>Four children were killed and dozens of _innocent_ bystanders were injured.
Compared to thousands of Hezbollah members. Literally one of the most targeted large-scale attacks of all time. There are effectively zero other military means that would have been even close to as selective and discriminant. Would you prefer they drop a 500lb bomb on each of their houses instead?
The pager detonations were weak enough to be effectively nonlethal unless you're especially vulnerable. That's how you end up with such a low death to injury ratio in the first place.
So per the KPI metric you've chosen, making it more lethal and more dangerous to bystanders would have been better.
Even among the injuries, you're still looking at an awful ratio, since Hezbollah had mostly migrated these devices out of their combatants in favor of newer models, and they were mainly in the hands of civilians.
And all of this is ignoring the blatant international law violation against booby trapping. This was very clearly a war crime.
Common Article 3; GC I Art. 12 & 18; GC III Art. 13; GC IV Arts. 27, 32 & 51; AP I Arts. 48, 51(2–5), 57 & 54; CCW Amended Protocol II Art. 7(2) of the Geneva Conventions.
The point is that such preposterously stupid military means are not preventing the continuation of blood-shed, and if you are saying that exploding pagers are a perfectly acceptable means of executing military goals, then .. whats next .. are Israeli citizens expected to live under the continuous threat of exploding vibrators and vaporizers, now, too?
Compared to thousands of Hezbollah members. Literally one of the most targeted large-scale attacks of all time. There are effectively zero other military means that would have been even close to as selective and discriminant. Would you prefer they drop a 500lb bomb on each of their houses instead?