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The Intercept is being sloppy with its rhetoric, as usual.

However the idea that this was a precisely targeted operation is pure fiction. Mossad understands perfectly well that Hezbollah is a "horizontal" organization, widely permeated in Lebanese society. And though the pagers themselves seem to have wound up in mostly in the intended hands, Mossad knew also that, at the time of their detonation, they would be located would be be wherever the operatives were: in homes, taxis, grocery stores, cafes, hospitals, on street corners, and apparently (per news reports) at at least one funeral.

That's how we ended up with a large if not yet precisely known proportion of civilian deaths and maimings (the latter category being vastly larger of course -- including a staggering 300 cases of persons losing one or both eyes). Unfortunately we're still lacking in reliable reports, as world attention has moved onto other atrocities. But according to the Lebanese Health Ministry the deaths included 2 children and 4 health workers (one Hezbollah-affiliated), among some 42 total. From this it seems reasonable to extrapolate a "non-affiliated" ratio of at least 20 percent, likely higher.

None of which would have been accidental from Mossad's point of view. If anything, we can be entirely sure these numbers (and the fact that they would surely include children), along with all the horrifying scenes reported in hospital rooms in the immediate aftermath, are in close agreement with the thoughtful, meticulous predictions they made when they decided to sit down and press the buttons for these attacks.

Finally:

I don't believe anyone can name a more targeted military operation.

This is just silly of course, as every large war (including the current one in Ukraine) includes countless incidents of military installations being precisely targeted with 100+ entirely military KIA, and so forth.

View on HN

On Sept. 17, just before 3:30 p.m., the small waiting room of Dr. Nour’s three-room pediatrics clinic in southern Beirut was packed. A mother was waiting to get preschool checkups for her three children. Two elderly patients were booked in for cataract treatments at the ophthalmologist office next door. Sitting next to them was a young couple whom Nour, whose name has been changed for security reasons, had not met before. The father bounced a 10-day-old baby on his lap. Clipped to his belt was a Gold Apollo Rugged Pager. Nour brought the young couple into her examination room. She pulled out a blank file for the newborn and wrote his name: Aiman. She placed him on the scales: a little over 7 pounds. She lay Aiman on his back on an examination table and began to record his weight. As she did so, the man’s pager beeped twice. “Excuse me,” he said, and reached down to silence it. As he did so, about an ounce of explosives concealed within the pager detonated, sending shards of metal and fragments of its thick plastic casing out in all directions. The shrapnel tore deep wounds in the man’s abdomen, lodged in the ceiling of the clinic and lacerated the face of the baby as he lay on his back. Nour was thrown backward as the room filled with dust. She could not see through the smoke, but she could hear the woman’s voice shouting: “Aiman!” Nour did not know that scenes like these were being repeated all over Lebanon. Simultaneously, some 4,000 booby-trapped pagers that had been handed out to members of Hezbollah began beeping and then exploded. In shops, in houses and on sidewalks across the country, pagers blasted their users as well as anyone in their vicinity with small clouds of shrapnel.