There is no credible figure for the number of combatants killed or injured. The Times of Israel reported that 1,500 fighters were injured. Taking these two data points together, a majority of those injured were civilians rather than combatants.
Where are you getting the claim that this was “probably the most precisely targeted large-scale military strike of the last 100 years”? That is a far-reaching assertion, especially given the lack of sources.
You say this is not a value judgment but a descriptive claim, yet the claim does not appear to be backed by facts.
(The 4000 figure) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device... (The 1500 figure) https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-year-on-some-lebanese-bystan... (General HRW source) https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/18/lebanon-exploding-pagers...
> along with a directional sense of the wounded vs. KIA count of the strike
I am not sure what this means.
To add, you're making it impossible to argue anything against your claim. We're discussing how the pagers hurt civilians and if they were properly targetting combatants. You're saying no matter what, since you know the pager was targetting combatants, the evidence that civilians were hurt must be false. Your logic circular.
Do you know of any civilians anywhere in the world that currently use pagers?
Who had the pagers and why they had the pagers is almost derivable from first principles at this point, never mind the international journalism on the subject.
Another way to say this is that if you have evidence/reporting suggesting that Israel did in fact set explosives in pagers that were broadly available to Lebanese civilians, my argument falls apart.
I think Hezbollah is inexcusably evil, far worse than Israel is, but I'm not particularly interested in defending Israeli governance; I have no commitment to the proposition that Israel doesn't commit atrocities (in fact, I think they commit rather many of them). So I'm fine with my argument collapsing; I'm just waiting for evidence to topple it. The trouble the preceding commenter is having with me is that I can't find a story that squares the circle of the numbers they're trying to present.
Dennis Duffy, but he is the Beeper King.
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=46227021
(If you want to reply to that argument, can I ask that you do it on that leg of the thread, just to keep the thread simpler? Thanks!)
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...
I'm open to replacing it with a better link, but the one you've listed here (even though it's a much more in-depth article) isn't about this specific topic.
I found https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-used-palantir-its-... by googling. Is it better than OP?
For whatever it's worth I think it's fine that the resource posted in that comment just makes it an especially valuable comment, without altering the story itself.
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.
Premise 2: The physical location of the pagers directly affects the pattern of civilian injuries. Hospitals reported that many of the injured were civilians, including children, women, and non-combatants who were at home, at work, or in public areas. Even pro-Israel outlets, such as the Times of Israel, reported the same distribution of casualties.
Footage from Reuters, Al Jazeera, AP, and local Lebanese reporters shows numerous injured civilians with bandaged hands and faces, including people hurt inside homes, markets, farms, and workplaces, as well as children with hand and facial burns.
Now I would pose the question to you, why is your (likely novice) understanding of explosives and the footage you seen enough to overwrite the opinions of the hospitals and government of Lebanon?
Premise 2 just repeats Premise 1, from what I can tell.
The footage argument doesn't rebut any claim I made. You're treating this as if it's an argument that the pager strike was clean, or even morally justifiable; I have made neither claim.
"Footage from Reuters, Al Jazeera, AP, and local Lebanese reporters shows numerous injured civilians"
How do you know they were civilians?
It's also false that footage shows numerous injured civilians with bandaged hands and faces. Again, show a credible source and explain how this happened to them.
OP did split this chain, but a sibling comment has the sources you want.
EDIT: Getting downvoted because I didn't want to paste the same source N times. Nice.