society.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-war-idf-palestinia...

> A member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party, speaking Monday at a meeting of lawmakers, justified the rape and abuse of Palestinian prisoners, shouting angrily at colleagues questioning the alleged behavior that anything was legitimate to do to "terrorists" in custody.

> Lawmaker Hanoch Milwidsky was asked as he defended the alleged abuse whether it was legitimate, "to insert a stick into a person's rectum?"

> "Yes!" he shouted in reply to his fellow parliamentarian. "If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!"

That is what you are defending. It's fucking disgusting.

The pagers had strictly military use.

Of course, by Mamdani's logic here we're fully justified in mobilizing force on the scale of the Allied war in Europe during WW2 against any and every nation-state for the crime of being a nation-state. Go ahead and bomb Dresden again out of nowhere, because the nation-state is genocide!

And all I have to do to operationalize this logic is to accept the premise that the idea of a nation-state is synonymous with genocide.

> Words mean things. "Perfectly lawful" means just that? And so, I was curious.

He did prefix it with "I think", highlighting that "this is my opinion / my interpretation", not that he is issuing a ruling as a judge in an international court.

The figure of merit in a military strike is casualties, not KIA; it's the "wounded" part you actually care about (in fact, in some tactical situations, wounding is preferable to killing, as it ties up adversary logistical resources).

Since the pagers that were targeted were exclusively used by Hezbollah (which fought an actual civil war with the Lebanese security forces specifically in order to establish its own telecom network), I would be extraordinarily wary of any source that has claimed more injuries to noncombatants than to combatants.

You can still tell a story where the pager attack was unacceptable owing to civilian casualties: there could be so many civilian casualties that any number of combatant casualties wouldn't justify it. But if you're claiming that there were more casualties to noncombatants over small explosions from devices carried principally in the pockets of combatants, it is rational to draw the conclusion that your reasoning (and sourcing) is motivated.

Fair enough, 12 total only includes the original pager attack, not the subsequent radio one. However, you seem to have made the same mistake. 42 people were killed total, but that does not mean that there were 42 targets.

In any case, if Hezbollah themselves admit that 1500 of their fighters were injured by the attack (according to your own source), it seems extremely dishonest to claim that all 4000 were civilians or that there were only 42 targets.

Thank you for that correction.

Seems some say even the named may be fabricated:

>> Sources within the Israeli intelligence community cited in the report raised concerns about how deaths were categorized, with one source claiming people were sometimes "promoted to the rank of terrorist after their death" in the database. <<

The IDF did not dispute this, so unclear why you are.

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Doctors don't use pagers anymore, just like tech on calls used to and don't anymore. Mobile phones are far superior for that, and are very available anywhere in the world, and especially to doctors

Regarding whether that's brilliant, that is not my wording, but generally it was quite mild compared to the methods of Hezbollah and was highly successful in ending a war with very little bloodshed. The other alternative was tried in 2006 and in Gaza, and fighting a terror organization entrenched in an urban setting means bombings and killing civilians in the process. This was not the end result as Hezbollah fell apart relatively quickly afterwards, so I think it was good compared to any alternative for Lebanese and Israelis

They didn't put bombs in pagers that were freely sold. They put them into shipments for Hizbollah specifically.

> Unless you’re a Lebanese doctor?

Where would a Lebanese doctor get an encrypted pager bought by Hezbollah and given to Hezbollah members with the explicit use for communicating with other Hezbollah members?

The idea that only criminals or terorists have pagers is ridiculous(you mentined doctors). But Israel didnt target pagers in Lebanon. They sold equipment for Hezbollah internal use om their own network (they convinced Hezbollah to pay a front company for the walkies).

That is the opposite of indicrimante.

as for

> white Judeo-Christian variety

Judeo Christian is a silly concept. Either say christian or say Abrahamic. While most casulties were affiliated with Hezbollah and therefore overwhelmingly Shia Muslim enough of the general public of Lebanon is Christian that they would make at least some of civilian bystanders injured. Also Lebanese people aren't any whiter in average skin color then the average Israeli

>> The Israeli military did not dispute the existence of the database or dispute the data on Hamas and PIJ deaths when approached for comment... <<

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/aug/21...

