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Comment by Izikiel43 | Hacker News Reader

From the amount of injured it seems more like a broad attack than a targeted one.

Most likely they knew some of them would go to hezbollah, and that was enough, collateral damage be damned.

I'd disagree - this seems highly targeted. There aren't that many people with pagers but pagers were a specific way for Hezbollah to speak to operatives.

Yeah, this is likely government backed, so targeting is most likely.

The news reports are saying a lot of explosions happened at hospitals. Considering that pagers are still in common use by Western doctors, I'm wondering if they considered hospital staff to be acceptable casualties.

these weren't random pagers. They intercepted a shipment of thousands of pagers for hezbollah and rigged them with explosives, and set them off likely using hezbollah's own command and control network.

Random doctors in the hospital won't have these.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/pagers-drones-how-...

In July reuters was telling us how hezbollah was using pagers to defeat israel. Israel was smarter than them.

> Random doctors in the hospital won't have these.

To put a slightly finer point on it: Even an uninvolved doctor somehow came to own a booby-trapped pager, they wouldn't be carrying it around every day unless it was configured to listen to the hospital's broadcast network of real medical messages, as opposed to leaving it tuned to Hezbollah High Command or whatever.

They had total control of the pagers, sigint and social graph, command and control hierarchy. They knew exactly who was who.

Question is how did Hamas slip by this same highly skilled org?

Slip by? Hamas was funded and propped up by this highly skilled org in order to deligitimize the peace process.

They probably run their numbers and reasoned that more than 75% or something of pagers from a specific batch were used by hezbollah or subjects close to them and decided that it was an acceptable casualty ratio.

"You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs" approach applied to armed conflicts.

There are tens of thousands of Hezbollah members. If anything, the attack was on a much smaller scale than it could have been. Unfortunately for Israel, not every Hezbollah member had a new pager.

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