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.
Premise 1:
The pagers were military devices, but based on what we know about them, it is impossible to assert that all were in the custody of Hezbollah combatants at the moment they exploded. One would need to prove that the pagers were physically on the combatants’ persons—and not, for example, sitting on a coffee table or elsewhere—at the time of detonation.
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 1: I accept that they could have been on coffee tables! The problem isn't that I'm sure every pager was in a combatant pocket; it's that they were microcharges (we have videographic evidence!), and unless most of the pagers were for whatever reason not on hand to a combatant but rather for some reason close to a civilian, the Lebanese civilian/combatant casualty figures can't be made to make sense.
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.
So, we established that there were injuries among people surrounding those with the pagers. Therefore, the parent comment’s claim was false — the explosions could hurt people nearby and weren’t small enough to affect only the combatant.
My other points still stand, but it’s strange to me that the argument seems to go (not necessarily from you, but from other commenters above):
The explosions were too small to hurt others, so the reported number of civilians injured must be false.
We see that the explosions did hurt civilians.
Well, only a small fraction — the numbers must still be false.
Can you see how this is moving the goalposts? The argument shifted from “the explosives were so precise that Israel must have known exactly who was targeted, and those injured were combatants,” to, in the grandparent comment:
How do you know they were civilians?
Now we see that civilians were present and injured. Perhaps you're correct that the videos show only a small number, but the videos still confirm the core point: civilians were harmed.
@tptacek, I don’t have a problem discussing this with you, but each thread you respond to splits off into new points I have to address. It feels like arguing with two people making contradictory claims.
I’ll leave you with this: the videos show only a minority of the pager detonations. Civilian injuries are most reliably known by Lebanese hospitals and government sources. The idea of detonating explosives in civilian-populated areas without knowing who is immediately around those devices is deeply problematic. And there is no way Israel could have known who would be harmed with any reasonable certainty; the reported numbers only reinforce that fact.
I'm not moving the goalposts. Instead, what I'm pretty sure is happening is that you see this as an argument about whether the strike was good or justified. I don't. I'm not interested in that question, which will never, ever be resolved on a message board. I'm just interested in getting the clearest picture of what actually did happen.
Most of this comment is you arguing points that I don't disagree with. The one place we're clearly not aligned is your belief that there were more civilian casualties (or even a comparable number of civilian casualties) than combatant casualties. I've argued, at length and with specific details, as to why that doesn't seem possible, regardless of what Lebanon or Hezbollah reports. If you want to keep hashing this out, that's probably the place where there's something to actually discuss.
Sources show, the source commenter I was discussing with in this thread agreed, why are you challenging this that were established in the thread? Why are you insisting that we don't use the context in the thread to continue discussion?
They weren't terrorists they were Hezbollah members during a time when Hezbollah was shooting thousands of missiles at Israel that forced 60,000 people to evacuate. This made them fair targets. The pagers contained about grams of explosives which only injured the person holding it.
Premise 2 is false. The vast majority of the injured were Hezbollah terrorists. You say The Times of Israel reported "many of the injured were civilians, including children, women, and non-combatant" - show me a source, please.
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.
Cmon man, there are sources pasted all over this thread from my discussion with OP. I'm not going to post the same source that was already discussed with him, why would I waste my time to do so?
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.
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.