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I don't agree, but we don't have to agree on this point to recognize the illegitimacy and coerciveness of Hezbollah and the IRGC. Even factoring Israel's most recent strikes in, the largest military losses Hezbollah has incurred in the last 10 years weren't with Israel, but rather in Syria, on behalf of the Assad regime, a client of the IRGC's, where Hezbollah (and the Lebanese security forces Hezbollah dragooned into the conflict) gleefully targeted civilian populations.

That would apply to Americans and Israelis too.

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All I can tell you is that users downvoted it. As to why - your guess is as good as mine, though there are sometimes clues in the replies.

so you agree that nobody in IDF was found guilty of war crimes ?

been accused it's not same as been found guilty. at least last time I checked.

The topic at hand is a military operation in Lebanon, not Gaza.

[flagged]

There you go.

There is no state organised war crimes going on, just normal war. If you can't understand the distinction that's your problem not mine. In my opinion Israels actions in Gaza fall well within the actions of a legitimate war, to the extent warfare can be legitimised. I'm not commenting on individual cases, and anyway those are not relevant to my argument.

The United Nations is only providing Sudan refugees around 400 calories per day. When Israel was claimed to be doing war crimes and starving Gaza it was providing over 1000. Should the ICC go after the UN program for Sudan refugees?

Re: timing - They were triggered to explode en masse, which implies that there was zero consideration to minimizing civilian harm.

Re: location - They exploded everywhere you can think of, while these targets were doing civilian activities near other civilians, and not in a combat setting.

Re: possession - Given the above, and Israel’s horrendous kill ratio, there was definitely no consideration for possession of these pagers at the time of the attack. For example, who is to say that some pagers weren’t in use by members of the political bureau, or unofficially resold to a hospital for use by oncall doctors?

Ok, so I see you're taking a denialist approach. At best you will have to settle on "well they sure did send them to a bunch of British politicians, and ya know, they did carry out the King David Hotel bombing that killed 91 people via terrorism, and they did plan on terrorist bombing a bunch of Westerners and Arabs to blame it on communists and Muslim Brotherhood (the Lavon Affair) before getting caught, but they definitely didn't send them to Truman we pinky promise".

This isn't even the most outrageous thing Lehi and Irgun did (trying to partner with Hitler against the British might take that) before the Israeli government disbanded them and merged most of them into the IDF when they no longer needed to terrorize the West.

you are avoiding the actual topic in question and try to divert discussion into different direction.

flags are been abused and you don't do anything about it, short of "show me wrongly flagged comment and i'll unflag it if i think it was flagged wrong"

can you openly admit that flags are been abused and misused to silence opinions that people disagree with ?

if you can't agree with such a trivial statement, I don't think there is anything to discuss here.

ps. obviously after i made 3 comments i am throttled and cant post this comment

That last sentence is arguably on the wrong side of the line, but ok, I've unflagged it.

They need to use it more then.

@dang Here is another comment of mine on this thread that is substantive, responding directly to the issue, and not a personal attack, but was still flagged. I'm an HN user for 15 years, have reviewed the rules, and don't think this violates any (except that I used the word "balls"?). I agree with the other commenters that flagging is being abused here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46223274

The point isn't so much to litigate each flagged comment, just to highlight how pervasive the flag abuse problem is. And of course, when the flag abusers 'defect' and gain some utility, it is only rational for the 'victims' to themselves defect from the civil conversation and start to abuse flags.

In threads that are, unfortunately, adversarial, abusing the flag button is a stable Nash equilibrium. I think it's a shitty equilibrium, though, and makes real, substantive conversations--ostensibly the goal on this forum--harder to achieve.

I think it's high time to reconsider the current 'flag' mechanics. At the very least I think we would all be better off if flags were simply disabled on highly controversial topics.

> I advocate concerning yourself with the things you can control, which do not include this forum’s idiosyncratic moderation style.

I can control my comments, which are a part of this forum's moderation style, and I can advocate in those comments for people to act in good faith, and appeal for help in figuring out how to make it more common.

If we can't discuss important topics in good faith on a nerd website, what hope do we have of discussing them elsewhere? It's not hyperbole anymore to say that if we don't come to some consensus we are going to end up in authoritarianism or war.

You haven't responded to any claim I've made other than to advance a claim that Hezbollah, which fired tens of thousands of mostly unguided rockets into Israel, did not in fact kill 12 Druze children in the Golan Heights.

