Hacker News Reader

Comment by fldskfjdslkfj | Hacker News Reader

International law dictates that reserves soldiers that are not in active duty are considered civilians - hence targeting them is a war crime.

And yes, there's something called collateral damage, which depends on the situation is considered legal, so yes, if you actually target a military target and happen to also hit civilians that reside in that target it is not a war crime. But it is a war crime if you just generally lob rockets in a direction hoping to hit something.

View on HN

That's great, that confirms that Israel went against international law (again). Since a lot of the Hezbollah fighters were not in active duty, and were in civilian areas (Beirut isn't a war front).

You are confused - the Hezbollah fighters are on Hezbollah payroll hence they are "active" and part of the organization. The non-active reservists are not on IDF payroll since they haven't been re-called for duty, so the are considered fully civilian.

Do you have a source on that? Most Hezbollah militants usually also live normal civilian lives unless engaged in a conflict. Especially those in say, beirut. I mean, maybe Mossad has magically been able to target only Hezbollah fighters on active pay roll and on active duty with the pagers.

You don't have a pager given to you by an organization if you aren't working for that organization (as opposed to IDF reservists who don't carry any pagers, other than you know, civilians phones).

We also know for a fact that the top Hezbollah commander had such a pager (since it was reported he was in the hospital for treatment), which is pretty strong evidence they didn't exactly hand them out to random people on the street.

Now, can we know for sure without actually knowing what IDF knew? probably not, but it seems extremely likely based on what we do know that the pagers weren't carried by off duty low level grunts (again, top commander had it, iranian ambassador had one or was in close proximity, 90 or so Iranians had one and were flown back to Iran for treatment), but I guess those were just random iranian tourists that happened to be at the wrong place and the wrong time? right?

And feel free to educate yourself further or the law: https://www.icrc.org/sites/default/files/external/doc/en/ass...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com