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Comment by jackling | Hacker News Reader

Twelve civilians killed and 4,000 injured does not indicate a precise attack.

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...

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Right, if in fact 1500 Hezbollah fighters were injured, any claim that over 1500 noncombatants were injured is suspicious. We have video footage of the explosions (along with a directional sense of the wounded vs. KIA count of the strike). It is not plausible that more noncombatants were injured than combatants, given the pagers were strictly military comms devices.

Both the 1500 and 4000 number were confirmed by Lebanon, and no reputable watch organization has credibly disputed them, you're not citing evidence just conjecture on how you believe everything went down due to a relative small bits of information.

> 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.

No, it isn't.

https://news.ycombinator.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!)

Do you want some deeply studied anthropological journal article on “The use of pagers in Lebanese society “?

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.

I'm not deriving who had the pagers from first principles. They were military pagers, on a military network that Hezbollah fought an actual civil war to establish and maintain, with subverted devices that Hezbollah itself acquired directly. There's a lot of reporting on this. Israel did not booby trap the whole supply of pagers into Lebanon. The Hezbollah combatants carrying these pagers did not acquire them at a Beirut Cellular Retail Outlet.

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.

It’s almost like explosives… explode, and hit the people and surroundings near them. Shrapnel travels. You’re trying to derive who had the pagers from first principles, yet you don’t seem to understand how a bomb actually works.

(1) We have videos of the explosions and their scale.

(2) We have Hezbollah's own claims about how many of their fighters were actually killed.

(3) We have Hezbollah's own photographs of scores of injured Hezbollah fighters --- people not blown apart from the explosions, further backing a claim that all sides to the conflict are making (far more casualties than KIA).

(4) We know how small the pagers were (indeed, exactly what pagers they were) and what the explosive was.

To the extent Lebanon is reporting higher civilian casualties than Hezbollah fighter casualties, the balance of evidence is that at least one of two things is happening: either Hezbollah is dramatically understating its own casualties, or Lebanon is dramatically overstating civilian casualties.

later

(Or we're just misreading the statistics! Pretty normal outcome for a message board discussion!)

Further:

You, reasonably, cautioned against axiomatic reasoning --- I do feel like I'm bringing quite a bit of empiricism into this, though I am rejecting the ratio of casualties we're attributing to Lebanese and Hezbollah reporting --- so let me add a couple more empirical observations:

* We have reporting (Reuters, others) that the pagers were packed with 6 grams of PETN.

* 6 grams of PETN produces ~35kJ of explosive force.

* That's about 7x more powerful than a cherry bomb, or about 2% of the explosive force of a standard fragmentation grenade.

Later

In considering that yield statistic bear in mind also that the lethality of an M67 (lethal within 5m, casualties within 15m, well studied) is mostly a function of its construction --- its explosive charge, 50x greater than that of 6g of PETN, is designed specifically to propel fragments of a hardened steel case out through its blast radius.

The pagers were just pagers, with the explosive payload specifically designed not to have metal components (which would have been detectable by Hezbollah.)

The bomb in the pagers was so weak it could only harm someone directly holding it or if it was in a pocket.

I think we have in fact pretty strong reporting that at least 2 children were killed, and while the explosions and payload were nowhere nearly as devastating as a grenade, they were still much bigger than a firework mortar (which themselves have killed children).

I think a stronger argument is that in the aggregate, the devices overwhelmingly targeted combatants.

The 2 kids killed picked up their dad's pager.

There are videos where the surrounding people were hurt by the pagers, so, what's the explaination for that?

I'm sure those exist --- it has never been my claim there there were zero or even just few civilian casualties --- but the videos I've seen had people standing next to the person carrying the pager walking away, startled but apparently unharmed. The explosions were quite small (I quantified them downthread from what Reuters reported).

Please provide links to these videos because every video I saw showed only the person holding the pager getting hurt. They only had 6 grams of explosives.

>Do you know of any civilians anywhere in the world that currently use pagers?

Dennis Duffy, but he is the Beeper King.

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