Our premises may be too far apart to usefully discuss this. The core of my argument (the comparative military and civilian body counts in Syria and Yemen) aren't going to be easy to refute by appeals to Hezbollah's PR. (You may also have responded to a by-2-minutes-or-so earlier version of my comment; we may be responding to each other in too-close succession and talking past each other.)

That's nonsense, do you know what Nakba means?

And I don't mean it's modern reinterpretation

I just skimmed through your comment history. I'm going to take a cue from tptacek and say that this isn't going to be productive. Good day.

As someone who is extremely online and often bored at work, I spend a lot of time checking the top ~100 or so posts here. Any article related to Israel was getting rapidly flagged and taken down. It’s possible that these posts are being mass-flagged by users and automatically taken down, but if that’s the case it appears to be an abuse of the flag function. I understand it’s difficult to moderate these threads and that Israel/Palestine is a contentious topic, but that just doesn’t explain the rapid (~10 minute latency) take downs prior to ANY inflammatory comments. Again, I don’t know exactly how your system works, but maybe some additional transparency would be helpful. It’s clearly already being gamed so it wouldn’t hurt.

Edit: I think it’s also important to be conscious of the central role that Y combinator and Silicon Valley in general have played both in the Israel / Palestine “conflict” and domestic US politics. “Hackernews” is not a neutral zone. It is directly associated with the most powerful forces in the world today. I’m not casting judgment because I work in this industry to. But it undoubtedly raises serious questions about the moderation (automated or otherwise) of speech around these topics on here.

Thank you for trying to keep HN from devolving into 24x7 culture war like every other site.

I have so many places I can go if I want to read and discuss Israel and Palestine. I don’t need another, and I especially don’t want to lose the one spot I have that’s relatively free of it.

As per my previous assertion, it is now on Israel and their sympathizers to answer all those questions in a manner that leaves no doubt about their veracity. Watching what they are doing and what they are saying for two whole years, and the results of it all, leaves them with zero benefit of the doubt with the vast majority of people in the world.

> 1. There aren't a lot of dead civilians given that...

It's amazing how similarly zionists/israelis and nazis rationalize.

> 2. Semites is not an ethnicity, it's a language family, sorry. When used colloquially it has always referred to Jews.

"Semitic people or Semites is a term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group[2][3][4][5] associated with people of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, including Akkadians (Assyrians and Babylonians), Arabs, Arameans, Canaanites (Ammonites, Edomites, Israelites, Moabites, Phoenicians, and Philistines) and Habesha peoples." --wiki

> 3. “Semitic” is a language group, not a racial caste.

Germanic is a language group and an ethnic group. Using your logic, germans are not germanic peoples because germanic is a language group.

> Jews—including Ashkenazi—have documented Middle Eastern ancestry,

They have less documented middle eastern ancestry (none) than elizabeth warren has of native ancestry.

> The idea that Israelis are “non-Semitic Europeans pretending to be Jews” is just antisemitic nonsense, not a serious factual claim.

Considering that most "israelis" are ATHEISTS and most "israelis" are non-semitic and most "israelis" do not adhere to or respect the torah, it is a factual claim.

> 5. Correct, Arabs are Arabian. You're not "making shit up" you're repeating evidence-free nonsense you want to be true without examining its validity.

Why do you lie? People can literally google "semites" or "semitic peoples". If you lie about something like this, what are the odds you are lying about israel killing civilian semites in palestine?

That doesn't necessarily mean the blast radius was large. The 9 year old was killed while holding the pager.

> Fatima was in the kitchen on Tuesday when a pager on the table began to beep, her aunt said. She picked up the device to bring it to her father and was holding it when it exploded, mangling her face and leaving the room covered in blood, she said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/middleeast/lebanon-...

You're strawmanning.

I didn't claim that they were particularly lethal. In fact, they were not particularly lethal. Thousands of pagers exploded and only 12 people were killed despite these devices being held directly up to the face or against the skin (pockets).

They were as close to non-lethal incapacitation, even against targets, as it is possible to get in war. When even the targets are rarely killed by the explosion, obviously that results in fewer unintended victims being hurt/killed.

Hezbollah has not been known to behead and rape civilians and has in fact condemned the use of these tactics by Islamists. This conflation really draws into question the quality of your analysis.